Movie Nation

Years after his time in Hollywood, where the great French director Jean Renoir (“The Rules of the Game,” “The Grand Illusion”) spent World War II, he related how cultural stress and strife is the crucible for great art.

All Hollywood needs, he told the future Indian director, Satyajit Ray, “is a good bombing.”

But something else comes through in his second and final completed film in Hollywood — “The Southerner.” Sentimental almost to the point of condescension, it’s an affectionate ode to American resilience and an innate working class decency that stood in stark contrast to the cynicism and factionalism of Europe.

It’s no “Grapes of Wrath,” just a hardscrabble year in the life of a farm family in Eastern Texas, a 30ish married couple struggling to survive as husband Sam (Texan Zachary Scott of “Mildred Pierce”) takes his shot at their piece of what would come to be called “The American Dream” — a sharecropper and farm laborer trying to strike out on his own and not pick another man’s crops.

Sam takes the last words of an aged laborer who dies picking cotton with him to heart — “Raise your own crops.” With Nona (Betty Field), cantankerous Granny (Beaulah Bondi of “It’s a Wonderful Life”) and their two kids, he borrows a truck to move them, borrows mules and a plow, and borrows seed to plant his own cotton.

They settle into a tumbledown shack, struggle through a year of little food, bad nutrition from the possum and fish they eat (pellegra), unfriendly neighbors (J. Caroll Naish and Norman Lloyd) and fickle weather, and the temptation to throw in the towel and take up a wartime factory job. They want to make their own way and their own destiny.

“Jus’ cause we’re havin’ hard times right now, don’t mean we gotta stop nothin’. We gotta keep goin’. Once we give up, we won’t have the courage to get ourselves back to good times.”

It’d be easy to read “patronizing” into this tale, with its country wedding, bar fight, brawl over a fellow farmer’s act of sabotage and bare-handed fishing, and imagine Renoir rolling his eyes at every Granny gripe.

“When you all look down on my cold dead face in the county pine box, you’ll be sorry then! Mebbe!”

But there’s something nobler going on here, a “realistic” and respectful statement on the quiet faith the farmer has in his own enterprise. The leftist politics of Renoir’s earlier work, and of Ford’s “Grapes of Wrath,” isn’t here. The urgency of Renoir’s other Hollywood outing, the Occupation thriller “This Land is Mine,” is missing as well.

There are good people, overreaching people, cheats, predatory floozies, tipplers and in that nasty neighbor, a classic “for me to succeed, you must fail” type. As with his later Indian film (where he met Ray), “The River,” and with his earlier “Rules of the Game,” this is Renoir as cultural anthropologist, observing and dissecting and appreciating, with every painterly-composed scene.

MPAA Rating: “approved”

Cast: Zachary Scott, Betty Field, Beaulah Bondi, J. Caroll Naish, Charles Kemper and Norman Lloyd.

Credits: Directed by Jean Renoir, script by Hugo Butler and Jean Renoir, based on a novel by George Sessions Perry.

Running time: 1:32

An Arabic post-apocalyptic thriller about survivors fighting over the little water that’s left? The pitch alone is enough for “The Worthy” to make one intrigued.

Filmed in Bucharest, financed in the United Arab Emirates and directed by a UAE native/London Film School grad, it’s compelling, competent, and so overfamiliar as to be utterly generic and forgettable.

But the very idea of such a film, that it played in the Arab world, is at least as compelling as the story told on the screen — or it would be, if it took bigger chances and aimed higher.

Civilization has collapsed, evildoers have poisoned most of the world’s fresh water and without that, only scattered pockets of humanity can cling to life, never venturing far from their dwindling supply.

Eissa (Mahmoud Al Atrash, good) narrates our story, relating how his truck-driving dad (Samer al Masri) once picked up a hitchhiker who “saw it coming.” “The Seer” warned “Beware the black flags,” and feel free to remember how many terror cells have used black standards. “Their only loyalty is to themselves.”

So Shuaib, the father, grabbed Eissa and his sister Maryam (Rakeen Saad) and, with a few others, established themselves in a place with water. It’s a ruined airplane factory, with a water tank that sustains the 10 people holed up there.

