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Strange love
Ed Sikov dissects Peter Sellers
BY GERALD PEARY

Ed Sikov’s Mr. Strangelove (Hyperion, 27.95), a shrill biography of actor and comedian Peter Sellers, is, as the title shouts, the story of a human monster. How many bios have been this hostile to their subject? Sikov characterizes Sellers as "an emotionally spoiled, spiritually amœbic mama’s boy, whose innate and fierce talent for mimicry allowed him . . . to perpetuate . . . his own evacuated personality."

The tale is all too familiar for a mightily paid movie star: failed marriages and compulsive womanizing; neglect of his children when he was not beating them with a belt; loathsome, megalomaniac behavior on movie sets. Stanley Kubrick liked Sellers, but Billy Wilder, Blake Edwards, and Vittorio de Sica were among the directors who wanted to kill him.

His meeting with young Woody Allen? Sellers pulled a power trip, rudely rewriting Allen’s dialogue for What’s New, Pussycat? Cast with Orson Welles? The ego-driven pair despised each other, turning the shooting of Casino Royale into a Whatever Happened to Baby Jane?

Scratch Sellers and there was nobody home, in the heart or the soul. The emptiness was filled a thousand ways with a thousand personas, from "Queen Victoria when she was a lad" to falling-over-his-feet Inspector Clouseau to Lolita’s protean Clare Quilty to Being There’s TV-watching blob Chauncey Gardner to his schizoid characterizations in Dr. Strangelove. Sikov explains, "The seamless flow of dissociation with multiple characters produced was remarkable. Men, women, old, young, upper class, working class."

When Sikov quotes Sellers on Sellers, the empty-bottle thesis is verified by the source, but with a manic-depressive twist. Here’s the comedian describing himself in 1962: "Someone who has never grown up, a wild sentimentalist, capable of great heights and black, black depths — a person who has no real value of his own. I’m like a mike — I haven’t a set sound of my own.

He grew up in London indulged by his show-biz-dame mother; he’d practice voices while listening to BBC radio. He got his big break when he became a member of The Goon Show, whose madcap, pun-dependent, anarchic Brit humor fathered Beyond the Fringe and the Beatles movies and grandfathered Monty Python. You can read lots about The Goon Show, but there’s no real way to experience what revolutioned England’s jolly air waves. You have to take the word of reliable witnesses like stage director Jonathan Miller, who said, "The Goon Show at its best was as good as Lewis Carroll."

Sellers’s amazing talents are a given, and part of Mr. Strangelove is given over to going through one Sellers movie after another and showing, in a perfunctory way, how good they were. But the book’s juice is certainly in the nasty stories, like when he broke his engagement to Liza Minnelli after she jokingly yanked off his wig. When he succumbs, in 1980, nobody reading the book is going to care. As Billy Wilder, expressing skepticism about Sellers’s heart failure, said, "You have to have a heart to have a heart attack."

MY CANDIDATE for the year’s oddest film book is White Zombie: Anatomy of a Horror Movie (McFarland), a 352-page scholarly tome, with dense footnotes and cogent references to Jung and Bettelheim, devoted to the most marginal of low-budget genre films. The best thing about the 1932 movie is its evocative title. It’s miserably acted and directed (Victor Halperin?) and has only an iota of the kind of dotty surrealism that makes Edgar G. Ulmer’s The Black Cat (1934) so ever-engaging. The film stinks, but the book is something else, so marvelously obsessive and so poignantly wrongheaded in making its gargantuan claims. The author is Gary D. Rhodes, who on a normal day is a respected film professor at the University of Oklahoma and the foremost authority on the career of Bela Lugosi.

RIP. I don’t think the story reached the Boston press about the September 20 avalanche in the central Caucasus that buried 48 members of a Russian film crew and the 30-year-old actor Sergei Bodrov Jr. After being cast by his director father, Bodrov Sr., as a young Russian soldier captured by Chechens in The Prisoner of the Mountains (1996), Bodrov Jr. became a Russian icon, a kind of James-Dean-meets-Eminem. He played a skinheaded assassin in Alexei Balabanov’s 1997 The Brother; his recent film, War, sent him back to Chechnya, this time playing a heroic, wounded, Errol Flynn–like Russian warrior. No surprise that there were rumors in Russia that his death was no accident, that Chechen terrorists had caused the fatal avalanche.

Issue Date: December 5 - 12, 2002
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