Mr. Strangelove_ A Biography of Peter Sellers - Ed Sikov [78]
The two Englishmen returned to London in first-class cabins on the Queen Elizabeth.
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Two-Way Stretch (1960) is a light and unpretentious diversion, a sympathetic critic’s way of saying it isn’t very good. Three con-artist convicts (Peter Sellers, David Lodge, and Bernard Cribbins) plot a diamond heist from their prison cell with the help of a visiting fake vicar (Wilfrid Hyde-White), their old partner in crime. A comic neo-Nazi guard named Crout (Lionel Jeffries) tries to foil the scheme. Everybody loses.
The comedienne (and associate Goon from the Grafton Arms) Beryl Reid, who plays a small role in the film, later said that because Peter “was so inventive himself, he probably couldn’t understand that a director couldn’t keep up with his mind. That’s the thing—that his mind went at such a rate when he was inventing characters that a director had to be talked into it.” While Reid’s remarks are undoubtedly true, their context is peculiar because Peter employs such restraint with Dodger Lane, his character in Two-Way Stretch, that the director Robert Day probably didn’t have to be talked into very much. Reid went on to note, though, that Peter’s inventions in Two-Way Stretch didn’t stop at his own character: “He used to give me rather dirty lines to say, because I always looked as though I didn’t know what they meant.”
Dodger Lane speaks in a most muted Cockney. It’s one of Peter’s least showy and therefore most generous performances, since he consistently throws attention away from himself in order to showcase Lodge and Cribbins. It’s lanky Lionel Jeffries who produces the only outrageous voice in Two-Way Stretch—a barking squeak, evidently the result of the figurative crowbar that Crout harbors up his fascistic rear. Perhaps it’s this funny voice that Peter resented when he began bickering with Jeffries during the production. Settling into the exasperated groove that would define much of the rest of his career, Peter was annoyed at Jeffries’s insistence on long rehearsals, while Jeffries, who responded precisely as many of Peter’s fellow actors would over the next twenty years, was irritated at Peter’s distaste for any rehearsals at all. It wasn’t a particularly happy shoot, but it wasn’t a disaster, either. And it was scarcely the last time that the dull ache of filming a Peter Sellers comedy wasn’t justified by the final result.
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Lena Horne was playing at the Savoy, an excellent occasion for Anne and Peter and some friends to spend a luxe night on the town. Anne wore a beautiful hand-embroidered dress. Their friends thought she looked smashing, so much so that by the time they got home Peter was in such a white rage of jealousy that he physically ripped it off of her and shredded it.
After almost ten years of marriage, the word divorce began to be used with some frequency in the halls and rooms of Chipperfield, even as he began earnestly to confine Anne to the house. Shopping trips were cause for the third degree. From whatever studio at which he happened to be filming, Peter would place two, three, four telephone calls to Anne every day, just to check her whereabouts. When she mentioned to him one evening that she’d like to get out of the house a bit more, Peter destroyed everything in sight—porcelains, a Chippendale chair, bookcases. He also threatened to kill her, but he didn’t follow through. He beat her up instead. Today, the intake desks of women’s shelters accept wives and girlfriends with fewer bruises than Anne sustained.
Another day, a small flock of doves nested under one of Chipperfield’s many gables. They cooed. So Peter brought out his double-barreled shotgun and massacred them.
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When Peter was first approached to appear as an Indian doctor