The Peter Sellers Centenary Collection │ StudioCanal
Courtesy of StudioCanal
by JAMES CAMERON-WILSON
Film buffs, StudioCanal has a very special gift for you: a Peter Sellers centenary collection, eight restored comedy classics all in one box-set on Blu-ray. Namely – deep breath – Heaven’s Above, The Smallest Show on Earth, The Ladykillers, Only Two Can Play, Carlton Browne of the F.O., The Wrong Arm of the Law, Two-Way Stretch and I’m All Right Jack.
For those who haven’t heard of him, Peter Sellers was a unique mimic and star of the wireless who forged an extraordinarily rich film career, resulting in three Oscar nominations. I elected to re-visit The Smallest Show on Earth in which he played a bumbling and rather ancient alcoholic projectionist, Percy Quill. The film was directed by Basil Dearden, produced by Sidney Gilliat and Frank Launder, and released in 1957, just as the menacing new medium of TV was sinking its teeth into cinema admissions, which is reflected in the subject matter of this funny and endearing little classic. So it was Quill five years before Sellers played Quilty in Stanley Kubrick’s Lolita – from Quill to Quilty.
The Smallest Show on Earth is one of those films that are quintessentially English, oozing both charm and nostalgia. Top-billing goes to the real-life couple Virginia McKenna and Bill Travers who play Jean and Matt Spenser, the latter being a struggling writer who suddenly finds himself the beneficiary in the will of an uncle that he had forgotten he even had. Initially believing that he has won a small fortune, he and his wife travel first-class to an industrial town called Sloughborough, knocking back the brandy on the way. Once there, they meet up with Leslie Phillips who dashes their hopes by telling Matt that he has inherited a fleapit along with its three eccentric employees, played by Peter Sellers, Margaret Rutherford and Bernard Miles, all rather long in the tooth. What follows is by turns very funny and sometimes quite sad in its depiction of post-war England and of a dying entertainment industry.
Now, I’m going to tell you something you didn’t know about me: I used to work for the film’s producers Sidney Gilliat and Frank Launder in their offices in Park Lane and in particular got to know Sidney Gilliat very well. If only I could go back in time, as they didn’t really mean that much to me back then, in spite of the famous guests who passed through their doors. And to think that they worked together on such classics as Hitchcock’s The Lady Vanishes (which they wrote) and Carol Reed’s Night Train to Munich with Rex Harrison, which they also wrote. What really got me about The Smallest Show on Earth is how it transports the viewer to an earlier time, when audiences happily puffed away in the stalls, were served ice cream by usherettes with trays strapped around their necks and when the film itself jumped up and down, went out of focus and out-of-synch, if not burning up completely in the projector. Looking back now, The Smallest Show on Earth serves as a perfect complement to Cinema Paradiso and Sam Mendes’s brilliant Empire of Light, affectionate hymns to the picture houses themselves.
And that’s just one gem in a stellar collection featuring a singular talent who went on to make his name in such movies as Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove and Lolita, the Pink Panther films, The Optimists of Nine Elms and Being There.
STUDIOCANAL’s release of The Peter Sellers Centenary Collection is now available on Blu-ray
STUDIOCANAL is Europe’s leader in production, distribution and international sales of feature films and series, operating in all nine major European markets - France, United Kingdom, Germany, Poland, Spain, Denmark and Benelux - as well as in Australia and New Zealand. It owns the largest library in Europe and one of the most prestigious film libraries in the world, boasting more than 8,000 titles from 60 countries, which span 100 years of film history. 20 million euros has been invested into the restoration of 750 classic films over the past 5 years. Known for releasing a stunning roster of incomparable vintage classics titles, StudioCanal’s releases include outstanding thrillers, heart-rending masterworks, horror favourites, war dramas, Ealing comedies, and plenty of lesser-known gems. The collection boasts some of the greatest and beloved stars of British cinema.
