ONLY TWO CAN PLAY (1962) ** Peter Sellers' wife Virginia Maskell is the only particularly attractive lady in the cast but of course he, as a stylistic library assistant in Wales, can't help a nagging case of the seven-year-green-grass-itch. Plus his wife encourages him to go for broke and apply for a promotion to sub-libararian, a post which requires a strenuous interview, and a campaign which is fraught with a dalliance with the head of the Library Committee's wife. What is supposed to look mod and racy already looks superficial, nauseating, otherwise unattractive and less than ethically ambivalent far before it dawns on Sellers that he's not quite as clever as he thought. Despite the occasionally able mockery of bourgeois ethics, aesthetics and pecking order it's not a film that anyone would care about if Sellers weren't in it. But in the scenes where he's given a little room to improvise it's obvious that he might become a genius. He just needs a little less script to work with.
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