Deux copines, un séducteur

If you go into this film expecting to see a lot of Peter Sellers, you will be disappointed. Make no mistake, he's in there and he's very funny but this film is not about his character, a mediocre pianist with a penchant for married women. Rather, it's about two 14-year old girls who are making the awkward transition from childhood to adulthood. One of the girls has an incredible crush on Orient and her friend is helping her worship him from afar. Henry Orient is the catalyst for their transformation when they learn a little too much about his "world".

The acting is uniformly fine. Sellers' character is a rat but he's so clumsy and foolish you find him endearing. Angela Lansbury, as the coldly selfish mother of one of the girls, is extremely hissable. It's hard to believe that she's the same actress playing the warm, friendly Jessica Fletcher so many years later. Paula Prentiss is very amusing as Orient's exceedingly nervous married girlfriend. Tom Bosley plays Lansbury's kind-hearted husband. One of the final scenes in the film is between him and Lansbury and their daughter and it's a great one. There's a great deal of superficial dialogue but the subtext is unmistakable and it becomes the climax of the film. The best part is the two young actresses playing the girls. I have a fourteen year old daughter and she acts just like they do (almost anyway, she doesn't jump over fire hydrants). Their portrayal of giddy women/children is what the film is really all about.

Highly recommended.

George Roy Hill is a perhaps neglected name in any 'top ten' list of great directors we are likely to see, but his filmography speaks for itself, with a number of quiet classics among a few heavyweight top 100 films--all within a somewhat small oeuvre. Each of these classics shows to good effect Hill's marvelous aesthetic moods and attention to detail, combined with absolutely expert casting, obtaining winning performances from all of the principles, with superior character acting from the secondaries.

Peter Sellers is actually something of a secondary in this one as the title role, but his portrayal of Henry Orient is so ludicrous and wonderful that he steals the show every time he's on screen. He was really something. Sellers plays it very large here, as a pretentious, NYC-based, avant-garde pianist of meagre talent--a charlatan, egoist, and ersatz Lothario who cultivates a faux-Euro accent but slides back into his 'native' Brooklyn (Sellers is probably the greatest accent-mimic ever) jargon every time he gets rattled, who has Paderewski hair that he continuously primps, and who entices women who've actually fallen for his schtick by hurling continuous salvos of romance-novel drivel at them until they (hopefully) relent.

Oddly, although it is made plain and obvious in the dialogue that Henry Orient is more or less a hack, and although Sellers plays his usual skillful physical shenanigans, I found that the pianist on the soundtrack played the piano quite well, despite the ridiculous material. There's a hilarious, gushing theme that is edited into almost every scene that Henry is in. His mannerisms during the piano concerto and the ostentatious buffoonery from scene to scene show Sellers in his element, and he never misses the chance to exploit the full range of available comedic ingredients in any moment to the utmost. Every time I watch him cross his arms to play two notes four octaves apart at the end of the concerto, and he does the little wiggle of the finger as if he's depressing the string on a violin to get vibrato out of it, I let out a belly laugh. I never get tired of that.

The two protagonists (or rather, Sellers's perceived antagonists) are played with mesmerising enthusiasm by the two adolescent leads. Tippy Walker is particularly radiant in this movie as the talented, attention-starved, sensitive, hyperkinetic Val, who develops a crush on Henry. Her pixie features, infectious retainer-filled smile, and wide-eyed, bubblegummy girlishness shine on, and share honors with Sellers for scene-steal appeal. She plays off the hurt, pouty ingenue angle beautifully too. Her counterpart, Merrie Spaeth, is no slouch either, although she had the disadvantage here of having the 'straight man' role. No matter! They don't compete for space at all (the scene-stealing qualities of Ms Walker notwithstanding),and they get equal attention and equally precocious dialogue, with the simpatico theme being so stressed as to tell us purposely that they are equal partners through and through.

Ultimately the film leaves me feeling bittersweet, partially through nostalgia--Hill's 1963 NYC is beautiful--but also because the movie has that theme of fleeting innocence in the face of oncoming adolescent desire. George Roy Hill's great movies have a sparkle to them, and this qualifies as one of the quieter greats. In any case, as time buries this one, those halcyon days of youth go with it, but the legacies of Sellers and Hill should mark it for at least cult-status immortality, which by proxy should give the girls their deserved legacy too.

The sixties became The Sixties around the time of this film, 1964. There was a time, believe it or not, when kids played grown-up, instead of the other way around, as is the case today. Two cute girls are venturing from childhood to youth, in a benign Manhattan. They have a crush on a pianist-Lothario who happens to be Peter Sellers. You can imagine the complications - and the hilarity.

What makes this film so appealing is the way it portrays adolescent awakening as a completely unsordid and sweet experience. Yes, there is pathos, when the two discover how adults have turned their world into Henry Orient's world.

