The test of any great interviewer is the ability to glean nuggets of gold, to bring something out of their subject, and come away with something extraordinary; a comment, or statement that perfectly sums up who they are, and what makes them tick. In the case of Peter Sellers, half-man, half-myth, the revelation was “There is no me. I do not exist. There used to be a me but I had it surgically removed”. This is a declaration that cuts closest to the bone when trying to summarise what it was that laid beneath the surface of Sellers, and that interviewer? Kermit the Frog in an episode of The Muppet Show from 1977.
There can be no doubt that Peter Sellers was a complicated, messy, perplexing individual, happiest it would seem when living in chaos, and content to leave disorder wherever he went on his never-ending quest to find peace and ‘happiness’. If there is one role in his long and varied career that he always felt was the closest to his real personality - the thing he guarded more than anything else, and the thing he couldn’t remove on that infamous bonfire in Gstaad, was as the pathetic and tragic Benjamin Hoffman. So close was this performance to Sellers’ own real self, that he tried, though, true to form not with any real conviction, to buy back the negatives and have it destroyed, as he saw nothing but ugliness in it. He couldn’t face showing the world his true form, and would much rather present himself through false teeth, fake beards, and ridiculous accents. This honest performance, more than any other he played, sent him into a deep hole of depression, and arguably remains as his penultimate last true great work.
He initially had trouble settling into how would play the role, first feeling he should play the part with an Austrian accent, with no doubt a light dusting of his usual whacky foreign performances, though he eventually listened to director Alvin Rakoff (Death Ship, Dirty Tricks), and agreed on playing it natural, slow, and brooding - bringing the perfect sense of melancholy, wrapped in a spiky blanket of maleficence.
Adapted by Ernest Gebler from his novel “Shall I Eat You Now”, adapted from the original Emmy award winning TV Play “Call Me Daddy” from 1967, which originally starred Donald Pleasance as Mr. Hoffman, and Judy Cornwall as Ms. Smith, Hoffman was the first film to be made at EMI under the stewardship of Bryan Forbes, an old, and very familiar friend of Sellers.
Benjamin Hoffman was a man who shared Sellers’ innate sense of loneliness; his longing for things he could never have, no matter how many strings he could pull, or how many shiny objects he would possess, the light at the end of the tunnel would always be distant and painfully bewildering.
In Hoffman’s case, that light was Janet Smith, played with exquisite elegance, and intense innocence by Sinéad Cusack, a colleague from work whom has become the object of his dark affections, and upon finding out information on her fiancé (he’s been selling information) that could lead to him becoming in trouble with the police, hatches a plan that if Janet were to spend a week with him, he would let the matter slide. As she enters his life, and his apartment, to the soothing tones of Matt Munro, she has no idea what she is in for, and what kind of things he has in mind.
He greets her like a starved Bela Lugosi, and as she crosses the threshold, and locks herself in her bathroom, he suggests that she makes herself look “like you want to be fertilised”, before fixing drinks for them both, and offering further swaggering assertions, all of which seem as empty and hollow as the man himself. There’s a dominating sense of want and control there, but one quickly realises that it’s all an act, and the only real driver is isolation, and limp, desperate grasps from within a deep pool of self-pity. “Many a good man has been destroyed by pity, Miss Smith”, Hoffman reflects, a statement loaded with victimhood, and plaintive mewling. He is no beast, he has an armoury full of love to offer, but it’s also tragically duelled with a cumbrous set of social skills, that will surely only serve to leave him as alone and barren as he always has been.
Janet, however, is filled with only fear, and guilt. She is set to be married in just three weeks, and has had to lie to her beloved Tom (Jeremy Bulloch) in order to be with her new captor, telling him she has to visit her sick grandma in Scarborough. She has a past with Hoffman, and once rejected his advances, with her only real crime seemingly being that she then told all her colleagues about it. She has an innocent mind, and likes to think the best of people, but in the case of the man before her, it seems utterly impossible to even begin to imagine he has any good intentions on offer.
