Cinema: Blue Matador

The Bobo. Peter Sellers, his fans may be happy to learn, is alive and living in Barcelona. There he sallies forth as a singing bullfighter impaled on the horns of a dilemma. A fop as a matador, a flop as a troubadour, he has decided to leave the corrida and seek a stage career. Down to his last peseta, he desperately accepts a dare by the local impresario (Adolfo Celi), who agrees to book him into his theater on one condition: Sellers must seduce Britt Eklund (Mrs. Peter Sellers offstage), an ice-cold big-league golddigger whose favorite phrase is “Mine.”

Around town, Sellers earns the sudden sobriquet of “Bobo”—Spanish for fool. After all, has not Eklund newly milked one victim for a luxurious pad and bilked another out of a Maserati?

Posing as the lackey of a nonexistent count, Sellers persuades the senorita to wait with him evening after evening for the aristocrat to arrive. Out of bore dom, Eklund endures him, then tolerates him, and at last—her cool melted by champagne—falls in love. The morning after Sellers wins his wager, he confesses all in an orgy of guilt. Raging, the seducee marches him at shotgun point to a bathtub full of cerulean stain. Bobo is last seen in a bullfight poster proclaiming his indisputably unique credentials as “The Singing Blue Matador.”

Sellers occasionally evokes vague memories of Chaplin and a promising young screen comedian named Peter Sellers who was awfully funny in some low-budget British farces. Early on in his career, he proved he could play a U.N.’s worth of accents and roles. Lately, however, his roles have been playing him, a familiar figure afflicted by gigantosis of the production and paralysis of the talent. Unlike his black-and-white delights of the ’50s, this Technicolor collage substitutes fake eccentricity for true humor. One man wears a toupee that looks like melted LPs, another drinks nothing but brandy and egg whites—it looks as if someone had expectorated in it, says Sellers, in a fair sample of the film’s scripted wit. And nearly everybody speaks in a pseudo-Castilian lisp that thoundth ath if the entire catht hath a thpeech defect.