Strangers approach, and wary but compassionate Shuaib takes the bait — literally. It takes other strangers to rescue him from the predators who chained up a woman to lure him out.

Some mistrust Gulbin (Maisa Abd Elhadi), a scarred Kurdish woman who doesn’t speak Arabic. And none trust Mussa (Samer Ismail), the wild-eyed man who killed to save Shuaib, but isn’t about to surrender his knife when he’s allowed inside.

“This knife and I are old friends,” he purrs to the leader of this “community.” The warning bells have been ringing in the viewer’s head, and must be in Shuaib’s as his “guest” starts prattling on about the need to “separate the strong from the weak,” “the worthy” from “the unworthy.”

Murder and chaos ensue. The siblings must stick together, “leading” and trying to outsmart a homicidal monster, who likes to make booby-traps.

Screenwriter Vikran Weet (“Darkness Rising”) goes to some pains to suggest that the traditional Shuaib has kept tenets of Islamic religious practice alive among his charges. Maryam has the interest of a young man in their group, but he’s got to get her father’s acceptance before anything progresses. Burials, hygiene and “hospitality” have survived centuries among the Bedouin, why wouldn’t they endure beyond the collapse of civilization?

Director Mostafa (“City of Life”) stages some suspenseful moments, and fritters away the chance for more in a story that morphs into a variation of every post-Apocalyptic thriller ever. “The Worthy” has more going for it than the “Maze Runner/Divergent/Hunger Games” YA-oriented fare, where the youth are the hope IF they can to escape/win this contest/fall in love. The stakes are high but the characters’ life-and-death struggle have a perfunctory video game feel.

The limitations on the female characters and a bleak/bleaker/bleakest third act hamper “The Worthy.” Even as the booby-traps, torture and murder — think “Saw” lite — grow more elaborate, one gets the sense that this is a movie scripted with one arm culturally and thematically tied behind one’s back.

The over-familiar tropes of the genre, dissent within, a power struggle built on “Selfishness is what it’s going to take from now on” aren’t enough to recommend the film. And the novelty of its characters, setting and cultural subtext doesn’t compensate for that.

But it’s polished and smart enough to to give one hope that Around the World with Netflix will have more entries from a part of the world not known for sci-fi or action films with coed casts.

MPAA Rating: TV-14, gruesome violence

Cast: Mahmoud Al Atrash, Maisa Abd Elhadi, Rakeen Saad, Samer Ismail and Samer al Masri.

Credits: Directed by Ali F. Mostafa, script by Vikram Weet. A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:39

Feed Hampton, the charismatic Illinois Black Panther, and his betrayal by an FBI informant.

The Revolution will not be televised. It will if theaters don’t open soon.

“Made in Italy” goes down easily, like an unassuming Chianti that doesn’t drown the taste of the pasta. It stumbles out the door, and staggers a bit at the end of the evening, a wino back off the wagon. But everything in between is sweet, sentimental and guaranteed not to deliver a hangover.

Sorry, films about Tuscany bring the cringing wine analogies. I’ll stop.

Liam Neeson, a grand vintage in his own right (sorry), co-stars as a retired painter who accompanies his son to the family’s long-vacant Tuscan villa for a quick clean-up and a quick sale. The kid (Michael Richardson, of those Redgraves and Richardsons) needs the money.

Because Jack isn’t really a “kid.” He’s going through a divorce. His wife’s family had the money that kept his “Flite” London art gallery open. If he wants to keep it, he’ll need to buy them out. No sense telling Dad that.

Robert is a widower, once a star with a brush, now turning his energy to turning on the charm for any woman who catches his eye. He’s fine with selling the house.

One dull, time-killing road trip in an old VW van (Not THAT old.) later, and they’re there. Robert turns sentimental, Jack is on task. Guess who the British-born estate agent, Kate (Lindsay Duncan, fun) sympathizes with? And it’s not just because Robert flirts with a little blast of the Bard.

“Bonny Kate, and sometimes Kate the curst, but Kate, the prettiest Kate in Christendom.”

