Peter Sellars was a strange and most perplexing actor. At times, he was brilliant...producing some of the best films of the era. Imagine....playing multiple roles in such classics as "Dr. Strangelove" and "The Mouse That Roared"! He was also brilliant in "Being There" and many other pictures. That being said, he also starred in many of the WORST comedies of his era...and this became much more the norm during the last decade of his life. Some was due to his overacting, some was due to his terrible choices of film projects and some was likely due to his being a VERY difficult actor who often clashed with directors...making the filmmaking process hellish for everyone according to many sources. Just look at films like "The Fiendish Plot of Dr. Fu Manchu", "The Prisoner of Zenda" and "The Great McGonagall"...all box office bombs with very, very few laughs. Because of the incredibly uneven quality of his later work, I put off watching "Ghost in the Noonday Sun" for many years.
In addition to my trepidation, the film turns out to have been a nightmare to make...with Sellers and the director at each other's throats during production. The film was also shelved and never released in theaters...only being released to cable a decade later! Surely, this likely means that my watching "Ghost" would be a chore!
The story starts off poorly. Inexplicably, it begins with a long prologue which looks like a parody of a silent movie. It is odd, as the rest of the film is NOT silent nor looks anything like this prologue. However, in the prologue you learn that a pirate ship's cook has killed the Captain and assumed command. Unfortunately, this cook is too stupid to remember where the pirate treasure was buried and he and the dead Captain are the only ones who know about its whereabouts. In order to get to where it is, the cook and his crew kidnap a boy who apparently can see and talk to the dead in the hope that the boy can talk to the Captain and learn about the treasure.
So is this any good? No. Unfortunately, instead of making the film conventional and funny, like Sellers' Pink Panther films, it is very unconventional. Sellers' performance is VERY broad and, frankly, poor. The film also is just dumb in places, such as the extensive use of 'silly' sound effects, sped up sequences in order to make them funny (it didn't work) as well as naming the cook 'Dick Scratcher'.
It has more of a Three Stooges style than that of a pirate film. Compared to this, the silly (but very uneven) 1980s film, "Yellowbeard" is a masterpiece!
Overall, this is a very bad film that even Peter Sellers' most devoted fans would have a hard time enjoying or even justifying its being made in the first place.
