Comic plays a gay shopkeeper in Roman Polanski's A Day At The Beach

An obscure Peter Sellers performance in a film written by Roman Polanski and lost for decades has turned up on Netflix.

The star plays a gay shopkeeper in the 1970 movie A Day At The Beach, with fellow comedian Graham Stark as his even more effeminate partner.

The plot revolves around  Bernie – played by Mark Burns – a self-destructive alcoholic who visits a rundown and rain-lashed Danish seaside resort.  He spends the day seeking out drink at the expense of looking out for his young charge Winnie – either his daughter or his niece –  who accompanies him.

A Day At The Beach was never released in theatres at the time of its completion in 1970 and spent two decades in a vault at the London offices of studio Paramount in London.

It was intended as Polanski's directorial follow-up to Rosemary's Baby, but he withdrew after the murder of his wife, Sharon Tate, and their unborn baby at the hands of the Manson Family in 1969. Newcomer Simon Hesera instead directed the film, before returning to obscurity.

Some reports suggest the film was  suppressed by the studio out of respect for Polanski, then lost in the archive due to a paperwork error.

Sellers and Stark’s characters are credited as ‘The Partners’, although Sellers’ name does not appear in the credits. He instead uses the unsubtle pseudonym ‘A. Queen’.

In their scene, Bernie plays along with the couple’s flirtations so he can get free beer – only to offer a withering putdown of Stark’s character once he’s secured his booze.

Sellers made tA Day At The Beach in a career lull between the success of 1968’s The Party with Sophia Loren and 1974’s The Return Of The Pink Panther, the first outing for Inspector Clouseau – although he did have one success in that time, There's a Girl In My Soup, which was also released in 1970.

After being rediscovered, the bleak film was restored in 1993 by its director and  subsequently released on DVD, attracting mixed reviews. One called it ‘a bitter, aggressive film that mirrors the fecklessness of the main character’; another said it was ‘a pathetic, self-pitying jerk’ while a third called it ‘a downbeat, admirably unromantic look at a sour, failed alcoholic intellectual, made harrowing by his mistreatment of his young daughter’. 

The film was an adaptation of Heere Heeresma's 1962 novel Een Dagje Naar Het Strand, and was remade under its original title in 1984 by murdered Dutch filmmaker Theo van Gogh.

Watch A Day At The Beach on Netflix.

Published: 11 Jan 2023