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.”
The novel recast the protagonists as forced laborers sealed inside a German bunker after Allied bombs destroy the entryway. Riveted by the grim (and, it turned out, apocryphal) story’s dramatic possibilities, Antony spent much of his holiday poring over the text. “By the end of the week I’d decided it would make a fascinating film,” he says, and he shared it with his creative partner, the director Clive Rees. The pair slowly tinkered on a screenplay while continuing to make commercials.
Antony occasionally recharged his batteries at his family home, Staplefield Grange, in East Sussex, where the neighbors included his parents’ old friends Princess Margaret and Lord Snowdon. One weekend in the summer of 1971, Snowdon suggested Antony join them for dinner back in London. They went to an Italian restaurant opposite the entrance to Kensington Palace, and were joined by Snowdon’s friend Peter Sellers.
At the age of 45, Peter was one of the world’s most celebrated—and prolific—stars, a past Oscar nominee (for his comedic tour de force in Stanley Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove) and beloved for the Pink Panther films, in which he played the bumbling French Inspector Clouseau. He was also a perennial feature of the gossip columns, renowned not only for his genius but also his extravagance, mercurial temper, and wide-ranging love life. He had recently married his third wife, the 23-year-old socialite Miranda Quarry, and was living with her as a reluctant tax exile in Ireland. (Britain’s top income-tax rate at the time was 90 percent.)
“I knew of Peter’s reputation for being difficult, but he was great fun that evening,” says Antony. “After dinner he needed to catch a plane back to his home in Dublin, but his taxi to Heathrow didn’t turn up, so I offered to drive him.”
“I had a copy of the Blockhouse screenplay in the car, so I cheekily asked if he’d be willing to read it and let me know what he thought. He politely took it, but I was sure he got handed scripts the whole time, and I didn’t expect anything to come of it.”
The next morning, however, Antony received a call. “Peter came on the line and told me that he loved the screenplay, that he was fed up of making idiotic comedies, and had been looking for a project he could really sink his teeth into.”
Parrots and Swamis
A few days later, Bert Mortimer, Peter’s long-suffering fixer, met Antony and Clive at Dublin Airport and drove them the short distance to Carton House, a vast 18th-century pile in whose coach house Peter and Miranda were maintaining an uneasy existence.
When they were getting along, Peter called her “Muffins,” but more often chose saltier words. She kept a malodorous menagerie of dogs, cats, and parrots named after Beatrix Potter characters. On one occasion, enraged by a perceived social slight during a dinner party they were hosting, Peter opened the birds’ cages and feverishly swatted them about with a tennis racquet.
While she enjoyed socializing with the local gentry, Peter found them unbearably drunk and narrow-minded, and when he became convinced that Miranda was cheating on him, he destroyed their wedding album. After another row, as she lay sobbing on her bed, he ordered Bert to hurl her jewelry into the ornamental lake; Bert tactfully play-acted the task.
Eastern religion preoccupied Peter. He burned incense, surrounded himself with images of his guru, Vishnudevananda Saraswati (whom he’d recently tempted to Ireland), and spent long periods standing on his head. He cycled great distances every day, alone with his thoughts, and toyed with opening an Italian restaurant in Dublin. None of it staved off boredom for long.
In an interview with a local newspaper, he described the “Irish atmosphere” as “a great weight pressing down on your head.” Cooped up in a house he disliked, with a much younger wife he had little in common with, he became despondent.
Although Peter was internationally celebrated, his reckless spending had led him to appear in a string of half-baked comedies. He moaned to Gillian Franks of the Irish Independent that “even intelligent people still put the comedian label on me” and ended their exchange with a cri de coeur: “Can you wonder that I’d like to break out and return one day to the stage—in a straight part?”
The Blockhouse had landed in his lap at the perfect time. It wasn’t a play, true, but it had strongly theatrical qualities, and the lead role of Rouquet, a French prisoner of war trapped deep underground, would allow him to extend himself and shift the perception of his abilities. Rouquet, the fundamentally decent schoolmaster determined to maintain his humanity in the face of unimaginable degradation—whether calculating the passage of time with candles or scrawling poetry on the walls—lay at the heart of the piece.
