MovieChat Forums > The Life and Death of Peter Sellers (2004) Discussion > So many omissions and errors

So many omissions and errors

posted 13 years ago by straker-1
4 replies | jump to latest

The Life And Death of Peter Sellers is a great film, with some excellent performances (especially Rush), but even with a 2 hour running time huge and puzzling gaps in Sellers' career yawn like chasms. And then there's the strange and pointless changes to established fact. For example:

* The film would have you believe Sellers' 70s comeback began with The Pink Panther Strikes Again. It was in fact The Return Of The Pink Panther, which is not even mentioned. Possibly due to rights issues?

* Sellers' last film, The Fiendish Plot Of Dr Fu Manchu, is not mentioned, even though Roger Lewis goes on and on and on and on and on at truly worrying length about every pathetic detail of that awful movie in his blisteringly pretentious and chronologically chaotic book.

* Sellers' brief fling with Liza Minnelli in the 70s is not mentioned. Bizarrely, his second and fourth wives, Miranda Quarry and Lynne Frederick, are not so much as referred to once.

* Blake Edwards had nothing whatsoever to do with Romance Of The Pink Panther, which was to have been directed by Clive Donner. Edwards wouldn't even shoot the script with Dudley Moore after Sellers died, preferring to rape Peter's memory with Trail Of The Pink Panther in '82. The film gets this totally wrong, with the strange and meaningless 'script conference scene' at the end.

* The film implies very strongly that Where Does It Hurt? was not released. It WAS released, made a small but respectable profit, and is now held up by many PS fans (not including me) as a minor comedy triumph.

* The film also implies...basically states...that Sellers walked off Casino Royale because they wouldn't let him play the role straight. That is total and utter nonsense, and not in any way true. Sellers walked off the movie before it was finished because he could legally do so, as his intricately arranged contract had expired...he did not run away. His feud with Orson Welles is not mentioned, even though that is one of the main reasons the film got into trouble.

* Good as John Lithgow was as Blake Edwards, he resembles the real man about as much as Sidney Poitier does. Edwards was a short, slightly built, rather hawk-nosed ferret of a man. The broad-shouldered giant Lithgow towers over Rush in the movie, yet in real life Edwards was shorter than Sellers!

* Ghost In The Noonday Sun, the 70s movie where Sellers went completely crazy and deliberately sabotaged the film, is mentioned in passing once without us being shown any of the events around the film's production. This, despite the fact PS's evil behaviour on that project has far greater dramatic potential than the unfairly portrayed and totally fictional scene from After The Fox, in which we are expected to hiss *Sellers* because his wife stupidly brought her baby to the set! What was she expecting the baby to do in front of all those lights and with all that noise? That was HIS fault, was it?!

* The scene in the plane where Sellers fixes on his Clousaeu character is complete fiction. Not even in the laid back early 60s, before terror security precautions were even dreamed of, would Sellers would have been allowed to play up like that on a commercial flight. In truth, Sellers had the character pinned down before he went near the airport.

* I have no desire to defend Sellers, who was a very unpleasant man a lot of the time, but the movie and especially the book go out of their way to highlight his mental cruelty and madness...as if that was all there was to him. Lewis's book in particular is guilty of this...read it for yourself, if you can wrap your brain around the interminable 'look how clever I am' armchair Freud pretensions, the schizoid timescale and absurd over-analysis of every moment of PS's movieS. Lewis, when he's not drooling over Sellers being an bastard to someone for the ninetieth time in four pages, looks for and "finds" supposedly telling psychological and emotional nuances that simply are not there and never were, claiming to detect them even in the most mundane and straightforwad scene or performance. Lewis would have you believe that PS spent his entire life being relentlessly horrible to everyone without pause or let-up, which is of course absolute bollocks.

[–] fritzfassbender 13 years ago

Lewis' book is probably the most mean-spirited biography you'll ever read; you'd think Sellers had stolen his wife the way Lewis portrays him. He even mentions that he met Sellers once and that it was a very unpleasant experience, which hardly seems a sure footing to write a book on.