Want to impress a lady? Don’t drop “The Taming of the Shrew” on her. All business “Kate” it is.

“Your plumbing seems to work. And people like that.”

Everything else? A bit of a shambles, with a weasel having the run of the place, to boot.

Jack would get a lot more done if Dad would stop reminiscing and pitch in, if the lovely restaurateur Natalia (Valeria Bilello) wasn’t in town, a ready-made distraction.

The actor James D’Arcy (“Dunkirk,” TV’s “Homeland” and “Broadchurch”) wrote and directed this, and he tends towards the maudlin at times. He sets up a sort of competition for Natalia between father and son, which is mercifully dispensed with.

“Made in Italy” was over twenty minutes longer when it played the festival circuit. Bu with romantic idyll movies, shorter and quicker is always better, even if you lose some lovely Italian vistas in the process.

Neeson brings a nice twinkle to Robert, and D’Arcy gives him one clever-bordering-on-brilliant scene. Jack looks at the place in the daylight for the first time and praises the “view.” Dad’s mini-tirade turns purple as he gripes at the kid not doing “one of the most spectacular convergences of nature” justice. Jack thinks that’s over the top, but “the artist,” his back turned, recites the glories of the aspect the place surveys. He has total recall for a landscape that “takes your breath away.”

“No, that’s the DUST, Dad.”

That lovely British word “tumbledown” describes the house, and while there are few surprises in any movie about a house renovation in Tuscany, “Made in Italy” clings to cute for dear life and thankfully — at this shorter run-time — never lets go.

It matters not that we, like Robert, will remember the view but not much about the story told in it or the Chianti reveries it inspires.

Cast: Liam Neeson,  Valeria Bilello, Micheál Richardson, Lindsay Duncan

Credits: Written and directed by James D’Arcy. An IFC Release.

Running time: 1:34

“Cromwell” came out in 1970, a late entry in a formidable run of stately British period pieces.

It’s inferior to “Anne of a Thousand Days,” “Becket,” “A Man for All Seasons” and even the somewhat stagebound “The Lion in Winter.” But it’s got realistic English Civil War battles, glorious Puritan/Cavalier era costumes, an abridged and bastardized piece of British history and Richard Harris and Alec Guinness, so it’s worth a go if you haven’t seen it.

Harris plays the gentleman-farmer Cromwell, about to emigrate to America where his fellow Puritans have set up shop, when he’s goaded into returning to Parliament to show the imperious, constitution-flouting Charles I (Guinness) that “the people” are in charge of the purse strings, and thus the country.

The high-handed Charles needs money, and only the Parliament — which he dissolved years before — can raise it. And with Cromwell and his fellow puritans like Pym (Geoffrey Keen) leading the way, and earls like Manchester (Robert Morley) and Essex (Charles Gray) bristling at the king’s overreach, Charles won’t get a ha’penny, blast his eyes.

Civil War it is then, and with the King’s continental nephew Prince Rupert (Timothy Dalton) here to “Tally HO” the royals, what can go wrong?

The great Geoffrey Unsworth was cinematographer, and the Spanish exteriors (Pamplona, Navarre and environs) make for splendid battlefields filled with musketeers, pikemen, artillery and cavalry, which Spain under Franco was always willing to provide on the cheap.

The dialogue — director Ken Hughes (“Chitty Chitty Bang Bang”) also scripted it — is pungently quotable, and Harris and Guinness make quite the theatrical statement with the best lines.

The newly-devout Cromwell –“O Lord, Thou knowest how busy I must be this day. If I forget Thee, do not Thou forget me.”

The tyrannical snob Charles — “A democracy, Mr. Cromwell, was a Greek drollery based on the foolish notion that there are extraordinary possibilities in very ordinary people.”

And of course, there’s the most famous Cromwell battlefield quote of them all — “Put your trust in God, but keep your powder dry.”

The history is something of a mashup, condensing three civil wars into one, shifting Cromwell’s importance in this or that battle, putting him at the execution of King Charles (he wasn’t there), all sorts of things great and small which even someone not a stickler for British history can sense.