The two filmmakers and Peter immediately got down to analyzing what interested them about the story—the claustrophobia, the intensity, the study of humans under unbearable existential pressure. “Before we left he’d given us a firm verbal commitment. He kept saying, ‘This is going to be my Hamlet!’”
“Only Poetry and Music and Beauty!”
“Having Peter attached was flattering and exciting, but terrifying too,” says Antony. “Going from making 30-second puffs for breakfast cereal and aftershave to a dark drama feature with a big star was a huge leap.” Sellers’s wily agent Denis Selinger was highly dubious about the project. “He told me that no announcement about Peter should be made until funding was in place. That left me having to approach other stars, including Charles Bronson and Donald Pleasence, just in case.”
Antony put together a budget of around $700,000, looked into studios around London, and secured the fine British actors Jeremy Kemp, Peter Vaughan, Alfred Lynch, Leon Lissek, and Nicholas Jones. Partly to reflect the trapped men’s varied backgrounds, he and Clive also wanted to cast some European actors, and approached Per Oscarsson, an austere Swede who’d been named best actor at Cannes for his performance in Hunger in 1966. He, too, agreed to appear.
The only remaining character to cast was the cynical, opportunistic prisoner Visconti, in many ways the antithesis of the methodical, right-minded Rouquet. “We needed someone charismatic, of course, and with Peter on board the range of actors we could pitch to had become wider,” says Antony. “A few months earlier I’d seen Charles Aznavour performing in London and had idly thought he’d be an interesting choice. Peter wanted to be kept informed about our progress, and when I mentioned casting Charles he told me it would be ‘a stroke of genius.’”
A year older than Peter, Charles was one of France’s most popular balladeers, as well as a versatile actor. “Charles invited Clive and me to visit him at home outside Paris,” says Antony. “Eventually I had to broach the subject of his fee, upon which he said, ‘I refuse to discuss money in my house! Only poetry and music and beauty!’ So that made life a little easier. In the end, we agreed on seven thousand.”
Clive, meanwhile, was researching blockhouses and learned that some had been constructed in the Channel Islands during the German occupation. He visited Guernsey, where he explored an underground hospital the Germans had built into the cliffs. Upon his return, he had news for Antony. “He had become fixated on the idea that we should shoot the film in this vile place. He wanted the purity of it and thought the actors’ performances would seem more realistic if they were immersed in an authentically damp, dark atmosphere.”
To Antony the idea “was crazy. Guernsey was an agricultural backwater next to Brittany, culturally more French than British. There was no incentive or tax break for filming there, and it would involve transporting the whole cast and crew, putting them up and paying them a per diem, as well as having to move all the equipment. Clive was very stubborn, though.”
Contrary to Antony’s expectations, Peter was delighted at the prospect of summering on Guernsey, not least as it would help maintain his tax status. With great reluctance, Antony agreed to filming there, though it led to a revised budget of close to $850,000. “This was big money in 1972—and funding it was problematic as it was,” says Antony. “The subject matter was grim and obviously uncommercial: after the opening five minutes, everything took place below ground.”
The increasingly desperate Antony met with the producer David Puttnam, whom he knew from the advertising world. “David was making films with finance from the immensely rich Edgar Bronfman Sr., who owned the Seagram Company but was passionate about the film industry, so I was hoping they would invest in The Blockhouse.”
Instead, having taken a polite interest in the production, David had a favor to ask of Antony. “He mentioned that Edgar’s teenage son, Edgar junior, was in search of a summer job as a production assistant. Of course, it crossed my mind that if I were employing Edgar junior it might encourage his father to finance the movie. I told him that I would be happy to take him on, but that as things stood there was a fifty-fifty chance that The Blockhouse wouldn’t go ahead.”
