Monster’s ball? Peter Sellers, his life and films, plus ‘Living with Slim’ BY GERALD PEARY

The off-screen life of the great British comic Peter Sellers was downright ugly, and he crawls through The Life and Death of Peter Sellers, a film as chaotic, off-putting, and odiferous as its biographical subject. This portrait of a lost soul who seems equally hateful to his wives, lovers, children, and fellow thespians would surely tank at the theaters, even with the star power of Geoffrey Rush as Sellers, Charlize Theron as one suffering spouse (actress Britt Ekland), and Emily Watson as another (Anne Sellers). Instead, this Stephen Hopkins–directed film goes straight to HBO beginning December 5, after a December 2 sneak at the Brattle Theatre as part of its "Being Peter Sellers" week.

I attended a Life and Death press conference at the Cannes world premiere last May. What a morbid occasion! Nobody in the room, neither the journalists nor those on stage, seemed very thrilled about the movie. There were long silences between questions, and then what was asked often wandered a long way from the subject. Someone asked Rush about his visiting his ailing wife in Australia. Wasn’t that an arduous trip? A Brazilian journalist wondered whether anyone had been to Brazil. Rush: "I never have." Theron: "Yes, I loved it."

The film? Rush: "I turned the part down three years ago. Sellers was hairier than I am, shorter than I am. But on The Pirates of the Caribbean, I was getting pleased with my swordplay, and I said, ‘I could do this!’ I’m from the school of putting putty on my nose, socks down my shorts. Transformations!"

Hopkins was asked whether the picture of Sellers was perhaps too negative. "He’s certainly not portrayed as evil. He’s a giant, extreme version of a lot of us, artists who have trouble knowing themselves, except through their work. . . . To really know Peter Sellers, you need to see his movies."

Off to the Brattle!

November 26 and November 27: The Pink Panther (1963) and A Shot in the Dark (1964) are the first and best entries in the beloved Inspector Clouseau series, with Sellers sublime as the bumbling, pratfall-prone Sherlock Holmes of the Seine. "I suspect everyone and I suspect no one" is Clouseau’s credo, though he has no clue whatsoever when any crime is committed. The Pink Panther is more stylish, visually opulent, and star-packed, but A Shot in the Dark sends Clouseau to work for, and, uproariously ruin the day, of short-fused, tic-infested Chief Inspector Dreyfus (Herbert Lom).

November 28: I Love You, Alice B. Toklas (1968) and The World of Henry Orient (1964) are two rarely revived Sellers vehicles. In the first, a fairly enjoyable romp, he’s a straitlaced LA lawyer with an imposing Jewish mother who for a time tries out the hippie life, residing in a Day-Glo-painted van with a bare-legged nymphet. In the latter, he’s a womanizing concert pianist who’s chased around New York by two tedious pubescent groupies.

November 29: Murder by Death (1976) is a talky Neil Simon–written parody of detective stories, with Sellers’s ersatz Charlie Chan actually upstaged for laughs by Truman Capote as the millionaire who invites the world’s five greatest detectives to his mansion to play Clue.

November 30: The Party (1968) is Sellers’s hilarious turn as a lovable Indian (from India) walking about a decadent Hollywood party. It plays with What’s New, Pussycat? (1965), a silly but affable Woody Allen–written ’60s-time-warp farce in which Sellers is a horny, ditsy shrink jealous of Peter O’Toole as his ladies’-man patient.

December 1: Being There (1979), from the Jerzy Kosinski novel, is a Sellers classic in which he portrays an illiterate TV-watching boob who somehow gets elected president of the USA.

BU FILM PROFESSOR SAM KAUFFMAN used his Fulbright to go to Makere University in Uganda and make "Living with Slim: Kids Talk About HIV/AIDS," a profoundly upsetting 28-minute documentary that’s showing December 1 and 4 at the MFA. What a heartbreaking thing: to put voices and faces with tears to the reality that thousands upon thousands of African children are dying needlessly of AIDS. Why? Because nobody cares enough to supply the ARVS medical antidote to keep these kids alive. Kauffmann interviews seven infected Ugandan children ages six to 16. To a person, they are sensitive, deep-thinking, made unfairly wise by their intense sufferings. Born with HIV, almost all are orphaned, living uncomfortably with impoverished relatives, scapegoated and treated miserably at school. "Living with Slim" does its work: it makes us in the audience think of contributing money and shouting at indifferent Washington: DO SOMETHING!