As the title warns, “The Ghost of Peter Sellers” is the story of a haunting. It might look like a documentary about the making of a cursed, never-released 1973 comedy; but this moving personal essay (available on demand) by the director Peter Medak feels like nothing so much as an extended therapy session, one designed to exorcise smarting memories and make peace with a complicated past.
So much could have gone wrong — and most of it did — when Medak and his notoriously mercurial star, Peter Sellers (who died in 1980), headed to Cyprus to film “Ghost in the Noonday Sun,” a farcical take on 17th-century piracy. Neither arrived prepared, with Medak now acknowledging it was inviting catastrophe to film at sea with a star who appeared not to have read the script (partly written by Sellers’s friend and frequent comic collaborator Spike Milligan).
Calamitous from the outset, the shoot began with a drunken captain steering their sailing ship onto rocks and Sellers, upset over a recent breakup with Liza Minnelli, immediately determined to sabotage the production. His chronic lateness, script complaints and frequent disappearances — he even faked a heart attack — turned filming into a nightmare and his young director into a basket case. Fresh from the success of “The Ruling Class” the year before, Medak was ill-prepared for a star who, having taken umbrage at his co-star, Anthony Franciosa, simply refused to share scenes with him.
Still obsessing over this disaster more than four decades later, Medak — who would go on to make a series of notable films like “The Changeling” (1980) and “The Krays” (1990) — returns to Cyprus to wander and ponder his near-derailed career. Marvelous archival clips from the troubled film play like dissociated, outlandish skits, the kind of inspired madness that often resulted whenever Sellers and Milligan shared the limelight.
“I mean, it’s not as though we didn’t know Peter was nuts,” the producer John Heyman says, grinning amiably. “Truth of the matter is, none of us knew how nuts.” Yet Medak takes full blame for his role in the debacle, his admiration for Sellers’s tormented genius as evident as his own psychological wounds from a childhood in Nazi-occupied Hungary and later personal tragedies. This introspection gives the film an emotionalism that its entertaining contributors respond to with bracing, pick-yourself-up pragmatism.
Neither bitter nor maudlin, “The Ghost of Peter Sellers” is a movie about filmmaking and soul-searching, a tale of two Peters and maybe the worst of times for both.
The Ghost of Peter Sellers
Not rated. Running time: 1 hour 33 minutes. Rent or buy on Amazon, iTunes and other streaming platforms and pay TV operators.
Source: Movies - nytimes.com
