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The two of them were rehearsing one day in Peter’s dressing room—a noirishly threatening bedroom scene, as it happened. But in the dressing room it was romantic comedy, Sellers-style: Peter began his conquest by doing a series of Goon voices and followed through by delivering all of his gangster lines in the voice of an Italian gigolo. The method worked, though there was some assistance from two factors beyond Peter’s control: “He had helped me through my brief spell of insecurity and I felt I owed him something.” Also, Carol White adds, “I liked the fact that most men wanted to make love to me and I had gotten over being raped.”

By the time they filmed their scene, in which Meadows menaces Jackie into bed, they’d had each other offscreen as well, and they continued to do so over the next few weeks of shooting.

The unusually active Carol then proceeded to launch an affair with the other leading man, Richard Todd. Never having given up Adam Faith during her affair with Peter, she was quite the star of the offscreen show: “During the last two weeks of shooting Never Let Go I enjoyed my triangle of lovers. When filming was over, Peter Sellers returned to his wife and our secret adventure was over.”

“The fact that her mother was on the set a lot I always found very suspicious,” John Guillermin observes. “When the mother’s there it doesn’t mean that the daughter’s innocent. It means the opposite.”

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“He was very loyal to his friends from the radio days,” says John Guillermin. That’s how David Lodge ended up playing Lionel Meadows’s henchman in Never Let Go. “Peter introduced me to David, and we cast him.” (Lodge went on to marry Guillermin’s sister, Lyn.) “We had a very funny scene on that film,” Guillermin declares unexpectedly, given Never Let Go’s utter lack of comedy. “Peter and David had a history of inside jokes, mostly on Peter’s side. He had an absolutely manic sense of humor—a wonderful, crazy humor that suddenly exploded, and he’d be helpless with laughter. So there was a line of David’s—it was a very dramatic moment, they’re in the garage, and David runs in and says, ‘The police are outside!’ For some reason, this line absolutely dissolved Peter. Every time, David ran in, full of terror, and said it, and Peter exploded with laughter. We got one take in—the laughter started about a second after the last mod [audio signal], and we managed to print it.”

There was mirth during the shooting, but none during the accounting after the film’s release. Despite Sellers’s enormous popularity at the time, Never Let Go was neither a commercial nor critical success. “Now that this so unnecessary film has been made,” wrote the reviewer for the New York Times, “will Mr. Sellers please go and do something precisely the opposite?” Says Guillermin, “Box-office-wise it didn’t do anything like his comedies, so for him it wasn’t lucrative.” Peter never played a thoroughly unsympathetic character again.

Peter’s rendition of a gangster is rather successful nevertheless. Lionel Meadows gave him a chance to channel some real rage, especially during the scene in which he slams Adam Faith’s hand in a desk drawer. Perhaps it’s the knowledge of Peter’s more famous roles that gets in the way, but one gets the slightest sense that he’s impersonating a movie thug rather than being the thug in the movie, a tendency the camera can’t help but register. Drawing his lips back in an intimidating, mirthless grin, and speaking in a nasal twang derived from old Jimmy Cagney movies, Peter seems just a little bit adrift as he tries to be despicable. It’s as though he simply didn’t have it in him to be so unbendingly cruel onscreen.

According to Michael Sellers, however, Peter immersed himself in Never Let Go so thoroughly during the production that he returned to Chipperfield every night as Lionel Meadows, savagery and all. Peter acknowledged that his inability to shake his adoptive thug persona was hard on Anne: “I was sort of edgy with her while we made that film.” Michael goes a few