The teenager had a proposal for Antony: “He said that if he were to have credibility whilst we were seeking investment, he needed to be promoted from being my assistant to being my co-producer. I had bigger things to worry about and agreed.”
Salvation came from a different quarter. Denis O’Brien, who managed Peter’s finances, found a Swiss investor willing to stump up enough money to “just about make the film. The only problem was that Denis had told him it was a Peter Sellers comedy, so it took some explanation as to why the entire shoot was taking place in an authentic Nazi blockhouse.”
“What the Fuck Are You Doing?”
By the spring of 1972, Peter’s marriage was all but over. He had abandoned Ireland for London and was desperate to throw himself back into work. He based himself in the penthouse at the Playboy Club, where the Evening Standard reported he was surrounded by “expensive stereo equipment, lots of scripts, cheery yoga messages on the wall and books galore about Adolf Hitler.”
With the first tranche of Swiss cash in the bank, the crew and eight-strong cast decamped for Guernsey in early June. “Most of us were staying in a hotel managed by a crazy Cypriot, but we rented a lovely house for Peter, with a cook and so on. He was accompanied, as usual, by Bert Mortimer, but not by Miranda or any of his three children [two by his first wife, Anne Howe, and one by his second, Britt Ekland]. Money was extremely tight from the start. It was all flying by the seat of our pants.”
Before filming began, the cast rehearsed in the hotel. “At first I was a little wary of Peter’s star power and reputation for volatility,” says Antony, “but we all found him easy and professional from the start, and he didn’t treat the other actors with anything but respect.” The atmosphere on Guernsey seemed to have a calming, almost therapeutic influence on him.
While the actors rehearsed, the motley crew prepared for the arduous underground shoot. “Matt Raymond, our production manager, was in well over his head,” recalls Antony. “At first sight of him I knew we were in trouble: he turned up looking like General Patton, in full military gear and shades, driving an American World War II jeep in full camouflage. I said to him, ‘What the fuck are you doing?’”
“Clive had chosen his protégé Keith Goddard to be the cameraman. He was a nice guy, but inexperienced and hopelessly unequal to the challenge we faced. The editor, Peter Gold, had never edited a feature before, and Clive’s assistant, Murray Buttrose, was a dope-smoking hippy. This did not help. To cap it all, my supposed co-producer, Edgar Bronfman Jr., was a goofy 17-year-old American high-school kid, with braces on his teeth and big round glasses. He tagged along every day in a tie-dyed denim suit, without adding any value.”
The first scene to be shot was the D-day bombing of the entrance to the blockhouse on the clifftop. Belying Clive’s inexperience as a director of feature films, it’s a bravura sequence that expertly sets up the ensuing horror. “Peter loved it, as it brought back wartime memories for him. Unfortunately, my flatmate in London, Anthony Haden-Guest, had a less enjoyable day. We were using him as an extra, but the guy in charge of the stunts overdid the gelignite, so poor Anthony was practically detonated.”
During breaks the ebullient Peter kept everyone amused with a stream of comic voices, and the sunny Charles Aznavour required little encouragement to sing. However, the animated atmosphere shifted when it was time to go underground and re-create the men’s living death.
“Things got way more intense,” says Antony. “The blockhouse was a huge structure that went many meters underground, deep into the cliff. It had a weird ambience, damp and uninviting, with German markings all over the place. It was dark and quiet, as well as sinister and unhygienic, with dank, putrid air.”
Adding to the funereal ambience was a technique Clive had devised, as he later explained: “[We were] seventy feet underground. Very quiet. And so I’d say, “Standby!”—and there’d be silence. I’d wait, sometimes a minute. Then we’d turn the camera on; then wait a bit more; then I’d say, “Action!” [That created] a terrific feeling that got to the actors, and it made it easier for them to be emotional.”
By Clive’s account, Peter “was smoking a lot of dope; he was on macrobiotic diets and he stood on his head a lot. He’d get up at five in the morning to do his exercises and he’d come to rehearsals by eleven. He’d look completely wrecked by then, which suited the picture.”
