UFO Info Week-End

He was honouring our agreement he even seemed to be enjoying himself

He was honouring our agreement, he even seemed to be enjoying himself. The only Dan Leno I knew was the 19th-century English music hall comic, and so far, I told him, his name hadn’t come up It will, said Feldman mordantly. He refused toelaborate, but since Leno had been dead since 1904, it did not seem to be a matter of any great urgency and I let the matter drop.Sellers and I continued to work together through the spring and summer of 1966 on what he now liked to call The Life. The gamble had paid off handsomely at the box-office for Feldman, who promptly re-engaged Sellers to star in his spectacularly misconceived James Bond spoof, Casino Royale. My agent negotiated an impressive American advance, and I embarked on what Sellers promised would be a “great adventure into the unknown.”
Well, it turned out he was right about that.Shortly after I signed the contract, I got a call from the film producer Charles Feldman, who had resurrected Sellers’ career after his heart attack by casting him as a screwball Viennese psychiatrist in What’s New, Pussycat, having personally underwritten the liability because no insurance company would accept the risk. He promised his complete cooperation: “Whatever you want, Pete, just ask Anything Anything.

And the lesson is to realise how often those things go together in film-makers.d.thomson independent.co.uk. In 1966, two years after he suffered a massive heart attack in Hollywood – he had been clinically dead for two-and-a-half minutes before a vision of his mother beckoned him back from the grave – Peter Sellers asked me to write his official biography. It is a film made just like a “story film” in which Hitler is not simply a real man but a character from living legend. And the truth is that Leni Riefenstahl was both good enough to make that kind of film – and make it beautiful – and misguided enough not to notice how truth had been tricked.It takes a very great skill and an enormous degree of moral character to film anything without glorifying it, or falling in love with it, and Leni Riefenstahl – 100 on Thursday, a survivor – lacked that moral character She had a great eye, and an empty head. It is rather more the calculated celebration of a staged event. But then ask yourself this: in a supposed documentary film, how was that shot of the hand obtained? Did Leni Riefenstahl see it in nature as the motorcade passed by? In which case she would have been in no position to get the very tricky shot for her film.

So, did she say, stop the motorcade, let’s do it again? Or was the shot imagined in advance? Was the camera set-up in readiness for it? Did she even say, “F?r, dear F?r, if you just cupped your hand a little.” And the F?r says, “Fr?ein, the F?r’s hand must be vigorous!” “Oh, F?r, do it for me.” Yes, of course I’m making this up, but it’s not implausible and it’s actually a welcome touch of humanity to see this little moustache acting the superman and being coaxed into taking “direction”.The larger point I’m making – and I think it can hinge on a detail – is that Triumph of the Will is only in part a documentary or the record of an event. You may sigh; you may begin to tap your foot to the great drive of marching music.You have your choice. At the same time, you can imagine the effect the film had when first seen in Germany – at a time when Hitler was not quite known to history as a monster. For it is beautiful, and beauty has its way of slipping through every defence. You may wish to resist fascism and its force with every nerve in your body and every atom in your mind, but this is a tricky moment.

There is a superb close-up of his hand in “his” salute, covered by a tracking camera as his car moves forward. The hand is cupped – as if, after hours and years of saluting, even Hitler was weary. The crowd surging forward, so full of passion.It’s in picking those details that anyone makes a film, and reveals their attitude.But then Hitler enters an open car to be driven through the packed streets of the city. The filming gives every sense of some divine figure coming down from the skies How does she do that? The burnished sky The heroic aircraft The rising power of the musical accompaniment The camera angles to cover Hitler. That made me think of maybe the finest thing Leni Riefenstahl ever did. At the start of her film, Triumph of the Will, Hitler is in a plane flying to Nuremberg to attend the Nazi party rallies.