Taking advantage of her terror, Hoffman lays it on thick, bringing out his dark side, and talking about having full use of her, dismissing her fiancé entirely at every turn, issuing a missive that “women cheat by instinct”, before commencing with his games of endurance. He begins by taking her for dinner and ordering snails on her behalf, much to her disgust (and his delight), he hears her concerns of the cruelty involved with animals that are slaughtered for our meals, and orders her lamb - perhaps not the subtlest metaphor buried within these early exchanges. The divertissement continues, with her being dragged on long wood walks in her painfully non-sensible shoes, while he strides a long way in front like an experienced hiker with purpose. These games are harsh and cruel, and only serve to make this relationship begin in the worst possible way, with one getting the very real sense that rather than being seduced, she is being punished for rejecting his “maniac face”. She is essentially his prisoner, his prize, and while she is in his company, she will be a source of his aberrant amusement, but this act cannot go the distance, and as Janet is pulled from pillar to post, he begins to show his weakness. She quickly discovers that behind that stern, prepotent exterior, is the body of a wounded man, abandoned by a recent marriage, or late disaster as he refers to it, and broken by abandonment. He cares for her when she is unwell, and opens up about his feelings when showing her around the sight of his new flat, still under refurbishment. He’s leaving the old place as it’s haunted by memories of the past, and filled with ghosts of where everything went wrong. The new house will be exuberant, expensive, and a metaphor for what he wants in life; a chance to start again, brick by brick. As Janet speculates as to where things should go in her dream kitchen, he watches her in the doorway for a moment, basking in her glow of hope and joy at being a fictional homemaker, his eyes longing for it to be real, before snapping out of it and showing her the rest of the house. By the time they play a duet at the piano, there’s the real sense that the thaw has set it with both; Janet is smiling and laughing like never before, and Benjamin has dropped his act entirely, becoming the natural, playful, loving person he always wanted to be, and feels he can be forever with her by his side.
As the week comes to a premature end, and Janet has to go home, a plaintive Hoffman dwells in her presence, and uses what little time they have to tell her how he feels, and how he knows she’s making a mistake by leaving, telling her she’ll always remember him, when she’s locked in a domestic grind with Tom, and his overbearing mother, and how he only ever wanted to love her, to woo her, and to share the autumn of his life dancing and singing with her. He will protect her, provide for her, brush her hair, and keep her in his pocket like a mouse. With one last act of disparate Machiavellianism, that brings Janet’s world crashing before her eyes, he forces her to realise some hard truths; is a life with Tom what she really wanted? Or was she just all too ready to settle into something that was just all too comfortable and easy, and ultimately wasn’t what she deserved. One final test awaits Janet, and that’s how Tom will react to the news of where she has been, and who she has been with, and all too quickly it becomes clear that he doesn’t care about what they have, what they’ve built, and only sees their future on his own terms, lead by his domineering mother, and is clearly incapable of behaving like an adult. He’s only worried about avoiding prison, even asking Janet to re-enter the lion’s den without a moment of hesitation, in order to convince Hoffman to save him from the punishment that is rightly heading his way.
Hoffman’s motives, on the other hand, become clearer; it was never an exercise built for seduction and humiliation, it was always a last gasp attempt to appeal - to convince her there was more to life, and free her from the anguish she had in store. While his methods were, to put it mildly, deeply questionable, his heart was always in the right place. After all, he’s loved this woman for eighteen months and two weeks, and wants to spend the rest of his life with her. With Janet’s world now seeming alien, and Tom’s selfish motivations to stay out of jail totally at odds with Benjamin’s, her decision is clear; only one man truly loves her, and only one man will ultimately bring her happiness, something that four days ago would have seemed totally and utterly out of the question. She returns to Hoffman and asks if she can choose the new kitchen, have piano lessons and give up work, and he happily agrees, before finally welcoming her into her new home, and new future.
In real life Sellers and Cusack formed a similar relationship, with Sellers showing her the bright lights and exciting sounds of London, and even eventually asking her to marry him, as he did with most women that were ever close to him. Much like Hoffman, Sellers took great pleasure in introducing the young actor to the finer things, serving as a sort of conduit for high-living, and even soft drugs, though as with most relationships in his crazy world, it ultimately just became a reflection of whatever part he was playing at that time. He limped through the remainder of the 1970s, delivering memorable performances, in often left-field movies (though earning an Oscar nod for Being There), but became stuck in a rut of franchise disguises, and off-screen romantic upheavals. By the end of the decade he was a tired reflection of himself, metaphorically and physically, aged just 54 when he died, but having the appearance of a man at least a decade older - the legacy of a long, difficult relationship with his heart, he ended up much like Benjamin Hoffman; endlessly searching for the perfect woman to love, and endlessly moving further away from happiness, but unlike Hoffman, his end was not nearly as happy.
*This essay was written for the booklet contained inside the Hoffman blu-ray