Whatever the highs and lows of his earlier and later career, the years 1962-64 stand out as the most ambitious of legendary screen comic Peter Sellers. He made a string of films, just as he was blowing up as a screen star, that stand out for their sophistication and feature many of his greatest performances.
From “Lolita” and “Waltz of the Toreadors” through “Doctor Strangelove, or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb” to “The Pink Panther,” “A Shot in the Dark” and “The World of Henry Orient,” we catch Sellers as an actor on the rise and on the make — taking every prestigious role he was offered, putting in the work, climbing the ladder of stardom, just starting to be demanding and “difficult” and throw his weight around, on his way to iconic status and the truly huge paychecks to come.
And then he had that first heart attack, and a lot of that wind left his sails, pretty much forever.
“Only Two Can Play” of 1962, is a droll sex satire and send-up of Welsh pride that if not one of his very funniest films, stands out as among Sellers’ most sophisticated. Based on a Kingsley Amis novel, as a film it is classic Sellers, built on a sometimes amusingly antic but often buttoned-down performance.
Sellers plays John Lewis, a Welsh librarian with a wife, two small children, and a bit of ambition. He’d like that big promotion at work, and his wife (Virginia Maskell) would dearly love the “extra 150 a year” that would offer.
Lewis may not be the best candidate for the job, as he is “not sufficiently up on Welsh literature.” But he can turn on the posh accent when needed and affect enough snobbish authority to be the theatre critic at the Aberdarcy Chronicle, their Welsh town’s local newspaper.
It’s his wandering eye that could be his undoing, or his “doing.” Lewis notices, checks-out and leers at every lovely lady in a skirt he spies — on the streets, in their apartment building, on the tennis courts or at work, and many seem to give him the eye back. A pretty woman looking for a book he can’t lay hands out — something just off “the banned list” — gives him her number, and temptation becomes opportunity.
As he notes in voice-over, he’s constantly facing this choice of “doing something and regretting it,” or not.
Mai Zetterling, the first Scandinavian beauty paired-up with Sellers, on or off camera, becomes his ultimate temptation. She’s a Norwegian war immigrant who married well — she drives an imported Mercury convertible — and is helping out a local theatre company find reference books for costuming its next production. Lewis flirts, and she flirts right back.
“I’ll try anything, once.”
And she is connected, someone with the ear of the chair of the search committee for that library promotion. She’s married to him. She could be Lewis’ edge over his competition for the job, his nervous, tic-ridden and very Welsh colleague, the Welsh lit expert Ieuan Islewyn Owen Dafydd ap Jenkins (Kenneth Griffith).
And you thought Ioan Gruffudd was a mouthful.
The role stands out for the scenes of domesticity Sellers plays with Maskell, a husband nagged into pursuing the promotion by his wife, a dad indulging his children and tormenting that one shrewish neighbor. He’s a threadbare posh, a librarian with a tux, a worn suit and enough of a literary-air to have that critic job as a side hustle.
Sellers does a few of the “voices” the actor put on that made him him famous. And Sellers as Lewis scrambles madly to extract himself from Mrs. Liz Gruffydd-Williams’ (Zetterling) many-roomed house when her husband and “the council” come home, abruptly.
There’s a sly innocence to the ways Lewis tries to put his wife at ease, or throw her off the scent as he’s trying to make time with this never-quite-consummated fling. Wife Jean lets us know she’s not falling for it in all sorts of ways.
Maskell and Zetterling head a sparkling supporting cast that includes a hilarious Richard Attenborough as a preening, diminutive, goateed local hipster/poet/playwright and lifelong rival of Lewis, Griffith’s twitchy turn as a librarian, a single-scene Welsh lampoon by Graham Stark, Sellers’ future subordinate in years of “Pink Panther” movies and no less than “Q” himself, Desmond Llewelyn, future Bond movie gadget guru, shows up playing a priest.
Mayhill, Swansea in Wales beautifully subs for the fictional city of Aberdarcy, just high-faluting enough to be pretentious about Welsh culture, have a literary and theatrical scene and require the services of a theatre critic, just rural enough to have cattle, who interfere with an attempted assignation in the back of Mrs.Gruffydd-Williams’ amusingly-complicated convertible.
Sellers effortlessly casts off lines like “People invite me (to society parties) just to get the name of my tailor,” fitting in with “that crowd” with witty observations such as deconstructing the working methods of much-lauded painter of the day.
“What he does, you see, he puts the canvas on the floor, chucks some whopping great dollops of paint on it and drags a naked woman across it. Yes. Yes. Sort of job I’d like, that. I’d enjoy cleaning the brushes anyway.”
Amis’s novel “That Uncertain Feeling,” written about his own experiences moving to Wales, a writer exasperated by the pretention of the Welsh locals, provided Sellers with a role that demanded he tone down the “Goon Show” business, the love of donning disguises, silly voices and playing broad characters and just be a lightly-funny, somewhat unsympathetic leading man.
Sellers didn’t do it often, and this film may not be remembered with the same affection as “The Ladykillers,” “Lolita,” “Dr. Strangelove,” his many turns as Clouseau or his last gasp of glory in “Being There.” But “Only Two Can Play” shows us a broader career that might have happened had the ever-growing paychecks not limited him to farces and his first heart attack turned him cautious.
Rating: “approved”
Cast: Peter Sellers, Mai Zetterling, Virginia Maskell, Kenneth Griffith, Raymond Huntley, Graham Stark, Desmond Llewelyn and Richard Attenborough
Credits: Directed by Sidney Gilliat, scripted by Bryan Forbes, based on a novel by Kingsley Amis. A British Lion release on Tubi, Amazon, etc.
Running time: 1:44
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