While I find your points fascinating, in the grand scheme most of them seem rather incidental. To go over all of these things the movie would have to be four hours long. As for switching of titles and things of that nature, does anybody really take TV biopics as gospel? I think it's implied at this point that these films are meant to give you the essence of performers, the bare details that most casual fans wouldn't know. In that sense, much like 'Ed Wood', which had similar accuracy issues, this biopic is successful.

[–] Gwasgray 13 years ago

Good as John Lithgow was as Blake Edwards, he resembles the real man about as much as Sidney Poitier does. Edwards was a short, slightly built, rather hawk-nosed ferret of a man. The broad-shouldered giant Lithgow towers over Rush in the movie, yet in real life Edwards was shorter than Sellers!

The idea behind the casting of tall actors such Lithgow, Steven Fry and Charlize Theron was make Geoffrey Rush (who is taller than Sellers was) seem shorter and smaller, which also would in a small way show his lack of self-esteem. As you can see from the photos from the film premiere (at the top of the film page) Charlize Theron is a lot taller than Britt Ekland but having her played by a statuesque actress makes her seem like more of a Goddess, if she was played by someone who was dwarfed by Rush it might have diminished this effect.

Sellers' last film, The Fiendish Plot Of Dr Fu Manchu, is not mentioned,

Actually it is, in the text at the end of the film (it says that it was a complete flop)

The scene in the plane where Sellers fixes on his Clousaeu character is complete fiction. Not even in the laid back early 60s, before terror security precautions were even dreamed of, would Sellers would have been allowed to play up like that on a commercial flight. In truth, Sellers had the character pinned down before he went near the airport.

Artistic licence. They wanted to show Sellers creating this character.

Sellers' brief fling with Liza Minnelli in the 70s is not mentioned. Bizarrely, his second and fourth wives, Miranda Quarry and Lynne Frederick, are not so much as referred to once.

This was all deliberately left out to keep things more simple. Showing every romance he ever had would make for an overlong (this film is already 2 hours), repetitive and episodic film. The DVD has some deleted scenes including some of Emilia Fox as Lynne Frederick and even a fantasy scene featuring Rush playing two film producers debating over what parts of his life to leave out.

The film also implies...basically states...that Sellers walked off Casino Royale because they wouldn't let him play the role straight. That is total and utter nonsense, and not in any way true.

I think you're looking at this a bit too literally. Rather than him just wanting to play it straight, this sequence implies creative differences and a lack of direction with the film in general (you have to admit the finished film is quite a mess). Although not accurate in the details these scenes get across that Casino Royale had a troubled shoot.

Blake Edwards had nothing whatsoever to do with Romance Of The Pink Panther, which was to have been directed by Clive Donner. Edwards wouldn't even shoot the script with Dudley Moore after Sellers died, preferring to rape Peter's memory with Trail Of The Pink Panther in '82. The film gets this totally wrong, with the strange and meaningless 'script conference scene' at the end.

The whole point of the final was to try and say something about the relationship between Sellers and Edwards (after all they had a long history together) and Sellers being something of an empty vessel living through different characters (although the whole him supposedly not having a personality of his own couldn't have actually been true). It seems like you just didn't get this scene at all, fair enough, but I thought it was quite good.

The biggest flaw with this film is probably that it features so little of Spike Milligan (who would be a ripe candidate for a biopic), Harry Secombe and The Goon Show (a massively popular and mould-breaking comedy series). Even though they made a clear decision to show the post-Goons Show film career part of his life, they could have actually given some proper scenes to Milligan and Secombe since he knew them longer than he knew Blake Edwards (didn't he spend his last day with them?)

[–] 13 years ago

[deleted]

[–] bayblue71 9 years ago

Nothing about Victoria sellers apart from when Britt said I'm pregnant