Alan Spencer‘s recently-posted Trailers From Hell tribute to Peter Sellers and his performance in Hal Ashby‘s Being There (’79) is well deserved. But there’s a reason I haven’t re-watched Being There over the last 30-plus years, and that’s because it’s basically one very dry joke played over and over and over. But I’ve re-watched Sellers’ Claire Quilty performance in Stanley Kubrick‘s Lolita (’62) a good ten times, at least. Quilty is a throughly perverse and quite venal character, but it’s all but impossible not to laugh with him in every scene. I love the fact that Sellers used Kubrick’s Bronx-accented voice to play Qulity, and the fact that much of his performance is done off the cuff.
