Filmed on the whim of a liquor empire heir, a “true story” whose German Army WWII victims were changed to French and citizens of other occupied countries, “The Blockhouse” is one of the strangest titles in the later, quixotic career of British funnyman Peter Sellers.
The legendary French singer and actor Charles Aznavour was also in the cast, along with a selection of top drawer character actors of the ’60s and ’70s. The British TV director behind the camera would only make one other feature film, the not-quite-as-obscure “When the Whales Came.”
This minimalist, existential melodrama, set in the dark, silent bowels of a sealed coastal military fortification on D-Day, had a delayed release that made not even a ripple at the box office.
Unheralded video releases notwithstanding, “The Blockhouse” was fated to be forgotten, barely mentioned even in the most thorough Sellers biography, a curiousity from the last years of his career, but something of a table setter for “Being There,” the picture which should have brought him an Oscar.
Sellers’ somber and serious turn in “The Blockhouse” is one of the few things to recommend this too-dark, too-myopic, too-superficial plumbing of the psyche under stress. But while Seagram heir, one-time MCA/Universal mogul and current Time-Warner Music CEO Edgar Bronfman Jr. may have been the very picture of the rich dilettante when he undertook this production, casting Sellers and Aznavour in this modest-budgeted WWII tale wasn’t the craziest gamble.
Director Clive Rees gives us a splash of pre-“Saving Private Ryan” chaos and combat realism in the film’s opening scene.
Slave labor from all over Europe has been working on Hitler’s Atlantic Wall defenses against the Allied invasion sure to come. The French “section leader” Aufret (Peter Vaughan of “Straw Dogs,” and later “Brazil” and “Time Bandits”) takes his status and work seriously, waking his fellow inmates and half-leading them as they flee the naval and aeriel bombardment.
Seven men make frantically make their way into the concrete-encased structure they’ve been building. And when the shelling intensifies, they tumble down a steep “escape shaft” to escape what, as far as they know, is just a more-intense-than-usual air-raid and naval shelling on this day in early June, 1944.
Jeremy Kemp, as believable as a German WWI fight pilot in “The Blue Max” as he was as Jean-Luc Picard’s father on “Star Trek: The Next Generation,” is the Eastern European Grabinski, the one guy in this crew who knows the structure they’re hiding in, inside and out.
Lund, whom we gather is from Norway, is played Per Oscarsson (later of “The Girl Who Played with Fire”). Nicholas Jones, most recently seen on TV’s “House of the Dragon”) is Kramer,
Leon Lissek is Knozek, Aznavour is the Italian Visconti and Sellers the French school teacher Roquet.
Fumbling around by matchlight gets them deep enough into the blockhouse to be safe. They stumble over storage rooms filled with wine, cheeses, sausages and candles.
“This is the best time we’ve had since the war started!”
But the starving slaves have barely gorged themselves when Grabinski gives them the bad news. Their various means of exit have been bombed shut. There is no way to dig themselves out.
The “collaborator” Aufret insists “the Germans will rescue us,” and attempts to reassert his “authority” as he does. Nobody’s buying it.
The “gimp” Visconti drinks and bickers his way into full rebellion. The teacher Roquet works out a means of guessing how much time has passed. That is useful, for a moment or two.
But as the futility of their situation, their resignation mixed with half-hearted efforts to try and get out and the limited-light gloom of it all settle in, “The Blockhouse” stiffens into a cinematic corpse.
Sellers, Aznavour, Kemp and the others have moments that might have animated this narrative and piqued interest. But those moments are fleeting as the film settles down into a sort of Pirandello (“Six Characters in Search of an Author”) absurdist play.
It’s all talk and the talk isn’t that interesting. Eating, drinking, playing chess, feuding and fighting, it’s all blandly predictable and kind of aimless without the drive of “goals” — to work the problem and find a way to dig or get the attention of those on the surface — to keep the narrative moving.
The Guernsey (in the Channel Islands) setting is striking and colorful players were cast and give us hints of the movie this might have been, even with them playing war movie “types.” But this fictionalized account of a tale of survival and death is too brooding, theatrical and limited in scope and aims to pay off.
They thought they were making an art film, which is the way Sellers talked it up (briefly) at the time. But the John Gould/Clive Rees script broods and mutters and staggers and bores, like a play that needed another month of tinkering during out-of-town tryouts before opening night.
Bronfman would produce only one other film before using his family fortune to buy into the top tier of entertainment. “The Border,” with Jack Nicholson, is a far better movie, but also a box office bust. Bronfman, who dabbled in song-writing in the days when all oligarchs really wanted was to make it in show biz, has fared better as a production company executive.
Aznavour made movies right up to his death in 2018, and his romantic crooning — performed in a dazzling range of languages — turns up on film soundtracks to this very day.
Sellers’ “experimental” (“The Magic Christian”) and indulgent years would wind up with “The Optimists,” his next film. He’d get back to multi-role straight comedies (“Undercovers Hero”) and his most popular character, Inspector Clouseau, before nursing “Being There” to the screen, only to die shortly after losing his last shot at an Oscar in 1980.
“The Blockbuster” showcased him as a true ensemble player, serious without a hint of even sinister or devilish wit (“Dr. Strangelove,” “Lolita”), that rare moment when the funniest actor of his generation took a role where he couldn’t find a laugh, even if he’d wanted to.
Rating: R, violence
Cast: Peter Sellers, Charles Aznavour, Jeremy Kemp, Per Oscarsson, Leon Lissek, Nicholas Jones and Peer Vaughan.
Credits: Directed by Clive Rees, scripted by John Gould and Clive Rees, based on a book by Jean-Paul Clébert. A Hemdale/Cannon Films release on Tubi.
Running time: 1:33
