The Nudest Peter Sellers and the Nudest Elke Sommer

The Nudest Peter Sellers

For those who Found Peter Sellers' characterization of the stumbling blockhead French police inspector Jacques Clouseau in The Pink Panther a triumph of gumshoe ineptitude, the United Artists sequel, A Shot in the Dark, should be the topping on the frappé, as it continues Peter's maladroit masterminding. The teaming of Sellers with Germany's current sexpot titlist Elke Sommer makes the Blake Edwards--directed film a twofold treat Well-packed parlormaid Elke has been accused of murdering her swain from Spain. Sellers, assigned to the case through a departmental snafu, decides that no one that good-looking could have committed homme-icide, figures Elke is covering up for someone. Decked out as a balloon vendor, he flat-foots after Elke only to be picked up for peddling without a license. Resuming la chasse, he finds Elke standing over the very dead body of her employer George Sanders' gardener with nothing more incriminating than bloody pruning shears in her hand. Still with implicit faith in Elke. Peter has her sprung from jail, shadows her in a Toulouse-Lautrec disguise. Another misunderstanding with the gendarmerie deposits him in the hoosegow. Sellers' next guise in his pursuit of Elke is that of a hunter, and when he bags a crow in self-defense, the local game warden claps him in irons for doing it without a license. By the time Sellers is released, Elke has taken refuge in a country retreat called Camp Sunshine. To Sellers' discomfiture, it turns out to be a nudist camp. Here, Peter reluctantly settles for the haphazard cover-up of a guitar and plastic pool raft as he commences a bare hunt for Elke among the sun bathers. What he does stumble upon is another corpse (though he doesn't realize it at the time). When he eventually finds Elke, after a series of dishabilled disasters, the two of them just manage to avoid the law called in for the latest murder. There's no time for clothes as they drive au naturel through the streets of Paris, returning to George Sanders' mansion just in time to discover yet another corpse. This is the last straw for Sellers' superior, who takes him off the case vitement and banishes him to Le Havre. Sellers' exile is short lived, however; his superior has second thoughts and reassigns him to the case. Sellers' first move is to have Elke, now in prison, released to join him for dinner. A night-club tour results in four more murders as an assassin out to get Sellers keeps bungling the job. Our defective detective, blithely unaware of the carnage, takes Elke back to his apartment for a tryst, but it's bonjour tryst as a time bomb explodes under his bed, shattering the mood. Undaunted, Sellers assures his chief, by now a manacle depressive, that he's about to crack the case, gathers together a half-dozen suspects in the Sanders mansion. The denouement that follows is too wildly improbable to let le chat out of the bag. Suffice to say that Peter as a flick flic is superbly incompetent and Elke as a domestique formidable is incomparably sexational.

The Nudest Elke Sommer

Hollywood has been frenetically searching around the world for a sexpot who will provide its cash registers with the same healthy ring in the Sixties that Brigitte Bardot and the late Marilyn Monroe imparted to them in the Fifties. It now believes that relief is finally in sight in the form of a handsomely configured Fräulein, Elke Sommer. Born in Germany not much more than a score of years ago, Elke has blossomed into an international attraction. The fast-rising and fast-driving (she's used to touring Europe's speed-limitless highways at well over the century mark) Elke got her first break while on vacation in Italy. She was spotted by someone who called himself a movie producer and who, contrary to what mothers warn their little girls about, turned out to be a movie producer. A series of European flickers followed (including one directed by Vittorio De Sica) in which Elke was given an ample opportunity to display almost all of her amply endowed (36-23-37) frame. Hollywood producer Pandro Berman caught her statuesque symmetry in a German film, The Girl, and realized that she was the girl to play Paul Newman's Swedish skoalmate in The Prize. That did it. Her Prize performance brought her a revealingly ripe part in Carl Foreman's The Victors, where she more than held her own among the fast female company of Melina Mercouri and Romy Schneider. Now very much a part of the Hollywood scene, Elke is comfortably wrapped in a three-picture MGM contract that will bring her approximately a quarter of a million dollars. Along the road to stardom she has managed to raise a number of roofs over her head--a $300,000 mansion in her home town of Erlangen, Germany, a villa in Spain, an apartment in Switzerland, and a house she rents in Beverly Hills for a modest $900 a month. One of Tinseltown's most eligible bachelor girls, Elke belies the cliché image of the bubble-brained beauty; she knows Latin, Greek, French, English. Spanish and Italian, has more than a passing acquaintance with Homer and Plato, Goethe and Schiller. A Shot in the Dark and the upcoming The Unknown Battle, in which she co-stars with Tony Perkins and Stephen Boyd, should prove to be two important rungs up the filmic ladder. Miss Sommer, with a firm resolve that has characterized her movie career, is striving to bring her acting ability up to her screen sensuality. Few who know her artistic capabilities (she's a passable painter and a composer who has recorded her own songs), and strong-willed determination, have any doubts that she will make it. And when Elke, who has no objection to shedding her clothes for the cameras, emerges as the compleat movie star, the super sex symbol of the Sixties may well have arrived.