2 early Peter Sellers films found

[Lzcutter]

From an archival list serve that I belong to comes this good news:

The New York Times Arts Beat blog reports today that

Two 1957 films by Peter Sellers, long thought to be lost, have been found by the building manager of the now-defunct Park Lane Films in London. The master prints of “Dearth of a Salesman” and “Insomnia is Good,” were in 21 film cans that the manager, Robert Farrow, salvaged from a trash can outside the building when the studios were cleared before to refurbishment in 1996.

“I took them home, put them in a cupboard and pretty much forgot about them,” Mr. Farrow, said in a statement. When he cleared out his cupboards recently he looked inside the tins and discovered the two 30-minute films, co-written by Sellers, who died in 1980, and the Canadian author Mordecai Richler. It is unclear whether the films were intended for television or cinema.


Click here to read the rest of the story and see video clips from each of the films.

http://artsbeat.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/ ... ss&emc=rss

[moira finnie]

I enjoyed the brief clips from these shorts, Lynn. Thanks for posting this item. I find that I prefer this kind of early, pre-Hollywood Peter Sellers preferable because he was gently funny. The kind of amusing observational humor that informs his work in such delightful movies as The Smallest Show on Earth (1957), the more antic Two-Way Stretch (1960), and touchingly whimsical Heavens Above! (1963) are among my favorites. These brief movies seem to be in a similar vein.

The Insomnia Is Good For You (1957) sequence in particular reminded me of Robert Benchley's shorts.

[stuart.uk]

It's a real shame that films that Sellers did with fellow Goons Spike Milligan and Harry Secombe, such as Down Among The Z Men didn't do justice to their iconic radio program The Goon Show, which went onto inspire Monty Python.

I remember him as an uknown in Orders Are Orders with future UK stars Tony Hancock, Bill Fraser and Sid James. He also did a nice film called John And Julie, playing a cop, searching for two kids who ran away from home to see The Coronation in London.

Sellers around the time he became internationally famous was offered the part of Alf Garnett in Till Death Do Us Part. He didn't do it, so Warren Mitchell played the iconic bigot, who inspired All In The Family in America

[Rita Hayworth]

I find that I prefer this kind of early, pre-Hollywood Peter Sellers preferable because he was gently funny.

Moira,

Define Gently Funny in your own words if you can?