The first reels to be shot underground were couriered to London for processing. Antony fretfully awaited the results, which confirmed his worst fears. “The report stated unequivocally that the footage was simply too dark. I told Clive that we needed to employ a far more experienced cameraman, but he refused point-blank. This rather strained our relationship.”
As the confined men realized there would be no escape, the mood among the actors became more somber, exacerbated by the fact that the story was being shot in sequence. “Every day they had to put on the makeup and descend into the hospital, and it began to affect them,” recalls Antony. “In particular, Jeremy Kemp—who was classically trained, very serious, and rather fragile—lost the plot. I had to fly out a doctor to deal with him, and in no time he was giving everyone vitamin shots in their bums.”
The shoot was tough, but the intimate nature of the film and the production seemed to appeal to Peter after his experiences in Hollywood. He barely caused any trouble—apart from one morning when he turned up stoned, wearing a ridiculous wig. During breaks he took naps, which he liked to suggest were meditative yogic trances.
“I remember him as dedicated throughout,” says Antony. “When he wept at one point, there was nothing artificial about it. He was determined to bring out the humanity in Rouquet, despite his awful predicament. Even when he occasionally improvised, he remained focused on character. He was often in the background of other people’s scenes, but never tried to draw attention to himself. He was notorious for finding fault with directors, but got along very well with Clive, whom he respected greatly.”
Per Oscarsson, meanwhile, had announced at the outset that he would be remaining in character at all times. “He even refused to wash,” recalls Antony. “Nonetheless, one of the makeup girls took a shine to him, and he invited her to his room one evening. This prompted Per to knock at my door. My girlfriend Anne explained I wasn’t available, so he said quite openly: ‘Please tell him this girl has come to my room, but I masturbated two minutes ago, so I need her to leave.’ I suppose that might have been normal in Sweden.”
Antony was nervously awaiting the next tranche of money from the Swiss investor, but he was proving hard to get a hold of. “Eventually I was informed that he had pulled out. It was a nightmare, like being adrift at sea.” Fortuitously, Edgar senior was due to visit his son that weekend. “I had always hoped that Mr. Seagram might come to the rescue,” says Antony.
He arrived on Saturday morning. “There was a strict rule that only small propeller planes were allowed on Guernsey—much of the island’s economy depended on supplying the U.K. with out-of-season vegetables, so a huge amount of land was given over to greenhouses. Nonetheless, he rocked up in a Gulfstream jet, which blew out hundreds of panes of glass as it came in to land. In no time at all I was trying to placate a delegation of furious farmers.”
Over dinner Antony took a deep breath and told the billionaire that they urgently needed around $120,000 to keep the production afloat. “On Sunday morning he spent some time watching the rushes before jetting off again, saying he’d get back to me.”
That week he sent over an accountant to discuss the budget shortfall with Edgar junior. They decided to talk in the suite that the cast used for rehearsals, but after a few minutes they were informed the actors would be arriving imminently. “Instead of going elsewhere, Edgar junior decided they should duck into the walk-in wardrobe. After hiding for half an hour, the accountant had had enough, so they emerged blinking, to general incredulity. Peter remarked that it was a little like the story of the movie itself.”
Word soon came back that it was all for naught: Edgar senior was not willing to help. In desperation, Antony and Clive flew back to London and mortgaged their homes. They had just enough money to complete the shoot.
The emergency cash injection meant that the harrowing dénouement could be shot. By the end of their entombment, the doomed prisoners’ fragile social structure had entirely unraveled, and among the final scenes was the resilient Rouquet’s suicide. Threatening to kill himself had long been one of Peter’s favored attention-seeking tactics, but this sober enactment shocked him.
“He was so wrapped up in the part, I believed he might actually do it,” recalled Bert. “And Peter was nervous himself that it might actually come about. I was out of my mind with worry about it, because for many years I had lived with his suicide threats.”
“After six weeks or so, we somehow managed to get off the island,” says Antony. “It was a huge relief just to have the movie in the can. In hindsight, I think I was on the verge of a nervous breakdown.”
