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| Peter
Sellers, Shirley MacLaine, Melvyn Douglas, Jack Warden, Richard
Dysart |
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Anamorphic
widescreen |
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Dolby Digital
5.1 |
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DTS |
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Trailer(s) |
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Featurette(s) |
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Documentary |
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Audio commentary
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Deleted scenes
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Concept art
/ storyboards |
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Multi-angle
feature |
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Chance the Gardener (Peter Sellers):
I like to watch.
A simple-minded gardener is mistaken
for a captain of industry whose comments are continuously mistaken
for profundities.
 Peter
Sellers may be commonly regarded as one of the finest screen comedians
in history, which makes the fairly mediocre level of films he typically
starred in something of a surprise. Apart from his three roles in
Kubrick's brilliant Dr. Strangelove, Sellers simply doesn't
have that many films to his credit that are as funny as he was.
Even the role of Inspector Clouseau, for which he is most widely
known, derives its reputation from an increasingly uninspired and
drawn-out series of broad and mostly unfunny Pink Panther
movies.
Being There is easily one of the better films from Sellers'
long career, and would have made an appropriate epitaph. It may
have been followed by the awful The Fiendish Plot of Fu Manchu
and the posthumous embarassment of yet another Pink Panther turn,
culled from unused Clouseau footage that wasn't even good enough
to include in any of the previous films, but Being There
was clearly the one Sellers wanted to be remembered by. He was desperate
to get the part from the very moment the book was first published
and made the po-faced nitwit completely his own.
The movie may be one of the best-remembered moments from the master
comedian's only half-successful movie career, but it isn't quite
as good as it could have been, or as its reputation suggests. For
one thing, the movie's one-joke premise can't sustain its protracted
running time: some judicious editing could have made it twice as
funny. The star manages to sell the continuous misunderstandings
by staying true to the essence of his character and underplaying
every single scene, but having a cypher as the movie's main character
also brings along structural problems. Chance can't develop by very
definition of his character, which makes 130 minutes a long haul
for the average viewer. |
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Identical releases are available for
Region 1 and Region 2.
The anamorphic widescreen image
is framed at an aspect ratio of approx. 1.85:1. The handsomely lit
cinematography comes to life in a slightly pale but otherwise very
impressive new transfer. The source print is in outstanding shape
and the presentation boasts excellent sharpness and strong detail
levels.
The monaural sound mix is rendered in Dolby Digital 1.0. The soundtrack
is somewhat lacking in fidelity, most notably in the music used
in the soundtrack, but is unhindered by major distortion.
The theatrical trailer is
the only extra on board this release.Simple static menu screens grant
access to the disc's limited features.
Dan
Hassler-Forest
Reviewed:
January 27, 2002
Click
here for IMDB info on Being
There .
Click here
to return to the front page.
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