The Ghost of Peter Sellers

This documentary by Hungarian-born director of mostly British films, Peter Medak, is an interesting self-retrospective. In 1973 Medak was fresh off a few successful films like "The Ruling Class" (1972). He was then asked by world famous comedian Peter Sellers, to helm a pirate-themed comedy, starring Sellers and his comedic frenemy Spike Milligan. This resulted in "Ghost in the Noonday Sun", a film so infamously bad, that it couldn't be released.

"The Ghost of Peter Sellers" documents the making of the pirate comedy in Cyprus. Sellers was always difficult but on this film, he was unbearable. Medak recounts everything he had to go through during the production. It obviously left him with a great deal of traumas, and this documentary seems to be his way of finally getting closure. The title is correct in that Peter Sellers is a ghost looming over this narrative, not the main subject of the narrative. I found this to be very interesting, and it's educational too. You should never make a film just because you can get the financing together. Otherwise you are bound to have on your hands nightmares just like this one.

Spike Milligan, not Peter Sellers, is at fault for the pirate movie being so bad since it was Spike who talked his former Goon, Sellers, into doing a movie that he hardly even had developed on the page.

In one reflection, Medak says that both he AND Sellers cried on the phone together after having read what there was to read of the script. Then, when Sellers becomes a pain to the director on set, Spike shows up to write the last half of the script, and acts like the hero for bringing Sellers back to the set, but in reality, it was a set that should have never been built because the script wasn't even finished from the very beginning. A screenplay is the most important "set" of a movie. It's everything.

Seeing parts of the movie, that is, the ACTUAL movie, it doesn't seem all Sellers fault despite Sellers being horrible in it. The direction looks like test shots for rehearsals or casting auditions, so this supposedly brilliant young director wasn't really directing but rather just pointing his camera and filming.

The fault isn't just on Peter Sellers here. And when Medak is sitting next to Spike Milligan's statue, praising him after defecating on Sellers for two hours, it makes very little sense.

Serviceable enough documentary- I always have a soft spot for ones that look at troubled film productions, so such a documentary would have to be pretty bad for me to come away truly disliking it.

I think this is seriously flawed in some ways, but I got some enjoyment out of it because of my fondness for this documentary sub-genre (for lack of a better description). It's also technically pretty well made, and feels well-paced and appropriately brisk at just 93 minutes.

It's not quite funny enough to be completely entertaining as a tragicomedy, and I wasn't that big a fan of the main subject at points. He did come across as somewhat petty, but he had also had a tough life and rough creative struggles, so my emotions towards him ended up being conflicted. The film however is incredibly sympathetic towards him, and I'm not sure he 100% earned that portrayal.

Sellers comes across pretty mean, but they do ultimately celebrate his legacy and comedic talent, even whilst lamenting the struggles of working with him and knowing him personally. The look at Sellers (who isn't really the main subject of the documentary- thanks somewhat misleading title) is therefore more balanced and ultimately more interesting.

Also might be a minor flaw, but they REALLY should have got the interviewees to do a better job at specifying which Peter they were reminiscing about, as Peter Medak and Peter Sellers are the two most discussed people in the documentary, and their full names are hardly used during interviews...

I have seen the bones of "Ghost in the Noonday Sun" and wonder if a successful movie could ever have been made out of it. Sid Fleishman's book was a curious idea for a movie, anyway.

In this documentary, director Peter Medak (The Ruling Class) diagnoses what went wrong with this troubled production, which Peter Sellers went out of his way to sink.

Sellers was a strange fellow. He wasn't, by all accounts, a team player. Except in rare cases (The Wrong Box springs to mind) he'd rather be the star of a thoroughly rotten movie than take a bit part in a good movie. No one who knew him likes him in retrospect but everyone I've ever heard interviewed about him, whatever else they had to say about him, end up saying he was a genius.

And so he was. And still is. That doesn't excuse him. I'm an artist myself (not an actor and certainly no Sellers) but I side with those who say the "artistic temperament" is a thin cover for bad manners. Like him or hate him, he's still a star, 40 years after his death. Medak himself had to put Sellers' name in the title to rouse any interest in this cathartic film. That speaks volumes.

For anyone interested in behind-the-curtain goings on in the movie business, this documentary is invaluable. It highlights so much that can go wrong in movie making (and the ridiculous power games I have no doubt other stars than Sellers have played) and why anyone who gets involved in it needs to be crazy or at least have good blood pressure.

...for a start, 1989's THE FAVORITE, aka INTIMATE POWER. Train-wreck productions are memorable for those involved, in the worst way!