Still and all, I think it works — after a fashion. Whatever deserved abuse it received upon its release, it’s brisk enough, the grandeur and scale hold up and the cast has just enough heft to carry it off.

It being British history and filmed in the late 1960s, you can expect to see many a James Bond bit player in supporting roles, just as every member of British Actor’s Equity turned up in the Harry Potter pictures more recently.

Here’s Keen, who took over after Bernard Lee (as “M”) died as Bond’s boss for several 1970s films. Gray was in an early Connery Bond as a bit player, and turned up as Blofeld in “Diamonds are Forever,” although he’s best remembered for singing and dancing the “Time Warp” in “The Rocky Horror Picture Show.” Dalton would play Bond for a couple of films in the ’80s. And Hughes directed some of the “unofficial” unsanctioned 1968 “Casino Royale.”

But the oddest thing I fixated on in this viewing was the makeup scheme chosen for Harris. A famous drinker and brawler who once kept a booking on “The Dick Cavett Show”after getting pounded in a bar fight, I was mystified at what I was seeing in Harris’s closeups.

One day, he’d have what looked like bumps and injuries covered by pancake on his chin and forehead, another a busted lip that could have been a cold sore.

There are plenty of photos that show him for the unmarked matinee idol that he was in that day. What gives? Were they going for a version of “Cromwell had boils and abscesses” authenticity (entirely possible), or did the man have herpes and the occasional knock-about in the local pubs?

In any event, he’s good in the film, which does a pretty good job of walking the fence on Cromwell as a Rights of Man patriot, a gifted organizer and field commander, and a religious fanatic who hated Catholicism and recruited fellow fanatics for his New Model Army.

“Cromwell” isn’t the last word on its subject. But to this day, that complex figure has yet to generate another major motion picture that even tried.

MPAA Rating: G, violence

Cast: Richard Harris, Alec Guinness, Robert Morley, Dorothy Tutin, Charles Gray, Frank Finlay, Patrick Magee and Timothy Dalton

Credits: Written and directed by Ken Hughes. A Columbia Pictures release, on Tubi, Youtube, etc.

Running time: 2:09

Some days, you need a movie that’ll make you smile, maybe feel a little better about the world.

It can be a teen dance comedy, built on a formula that was old when Channing Tatum was young.

Give us another plucky, cute and clumsy white girl who needs to get schooled by the talented kids of color.

Make the villain a diva who’s taken the name “Juilliard” and who no-no-no just isn’t HAVING your all-elbows/head-turned-the-wrong way “audition” for his team.

“Trinity? Could can ‘sage’ the space?”

Give us some sass, some dance trash talk quick to cross that line when Juilliard dons a white tank top and pink sweats as costume.

“This isn’t over. And you look like a tampon.”

Point us toward the “big competition,” hit Netflix “play” and let the TV stream, because we could all use a “Work It” break.

Sabrina Carpenter, alumnus of TV’s “Girl Meets World,” makes a star-statement as Quinn, rising high school senior, born klutz and thus determined to get into Duke University, the self-described “Harvard of the South.”

Carpenter’s gift isn’t that she’s latest in a long line of such white-girl-needs-help characters in dance/cheerleading comedies. It’s that she’s a damned genius at being just-bad-enough at dancing to convince us that the reason we don’t see her ripped midriff for most of the movie is that girl-can’t-dance and hasn’t rehearsed her ass off.

Quinn’s Duke (“Dook,” as we actually call it down South) dreams take a hit when one of her extracurriculars goes wrong — shorting out the lighting board for the Thunderbirds dance squad at her school. “BANISHED.” And damned if the shallow, dance happy admissions officer (Michelle Buteau, a hoot) isn’t underwhelmed by her GPA and resume.

Cellist? “Everybody plays the cello.” Nuts about TED Talks? “Girl, that’s sad.”

But let the lady who holds the keys to your future think you’re on a dance team? “THAT’S breaking out of the box!” She might be Dook-material after all, because they’re short on hyper-focused middle-class white girls, you know.

