Prisoner of Zenda, The (1979) (Blu-ray Review)
Director
Richard QuineRelease Date(s)
1979 (March 31, 2026)Studio(s)
The Mirisch Corporation/Universal Pictures (Kino Lorber Studio Classics)- Film/Program Grade: C-
- Video Grade: A-
- Audio Grade: A-
- Extras Grade: B-
Review
Pink Panther sequels resurrected the flagging movie career of comedy star Peter Sellers during the 1970s, but bad and even barely released movies outweighed the commercial and critical successes. Other than his three Inspector Clouseau films—The Return of the Pink Panther (1975), ...Strikes Again (1976), and Revenge of...—along with There’s a Girl in My Soup (1970), Murder by Death (part of an ensemble cast, 1976) and Being There (1979), Sellers starred in nine other features barely remembered today. The Optimists of Nine Elms? The Blockhouse? Ghost in the Noonday Sun? Ring any bells?
During this period, Sellers was notoriously difficult, demanding, unpredictable, egotistical, given to violent fits of rage and even sabotaging his own movies. Director Peter Medak built an entire 2018 documentary around the psychological trauma inflicted by Sellers that haunted Medak for decades following the making of Ghost in the Noonday Sun, Blake Edwards declared Sellers “certifiable” and the two barely got through Revenge of the Pink Panther without killing one another. On the set of The Prisoner of Zenda, Sellers was verbally abusive to his wife and co-star, and famously cost of the production considerable time and money refusing to perform scenes aboard a train becomes of his aversion to the color green; he wouldn’t approach it until all the cars had been repainted blue.
Some of Sellers’s psychological problems can be traced to, or at least were exacerbated by his many heart attacks—he suffered eight over just three hours in 1964, had another in 1977, a final one killed him in 1980—and in his last films the physical toll is pretty obvious.
Third from the end is The Prisoner of Zenda (1979), a comical take on the much-filmed Anthony Hope classic. Late in the 19th century, King Rudolph IV of Ruritania (Sellers) dies in a ballooning accident, prompting General Sapt (Lionel Jeffries) and his nephew Fritz (Simon Williams) to rush to London, where hedonistic Rudolph V (also Sellers) gambles and goes through women like tissue paper, most recently Nathalie (Elke Sommer), the wife of jealous Count Montparnasse (Gregory Sierra). Coveting the throne for himself, the King’s half-brother Michael (Jeremy Kemp) has sent assassins to murder Rudolph prior to the coronation, and Sapt and Fritz, startled by the striking resemblance of Hansom cab driver Syd Frewin (also Sellers) to Rudolph, hire him as a decoy. When Rudolph is kidnapped and imprisoned, Rudolph’s doppelgänger is compelled to continue the deception, during which he falls in love with Princess Flavia (Lynne Frederick, the final Mrs. Sellers).
The film is not entirely terrible but has two fatal flaws. While lavishly produced on a then-generous $10 million budget, the screenplay by the writing team of Dick Clement and Ian La Frenas, best-known for their work in British television, including The Likely Lads, Porridge, and Lovejoy, isn’t content to stick with Pope’s surefire plot and characters, lighthearted to begin with, and build from that. Instead it attempts, not very well, to emulate the Pink Panther films’ broad slapstick. Actor-turned-director Richard Quine made comedies of erratic quality (Bell, Book and Candle, The Wackiest Ship in the Army, etc.) and was not a good match for the material nor, according to producer Walter Mirisch’s autobiography, was Quine willing to stand up to Sellers and his myriad outrageous demands.
The bigger problem, though, is Sellers himself. As Rudolph V, Sellers affects a speech impediment that makes him sound like Elmer Fudd, so thickly done it’s hard to understand some of his dialogue. (According to Mirisch, Sellers refused to loop his dialogue in postproduction.) And that’s the sum total of that character’s humor. One can’t help but be reminded of Michael Palin’s similarly speech-impaired Pontius Pilate in Monty Python’s Life of Brian, released that same year. Not only is Palin a lot funnier, that entire film, with its daring, cutting-edge satire, only serves to make The Prisoner of Zenda look like a very tire throwback.
Slightly more successful is Sellers’s Syd Frewin, whose Cockney accent recalls the working-class types Sellers sometimes played in his 1950s and early ’60s smaller-scale British comedies. But even this is undermined by the actor’s obvious physical decline; he looks unwell and/or indifferent, perhaps even openly contemptuous of the entire project. In many scenes Sellers looks like a film star whose meal is rudely interrupted by an autograph seeker, he listening to an effusive fan with mild contempt and waning patience.
In his early film career, Sellers was sometimes criticized for building his performances around funny voices, the root of his appeal on The Goon Show with Spike Milligan and Harry Secombe. In The Prisoner of Zenda, as both characters, Sellers’s face is like an immobile mask with funny voices emanating from it; gone is the playfulness of his best Pink Panther films. He looks tired and drawn. The Pink Panther movies were aided enormously by superb stunt doubling (supervised by Dick Crockett) and editing, but here virtually all of the doubling of the actor is obvious, and because by this point Sellers could barely walk ten steps without one, it looks even worse. And because of his depleted physical state, a lot of the slapstick is given over to Gregory Sierra, a good actor hardly known for broad physical comedy.
Indeed, the movie wastes a lot of good talent, especially Lionel Jeffries, so underutilized in his later years. Elke Sommer, funny in A Shot in the Dark, tries hard and generates a little comedy energy, while Catherine Schell, of Return of the Pink Panther, isn’t bad in a smallish role. Henry Mancini wrote the score, but its pomp-and-circumstance cues don’t play to his strengths as a composer. Probably the single biggest contributions come from Albert Whitlock, whose superb matte compositions lend the film an old-fashioned grandeur, though the trick shots putting two Peter Sellers onscreen at the same time aren’t as flawlessly accomplished as those in MGM’s 1952 version. The Austrian locations and scenes of period London are picturesque, but to no avail.
Kino’s Blu-ray of The Prisoner of Zenda, licensed from Universal, looks good in its 1.85:1 widescreen. Colors are accurate, the image is sharp, and contrast is good. The DTS-HD Master Audio (2.0 mono) is acceptable, and supported by optional English subtitles. The disc is Region “A” encoded.
Extras are limited to a 4:3 trailer in fair condition, one that desperately tries to sell the film as a Pink Panther-esque romp. There’s also a conversational-style audio commentary back with film historians Paul Anthony Nelson and Lee Zachariah that’s just okay.
Following The Prisoner of Zenda, Sellers went on to make Being There, a project helped by Sellers’s enormous enthusiasm but also because the sedentary character he played didn’t overly tax his physical limitations. After that was the posthumously-released The Fiendish Plot of Dr. Fu Manchu, not a good film but as a spoof of the “yellow peril” genre and the ’60s Christopher Lee film series (an odd thing to parody) it was marginally better than Zenda. For Peter Sellers completists only.
(Addendum: Though he’s credited nowhere on the IMDb, in his filmography on Wikipedia or elsewhere, I’m pretty certain that’s John Rhys-Davies playing, uncredited, a palace guard just after the coronation scene.)
- Stuart Galbraith IV