Sellers Market

Selllers Market

Peter Sellers is a 34-year-old British funnyman who, as one of his fans puts it, "looks like anonymity with 'air on." In recent years he has established himself as one of BBC's top radio and television comics. Last year U.S. moviegoers became vaguely aware of him as a hilarious assistant heavy in torn thumb (TIME, Jan. 5, 1959) and as three other people in a farce called The Mouse That Roared (TIME, Nov. 9). Last week, as two of his latest pictures were released simultaneously in the U.S., Sellers stood suddenly revealed as a major comic imagination, easily the most brilliant ironic actor the British have produced since Alec Guinness--whose influence he gratefully acknowledges and emphatically transcends. As U.S. critics cheered, a British cinemagnate burbled: "It looks as if we've got a Sellers market in America."

The Battle of the Sexes (Bryanston; Continental), the less amusing of the two comedies, nevertheless permits Sellers to perform a minor prodigy of uproarious understatement. The picture transposes The Catbird Seat, a wickedly funny short story by James Thurber, from Manhattan to Edinburgh, and expands it from about eight pages of print to 88 minutes of celluloid. Sellers plays the hero of the piece, a timid soul with a face as blank as a manila folder, who has lived without women, whisky, cigarettes, or even regrets, and has worked for 35 somnolent years as a bookkeeper in the dingy Victorian offices of a dyed-in-the-wool conservative company of tweed merchants.

Suddenly a queer breed of cat comes prowling into this mousy existence. The bookkeeper's employer (Robert Morley) falls in love with an American efficiency expert (Constance Cummings) and puts her on the payroll. "Join the 20th century!" she bellows belligerently at Morley and his stunned subordinates, and proceeds to raise corporate Ned in the name of progress. She redecorates the offices, installs time clocks, adding machines, squawk boxes. Soon she is threatening to fire the tweed weavers. "Make cloth for millions--synthetic fiber!"

At these words the worm suddenly turns; the red ink in the bookkeeper's veins begins to boil; he develops a double-entry personality; he decides to erase this intolerable female, rub out this erroneous entry in the tidy ledger of his life. And the scene in which the meek little monster attempts to execute his resolve--with the help of cigarettes, whisky, open windows, kitchen knives and even an egg whisk--is a grand piece of sustained nonsense.

I'm All Right, Jack* (Boulting Bros.; Lion-International), the picture for which Sellers won a 'British Film Academy Award as the best cinemactor of 1959, is a cracking good sociopolitical satire on labor-management relations in what is described as "the farewell state."

The hero (Ian Carmichael) is the sort of friendly Freddie that P. G. Wodehouse likes to write about. A graduate of Oxford and the army, he takes a job at the missile works run by his uncle (Dennis Price), who suggests he start at the bottom. So the hero goes blithely to work in the dispatch bay, while Director John Boulting goes slyly to work on the spivs he sees at both ends of Britain's social scale--on the unions that leave a worker free to join or starve and don't care if production goes up so long as wages don't go down; on the businessmen who do not hesitate to turn a profit at society's expense and consider their responsibility to their employees discharged by "a bit of soap in the toilets." In time, of course, the hero heroically revolts against the abuses of both capital and labor, winds up with the public behind him--and bars in front.

Sellers' part is wittily written and redoubtably well played. He is the union's shop steward, a shabby individual who somehow manages to look like a fanatical potato. He has an aggressive proletarian pallor, beady eyes and an eagerly struggling mustache. He will make a speech at the drop of an aitch, and shows a genivs for tautology ("the existing agreement that exists") and abecedarianism ("I have no hesitation in delineating it as barefaced provocative of the workers").

Yet Sellers' character is no caricature. Many gifted mimics imagine that what they can imitate they have understood, but Sellers goes farther than that. His shop steward is the little man with the big dream, and he sees that if there is humor, there is also "enormous sadness" in the grubby little doctrine monger's vision of a workers' paradise somewhere beyond the Vistula: "All them cornfields and ballet in the evening."

* Laundered version of " . . . . you. I'm all right, Jack" a piece of British service slang that became a national catch phrase during the recent British election.

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