Too bad Juilliard (Keiynan Lonsdale, hilariously bitchy) has banished her. Nothing for it but to try out, and when that fails, research, recruit and run her own team with the help of BF and dance-career-driven classmate Jasmine (Liza Koshy, dazzling) and this once-promising dancer/hunk-choreographer who tore up his knee and now teaches kiddie classes (Jordan Fisher).

Oh, it’s SO on.

“Ugly Dolls” screenwriter Alison Peck finds her niche with this picture, throwing just enough plot wrinkles and smart-ass banter into the mix to make the formula — if not exactly fresh — at least fresh-adjacent.

Quinn NEEDS this team to do well, so she prays to the Dance Goddess — Queen Bey, Beyoncé, of course.

You KNOW if Quinn’s volunteering at a nursing home, there’s just got to be some aged hoofer wandering the halls, ready to pop it and lock it. You DON’T expect little old lady to bark “Turn that S— UP!” when she hears her jam.

Some of that HAS to come from director Laura Terruso. I mean, “Good Girls Get High” as a credit conveys a certain…edge. Not that this is “out there,” but the teen “types” and salty speech feel real enough.

And the dance numbers themselves are well-shot and edited without going all music-video-overboard.

Forgettable, disposable, one-among-many, all those labels apply to “Work It.” But it’s cute, hormonal and just sweet enough to get by. In this day and age, that’s a blessing and a reason we say, “If it’s a teen comedy that works, it MUST be on Netflix.” Even if STX intended to put this into theaters.

Even if, as everyone knows “Dook sucks.”

MPAA Rating: TV-14, profanity, sexual humor

Cast: Sabrina Carpenter, Liza Koshy, Jordan Fisher, Keiynan Lonsdale, Michelle Buteau

Credits: Directed by Laura Teruso, script by Alison Peck. An STX Film, a Netflix release.

Running time: 1:34

We’ve got a captain’s hat, a camera, my dad’s old pontoon boat, and there’s that old light house down on North Point. Let’s make a MOVIE!

The delightfully daft and DIY “Lake Michigan Monster” seems to give up its origin story in every cheesy, off-the-wall frame. A no-budget horror movie that pays homage to George Melies, Ingmar Bergman, “The Creature from the Black Lagoon” and Monty Python, it’s a classic “Oh, look how those crazy kids did that” film festival farce — the sort of screen comedy you’d only find in off-the-wall, off-the-beaten path gatherings of offbeat cinema and its fans.

Me? It had me at “It’s pronounced ‘pontoooooon.‘”

“Monster” is fizzy fun from the mind of the over-named Ryland Brickson Cole Tews, its writer, director and star. There’s a touch of Terry Gilliam whimsy in his design and effects, and Graham Chapman anarchy in his performance as “Captain” Seafield, a Milwaukee madman who assembles a team to hunt and kill the “monster that slew my father.”

Sean Shaughnessy (Erik West) is his “weapons expert.”

Nedge Pepsi (Beaulah Peters) is the “sonar individual.”

And Dick Flynn (Daniel Long) is from the “Nautical Aptitude adVenture Yunit.” That’s the “Navy.” The “Captain” is fond of self-invented acronyms, and isn’t even a real captain.

“You know how long a fathom is?” No. No he doesn’t.

Tipsy, manic Seafield and his “Team of the Century” set up shop on the beach at Lighthouse Island and search for the beast that he insists killed his father.

“With a gun or a knife we must end this monster’s life!”

It goes, well, silly and sideways right from the start. Every new scheme for accomplishing their mission has a goofier name than the one before — “Operation: Nauty Lady,” “Operation: Master Baiter.”

And every few minutes poke new holes in the “story” and competence of the “captain,” whose piratical brother (Wayne Tews) seems even nuttier than he is.

“There I go again, pretending.”

The black and white cinematography matches video — covered with superimpositions of dirt and celluloid scratches — with inserts of obsolete technology and the switches and buttons it took to operate it edited into “sonar” montages, digitally hand-drawn “diagrams” and graphics.

The inventiveness never ceases, even as the energy and fun flag a bit. Need a “phantom ship” for a scene? Film the local ferry (we can see crew on this “ghost” ship) and play back its deliberate maneuvering in sped-up time lapse.

