Sellersmanship

The Case of the Mukkinese Battle Horn. "A robbery, eh? Anything stolen?" To this slyly astute question, posed by the dryly astute Superintendent Quilt (Peter Sellers) of Scotland Yard, the answer is wryly affirmative and highly sinister. It seems that an international ring of Mukkinese battle-horn smugglers has heisted a Mukkinese battle horn from a museum in London. Description of stolen article: about 20 feet of antique copper plumbing, positively pimpled with rubies and emeralds. Looks like an anaconda necking with a nose cone, sounds like a hippo with gastritis, contains a slot for used razor blades.

Where oh where can that battle horn be? The well-aled machinery of the Yard begins to ho-hum. "Police photographers" rush in, set up their cameras, photograph the police. Dragnets are spread. "Calling Car ii D. Turn left into Oxford Street . . . Calling Car 5 K. Turn right into Oxford Street." Crash! A few frames later a man's suit is found without a man in it. After exhaustive analysis, the lab releases its report: "This suit needs cleaning." Suddenly a stone comes flying through the window and lands on Quilt's desk. "Aha!" cries the master sleuth. "Whoever threw that is just a stone's throw from here!"

Just a stone's throw from there, Quilt taps at the wicket of Maxie's Club.

"Mr. Maxie?"

"Such is my name."

"Sorry to bother you, Mr. Such. Will Mr. Maxie be along?"

"Trying to be funny, eh?"

"Aren't we all?"

Indeed we are, and sometimes trying just a bit too hard, but Britain's Peter Sellers is remarkably cunning about his funning: even when he's trying to get a laugh, he never really seems to be trying, so when he fails he never really seems to have failed. Which may explain why, in this 25-minute snicker at the usual British gumshoe flicker, a miss is as good as a smile.

The Waltz of the Toreadors, the sixth Sellers picture released in the U.S. so far this year, illustrates still another artful dodge of the world's sneakiest Sellersman: he apparently never hesitates to make a poor picture, perhaps on the theory that a brilliant talent is like a diamond necklace--put it on a beautiful woman and who sees it? put it on a turkey and who doesn't?

In Waltz, Funnyman Sellers has put his talent on a turkey that, on closer examination, proves to be a plucked peacock. As a play--written by France's Jean Anouilh and played on Broadway by Sir Ralph Richardson and Mildred Natwick--it was a brilliantly dressy slapstick satire: a show most wise and cruel when it seemed most raucous and extravagant. As a screenplay--written by Wolf Mankowitz and directed by John Guillermin--Anouilh's fine-feathered strutter has been saponified, caponified, shorn of its more splendid plumes of wit and stuffed with a mighty chunk of supererogatory and rashly overcolored celluloid that might have been more sensibly and even profitably employed to blow up the bank that financed this picture.

Still and all, the picture has its moments, most of them preserved from the play. Now and again it offers a good broad gag of its own: "You unqualified lecher!"--"Qualified, General! Trinity, 1880." Now and again, trickling through him as insidiously as an iodine highball, the spectator can feel the cold medicinal irony of Anouilh's attitudes and Anouilh's situation: essentially the moral situation of an aging general (Sellers) who is a lion in battle and a mouse in private life, who has the innocence of a boy and is crushed in his innocence like a fly in a storybook, who dreams like a boy of the angel he will some day wed and is meanwhile married to a monster (Margaret Leighton), who wastes in pity what he might have lived as love and expresses his manhood by chasing the chambermaids and sniggering like a schoolboy.

A pathetic old liplicker, and Sellers portrays him with quite uncanny skill and sensitivity. Though the actor is only 36, he manages, even in the closeups, to dodder and gasp and redden with exertion like a gay old boy on his last legs. What's more important, he clearly understands that the general is much more than merely a pathetic character. In his innocence he is touching, and in his bluff, bewildered courage he is admirable: a failed Quixote, a successful Falstaff.

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