“An Act of Commercial Hara-Kiri”
Back in London, a cut was assembled that ran for exactly two hours. “Despite all our tribulations, I knew we’d created something special,” says Antony. “We held a cast-and-crew screening, and Peter loved it. He was very proud to have carried off his role, and I was confident he’d receive acting awards for it. I think it’s by far the greatest non-comic performance he ever gave.” As Jeremy Kemp put it, Peter’s acting in The Blockhouse is “poignant and rather beautiful.”
“It’s a film for connoisseurs of the cinema,” Peter told The Guardian soon afterward. “It’s a very heavy movie. It could easily put you on a downer. It’s not the sort of film where you’d say, ‘I say, dear, let’s have a night out, go to a film and have dinner.’” With just a hint of hyperbole, he added that “Clive Rees, who directed it, is brilliant, every bit as good as Stanley Kubrick.” He then confessed to his own hopes for the future: “I am typecast to a certain degree, but Alec Guinness successfully broke through that comedy-casting barrier…. After The Blockhouse, it may all change for me.”
First, however, The Blockhouse required a distributor. Antony had always known that selling such an oppressive film would be a challenge. In August he met with Donald Langdon, head of production at the Hemdale Film Corporation, a production company and distributor. Antony booked a screening room and “arranged for them to see selected scenes, with the emphasis on the early part…. I didn’t want them to know how depressing most of it was.”
Enticed by the prospect of a war movie starring Peter Sellers, Hemdale agreed not only to distribute The Blockhouse but also to acquire the rights to it. “We had no choice,” Antony sighs. “I regretted the deal, as it meant relinquishing control, but our debts were considerable, and they undertook to pay them off—apart from the money Clive and I had put in, that is. We’d secured that personally and had to shoulder it ourselves.”
With postproduction complete, they hosted a special preview at the Bloomsbury Cinema on Friday, December 29, 1972. To Antony and Clive’s disquiet, it became clear that the audience was looking forward to starting the weekend with a farce starring a French-accented Peter Sellers. Their mood changed abruptly when it began.
As the action unfurled, Antony and Clive were dismayed to see that Hemdale had re-edited the drama and sweetened the ending. “They butchered it, which of course we could do nothing about, and then they did nothing with it at all apart from entering it into the 1973 Berlin Film Festival. The Germans do not like World War Two films.”
The Daily Telegraph’s Patrick Gibbs wrote that it deserved a prize “for the grimmest film at the Berlin Festival,” concluding that “one must admire the pertinacity with which the director sticks to his grim brief.” The brutal conclusion reached by the Monthly Film Bulletin was that The Blockhouse amounted to “an act of commercial hara-kiri.”
Spooked, Hemdale denied it any meaningful commercial release and effectively wrote off the whole project. “We knew it was never going to be a blockbuster, but we expected it to be shown wherever films were taken seriously,” says Antony. “Because that didn’t happen, Peter’s performance was barely seen, let alone nominated for any prizes.”
In the summer of 1973, Antony collaborated with Peter again, this time on a day-long cigarette-commercial shoot in Cyprus. Peter was in the midst of starring as “Dick Scratcher” in the dire Ghost in the Noonday Sun—one of a volley of bad comedies he made in the last years of his life—and seemed a different person.
“He behaved appallingly—he was late, he was rude, he was obstreperous, he was everything one might have feared from him. Over lunch I mentioned how frustrated I was that The Blockhouse hadn’t been released, and his bad behavior immediately fell away. He graciously told me that he was honored to have taken part in it, and that its time would come. Before we could get any further, a group of tourists asked for his autograph. He went into his Inspector Clouseau persona, and I was called away as they posed for photographs.”
The Blockhouse is streaming on Tubi and Fandango at Home, and is available on DVD and Blu-ray from Amazon
Richard Morton Jack is the author of several books, including Nick Drake: The Life, and is a co-founder of Lansdowne Books. He can be found at richardmortonjack.com
