The World of Peter Sellers (review)

Near the end of The World of Peter Sellers, the 44-year old actor (1925-1980) speeds in a fast car down a long, long highway. On the soundtrack, the music of Stravinsky's Firebird is overwhelmed by a barrage of discordant shrieks, fragments of words, rude noises. "He has to keep going," intones the words of friend and colleague from the Goon Show, Spike Milligan, "although he knows he's got nowhere to go." Quick portraits of Sellers in a variety of film roles flash across the screen. The car races on.

The aural-visual effect of this sequence might be described as "cruel, paranoiac, burning, agonized, hopeless"—words British filmmaker Tony Palmer once used to described the "Revolution 9" track of the Beatles White Album. It's analogous to the personal and psychological confusion Sellers reveals throughout Palmer's documentary. "He's always on the edge of ferment, of tears, of hysteria," says Milligan, "because the actual business of living has made him afraid." Speed, noise, and a fast track to nowhere are not only the erratic trajectory of Sellers' life and career, but the zig-zag pattern for Palmer's narrative, as well.

Palmer and his BBC crew spent nearly nine months with Sellers in 1969 during the filming of Terry Southern's The Magic Christian ("a film, says Milligan, that could have been written about him as much as for him"). With thirty-eight films already behind him, including Dr. Strangelove and the "Pink Panther" films, Sellers was then at the crest of his career. But his personal life—two bad marriages (and two more to come), a heart attack, and increasingly disturbing personality disorders—was in tatters. His distrust of everyone, including Palmer, is evident here in the on-screen interviews. "I tend to approach people now very warily, in case they're going to clobber me. I find I get clobbered a lot." He's always on, playing to the camera in a series of riffs, dodges, and skirmishes. "Don't ask me to play myself," he warns. "I will not know what to do. I don't know who or what I am, so I will not be able to help you. I'm not the real Peter sellers. I'm just a plastic mockup. . . . You see, as long as I'm inhabiting some other person, I have a freedom that I don't have as myself." Even friend and associate Milligan, whose words throughout are like a running counterpoint to Sellers' antics, warns about Seller's notorious inaccessibility: "Why should you think you can capture the core of the man in a 50-minute film?"

On and off the set Sellers clowns with Ringo Starr; he sails to Majorca on his yacht, the Victoria Maria, takes a voyage to New York on the QE-2, plays with his photography hobby, and, chameleon-like, slips in and out of voices, faces, and characters with quick and effortless ease. He is a moving target. Yet, by mixing together shots of the slaughter of a bull in the bullring, of Sellers alone in a ski lift, the gruesome details of a heart operation, accompanied on the soundtrack by the childlike pathos of Benjamin Britten, the majesty of Jan Sibelius, and the plangent murmur of Samuel Barber's Adagio for Strings—Palmer brilliantly conveys the essential pain and isolation of a man in flight from himself, yet held fast in the grip of his manic need for celebrity. And, unexpectedly, there are startling moments when Sellers seems to break down into personal revelations. "I feel extremely vulnerable," he says, facing away from the camera, "and I need help a lot. A lot. I suppose I feel mainly I need the help of a woman. I'm continually searching for this woman. They mother you, they're great in bed, they're like a sister, they're there when you want to see them, they're...