Although the cast is sterling all around, Tom Bosley is a standout as father to one of the girls, who helps put things to rights.

If the Kennedy assassination and Vietnam are cultural watersheds, then this film is a refreshing antidote; it gives the lie to the glib put-downs of the era by the current generation.

A few points. Elmer Bernstein's musical score is as whimsical as the young girls themselves. George Roy Hill, the director, was sensitive to the musical moods of his films. He had originally intended to be a musician and had a bachelor's in music from Yale. The photographer, Boris Kaufman, has done a splendid job of capturing New York City in the late fall and in mid winter. (He was equally perceptive in getting wintry Hoboken on film in "On the Waterfront.")

The acting is fine, surprisingly, from all the principles. The pavonine Peter Sellers usually steals every scene he's in. When he's trying to seduce Paula Prentiss his voice has an accent that sounds somewhere between Italian and Slovenian. He throws in Italian clichés but sometimes gets mixed up -- "Garcon! Due martinis, per favore." One of his funniest moments is when he's performing a terrible piano concerto. He's skipped the last two rehearsals so he's a bit lost. At one point he rolls dramatically into the upper registers (while the rest of the orchestra play checkers) and ends on a trill. He glances at the conductor who slowly shakes his head in disgust. The wrong key. Unperturbed Sellers starts the roll over again and looks to the conductor, who shakes his head again. After the third failure to find the right key, the conductor shakes his head and mouths -- very clearly and silently -- "B Flat." Satisfied, Sellers plunges ahead.

Paula Prentiss doesn't have a very large role but she's delicious both in looks and in her performance. She's so nervous, so flattered by the attention of Seller's phony pianist that she gulps and staggers slightly from time to time. When Sellers finally gets her to his apartment and begins to woo her with a paean to her "burnished shoulders" and "twin poems," she wavers while sitting on the couch and caresses her body parts as he lauds them. She never appears less than half gassed.

Angela Lansbury is in her bitchy mode here, along the lines of her mother in "The Manchurian Candidate." She never seems to go wrong, regardless of the part. Her husband, Tom Bosley, is kind of a good-natured schlub. Phyllis Thaxter looks just fine, considering that she first appeared in "Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo" more than twenty years earlier. Her sweetness might be cloying except that it seems ingrained in her real personality.

The most surprising thing in the performances are the two 14-year-old girls, neither of whom went on to a respectable movie career. They're plain charming, both goofy and funny, but smart and perceptive as well. "Gilbert" (Spaeth) comes from a warm middle-class family. We can tell because on Christmas we see them preparing a turkey and having friends over for dinner. Spaeth went on in real life to become a strong George W. Bush supporter and helped torpedo John Kerry with the Swiftboat Ads in 2004, for what it's worth.

"Valerie Campbell Boyd" (Walker) is a neurotic genius from a dysfunctional rich family. (That name is a great WASP cognomen, by the way). They're two cute kids, believe it or not, especially Tippy Walker who brings a molestable element to her role. Hill seems to recognize this and gives the PREverts in the audience a couple of slow-motion upskirt shots as the two jump over fire hydrants and dance on park benches. But it's all pretty unstressed and one would be hard put to think of a better image for two pleasant and happy kids living in a world of fantasy than to have them laughing and leaping in the air. Where do they find kids who can act so well? Walker has a way of flipping her hair back and gawkily hunching her shoulders that spells Preppiness.

The film has its serious moments but most of it is low-key humorous. I saw it in a drive-in in Riverhead, Long Island. You probably won't regret watching it.

I wasn't quite prepared for how much I enjoyed this sophisticated (but certainly not too much so) romp when I caught it during its first-run release. I thought it so well-executed in every department that I was delighted to note that it's now available in a DVD edition with its Panavision widescreen ratio restored. But unfortunately the audio element is so bad (requiring turning the volume way up to even begin to hear the dialogue, and a music score that's mangled beyond belief) that I had to return the disc for a refund. Fortunately Turner Classic Movies recently showed it and the soundtrack was not a problem, making possible a fairly decent high-fidelity VHS recording.

The two young actresses who played the very natural but entirely madcap duo who precipitate most of the plot's ins-'n-outs are completely charming and they are supported by an extraordinarily well-chosen cast of top-notch professionals. Angela Lansbury, never an actress to shrink from the somewhat less savory aspects of a character she's playing, strikes just the right note as a socialite whose maternal instincts are close to non-existent. I do remember wishing that Paula Prentiss had been given more to do, but I suppose getting mistaken for Jayne Mansfield (in one of the film's funnier sequences) wasn't something to be sneezed at. As the film's title character, Peter Sellers wasn't permitted by director George Roy Hill to unbalance the proceedings. And it certainly seems that scenarist Nora Johnson had inherited more than a modicum of her father Nunnally's professional good taste. This one is a treat for all but the dyspeptic and the excessively demanding.