This is at once one of Peter Sellers' least-known and more interesting vehicles; the film is virtually a two-hander with Sinead Cusack (daughter of actor Cyril and later Mrs. Jeremy Irons) as the young girl blackmailed by a middle-aged colleague (Sellers) into becoming his lover, because he knows of her boyfriend's involvement in a robbery.
While the film is considered a comedy, it doesn't sound like it from that synopsis; it's really a character-driven piece on a serious theme mid-life crisis which has been treated several times over the years, though rarely in such perceptively intimate detail (for which it was deemed tasteless at the time). The humorous element (if one can call it that) springs from the fact that Sellers' character who had been fantasizing about Cusack for months doesn't have the courage to do anything with her once they're together! Incidentally, Hoffman's innately cruel nature was so similar to the real Peter Sellers that one might be inclined to think that his dialogue was improvised but this wasn't the case!
With this in mind, the film can be seen as talky (though Ernest Gebler's script, adapted from his own novel, does contain a smattering of good lines), low-key and claustrophobic (the narrative strays only occasionally from Sellers' flat, and the two almost never interact with other people) not to mention repetitive and overstretched at 113 minutes! One particular sequence included an ambitious shot lasting for some 18 minutes, which certainly belied the rumors that Sellers had suffered brain damage during that infamous incident from the early 1960s in which he suffered no less than seven heart attacks in one day. The film's happy-ending-of-sorts, then, is highly improbable but I guess it works well enough in this context (given that Cusack's boyfriend is depicted as a one-dimensional character and, therefore, no match for the intellectual Sellers).
Gerry Turpin's cinematography of the bleak London settings is one of the film's main assets, while the tone of romantic melancholy inherent in Ron Grainer's score and his Don Black-penned theme song, "If There Ever Is A Next Time" (sung by Matt Monro) infuses the whole film and even serves as exposition for the main narrative during its deliberately vague early stages. By the way, director Rakoff had already handled the same material as a TV production starring Donald Pleasance; at his own admission, the film version was too slow because the pace seemed to be dictated by the lead actor and professed to having misgivings also about the choice of music. As for Sellers himself, he was so disappointed with the final result that the star offered to buy back the negative from the producer and shoot it again from scratch (the film, in fact, was such a resounding flop that it wasn't shown in New York until 1982)!