The whole enterprise hangs on R.B.C. Tews’  ditzy readings of the lines he gives himself as the loon-in-charge. How’d he come UP with this latest scheme?

“I saw some stuff when I was sleeping.”

“Like in a dream?”

“THAT’S the one!”

The effect of this 78 minute lark is to imagine how the 19th century illusionist and film pioneer Melies approached a problem on the set of say, “A Trip to the Moon,” and how he invented the tricks, effects and techniques of cinema with what he had at hand in 1902.

Melies, like Monty Python, made sketch-length short films. They knew how to make a point, get the jokes in and fade to black. “Lake Michigan Monster” plays like a sketch that goes on and on and on. It doesn’t so much run out of ideas as wear out its welcome.

But before it does, Tews and his Team in dazzle and amuse us in ways that put many a well-financed Hollywood production to shame. Tews is now working on a project titled “Hundreds of Beavers” next. One can hardly wait.

MPAA Rating: unrated, comic violence, alcohol

Cast: Ryland Brickson Cole Tews, Erick West, Beulah Peters, Daniel Long and Wayne Tews

Credits: Written and directed by Ryland Brickson Cole Tews.  An Arrow release.

Running time: 1:18

Toni Collette and David Thewlis play the parents of Jesse Plemons, with Jessie Buckley as the girlfriend who has to witness this little family strife.

Sept. 4 on Netflix

Damn, I’d like to have seen this one with an audience, in a re-opened cinema.

Yes, the only reason to interview filmmaker Jayro Bustamente would be to ask “Why on Earth did you give your movie the exact same title as a dozen other horror films about ‘the weeping woman?'”

Yes, his “La Llorona” takes a long time to deliver a fright, deliver on the dread he puts so much effort into building.

But the Guatemalan Bustamente (“Ixcanul”) has brought us the rare horror film that is actually about something. And it’d be interesting to see how the chill he spends too  much time establishing pays off, if there’s any jolt to the horror of a reckoning, the revenge of the woman who weeps.

This “La Llorona” is heard more than seen, the moans and tears a paranoid old dictator (Julio Diaz) hears in his fortress of a house. He and his family are under siege. A trial for the genocide committed in his name, massacring the Mayan-Ixil people of the provinces during a 1980s civil war, has denied him the justice he deserves.

And here in this bubble, his affluent family is whining at the noisy mob of protestors that surround the place.

“Why won’t they leave us alone?”

His wife, Doña Carmen (Margarita Kenéfic) knows more than she’s telling her doctor/daughter Natalia (Sabrina De La Hoz). We’ve seen the imperious Carmen leading a strange seance-like ceremony with the women of the family in the opening scene, a chanted prayer for deliverance by…could it be, Satan?

As to the mass murders and rape brought up in the trial, “even generals are men,” she huffs. She calls the grieving widows testifying in court “prostitutes” and berates Natalia (in Spanish and Kaqchikel, with English subtitles), “Don’t tell me you believe those…communists!”

As the general hears the crying, inside his house at night, as he stumbles into running faucets, he arms himself and takes potshots at “the guerillas” who have broken in.

“Did someone hear a woman cry?”

Nobody did. But the faucets turning on? Even the staff sees that once the exotic Alma (María Mercedes Coroy) shows up to replace those native maids and cooks who flee the “evil” that they assume is coming, but which we know is already here.

This General Montverde is a guilty as sin. The monster is in the house, waiting for Judgement Day.

It is daughter Natalia who is the first to awaken to her father’s guilt. She has a teenage daughter of her own, trapped under this roof, with that mob outside and this “presence” in it. Head housekeeper Valeriana (María Telón) may an ancient solution to their problem.

“Grab all the candles you can, and bring me sugar!”

But it’s not a corpse in a tattered bridal dress that they all have to fear. It is the general’s demented gun-slinging, firing at shadows where he hears crying. It is the noisy vigil or people surrounding the house, bearing witness for “the disappeared.”

This is horror that works on the head, not on the nerves, and as such lacks much in the way of hair-raising moments or frights. And those are sorely missed in the third act, when the nightmares have spread to those who share the guilt, when general’s butcher bill comes due.

