Buried Alive with Peter Sellers

When the great comedic actor agreed to star in The Blockhouse, a grim World War II drama, it seemed like his chance to be taken seriously—but the production turned into a comedy of errors

By Richard Morton Jack

In the summer of 1970, Lord Antony Rufus Isaacs was 26 years old and looking for a new challenge. He had been a banker, a rock-group manager, the part owner of Dandie Fashions—a King’s Road boutique—and a producer of TV commercials. While staying with friends in Cap Ferrat, he glanced over the bookshelf in his room and found a volume whose subject matter contrasted powerfully with his luxurious surroundings: Jean-Paul Clébert’s 1955 novel, Le Blockhaus.

It was inspired by a remarkable tale that had surfaced in August 1950—“The weird story of a German soldier buried alive for six years unfolded today,” reported the Associated Press. “Reliable sources said a soldier is in a hospital being treated for blindness which resulted from entombment since 1945 in a sealed-off Wehrmacht underground food warehouse near the seaport of Gdynia, Poland. The buried man, with five comrades, had sneaked into the food bunker to pilfer supplies and been trapped when retreating Germans dynamited the entrance to prevent advancing Russians from entering.”