The performances are subdued, not really pitched to match the rising horror facing them all.

Still, you have to hand it to Bustamente. He’s made a “La Llorona” movie with pointed politics, real world villains and righteous wrath. Sometimes, the horrors are in the headlines, or what the headlines aren’t telling us.

MPAA Rating: unrated, violence, nudity

Cast: María Mercedes Coroy, Sabrina De La Hoz, Margarita Kenéfic and Julio Diaz.

Credits: Directed by Jayro Bustamente, script by Jayro Bustamante, Lisandro Sanchez.   A Shudder release.

Running time: 1:38

Here’s an interesting artifact I stumbled upon while prowling the free streaming channel Tubi (it’s also on Youtube), a 1969 British TV special that’s a piece of “How I see myself” autobiography from Peter Sellers.

Documentarian Tony Palmer (“Leonard Cohen: Bird on a Wire,” “Margot,” “Testimony”) was just starting out when he filmed “Will the Real Mr. Sellers…?” aka “The World of Peter Sellers,” getting Sellers’ mentor and “Goon Show” pal Spike Milligan to narrate it.

“Peter’s a freak, NOT a a genius. Which makes him even more unique.”

It is, as one would expect, a sympathetic/always-take-the-star’s-side appreciation, with full Sellers participation. The film has artistic pretensions and self-consciously artsy touches, and it makes a fine if less trustworthy take on the actor than Peter Medak’s embittered (with just cause) but sympathetic “The Ghost of Peter Sellers” documentary of earlier this year.

Sellers vamps through “bits” for the camera, about his current life, his travels and the making of the film that was just then coming out, the all-star satire “The Magic Christian.” He horses around on a Cunard ocean liner, the QE 2, on the set of the film, in public appearances and the like. He kvetches about his heart attacks (graphic surgical footage is inserted), drives his Rolls Royce with the top down and revels in the freedom from pressure, the press and the public that having his own private yacht, the Victoria Maria, gave him.

Milligan enthusiastically narrates the project, getting into the “only child” and his relationship with his mother.

“He was always looking for the security he got from his mother…To him, the world seemed like a violent attack by the world on him and this comfortable life his mother created.”

Milligan insists there was an almost therapeutic “freedom” to Sellers’ work in the free-form “Goon Show,” the precursor to Monty Python, freedom lost thanks to the “idiots” Sellers had to deal with once he cast his lot in the cinema.

The narration sees Sellers’ growing paydays and power as “planned revenge” on such “idiot producers…idiot managers…idiot BBC officials,” and every person who ever saw things differently in a script, on a set or in the tabloids.

Given Sellers’ decidedly mixed track record in film, that is both disingenuous and revealing. He sought big paydays, and as Medak’s film suggests, lost his cool and turned diva when they didn’t turn out as critically-acclaimed blockbusters. And he was a very wealthy martyr about it.

“I tend to approach people now very warily, in case they’re going to clobber me. I find I get clobbered a lot.”

There’s all this wonderful footage of him goofing around during the “Magic Christian” shoot, snippets of the finished film (the Lawrence Harvey as “Hamlet” burlesque is still funny). The mercurial talent is obvious, his ability to improvise “bits,” to sling accents and mimic “types” almost unrivaled.

He was a Robin Williams who refused to be “on” all the time, unless “on” meant that posh accent he affected as his public persona for chat shows.

But it is Milligan’s insightful narration — spoken in 1969 as if Sellers was already dead — which gets at the man, protecting him and revealing him at the same time.

“Can you encompass a man’s life in 50 minutes? Do you think by doing that you will, in any way, help him? In Peter’s case, he’s mostly defenseless…He desperately needs to be left alone, and knows he cannot.”

Despair for Peter Sellers trap, Mulligan sermonized, a lucky clown whose “only compensation was his money.”

MPAA Rating: unrated, with plenty of off-color humor

Cast: Peter Sellers, Spike Milligan, Raquel Welch, Lawrence Harvey, Richard Attenborough

Credits: Directed by Tony Palmer, narrated by Spike Milligan.

Running time: :50