Only Two Can Play **** (1962, Peter Sellers, Mai Zetterling, Virginia Maskell) – Classic Movie Review 1,844

The 1962 British comedy classic Only Two Can Play stars Peter Sellers on his finest comic form as the lecherous librarian John Lewis, in a funny and pleasingly playful film of Kingsley Amis’s novel That Uncertain Feeling.

Director Sidney Gilliat’s 1962 British comedy classic Only Two Can Play stars Peter Sellers, who is on his finest comic form as the bored, henpecked, lecherous librarian John Lewis, in a very funny and pleasingly playful film version of Kingsley Amis’s 1955 novel That Uncertain Feeling.

Amis’s first-class novel about farcical extra-curricular fling goings-on in a Welsh Valleys town is confidently adapted by Bryan Forbes, whose expert screenplay packs in lots of crudely funny jokes along with some sharp, satiric barbs. They get the tone right and it helps enormously that the comedy is subtle rather than broad, doing Amis’s novel proud. It is a credit to everyone here that it is a better film of a less good book than Lucky Jim (1957).

The story follows the fall-out after the unhappily married Lewis makes the mistake of going to bed with the amorous, glamorous Liz (Mai Zetterling), the wife of a local councillor. Zetterling makes splendid seductive siren, an excellent foil for Sellers.

Only Two Can Play is all very stylishly handled by director Gilliat and incisively performed by the ideal ebullient cast, also notably including Virginia Maskell as Lewis’s long-suffering wife Jean, Kenneth Griffith as Lewis’s fellow librarian Ieuan Jenkins and Richard Attenborough as Gareth L Probert, a lying literary bore.

The film is set in the fictional South Wales town of Aberdarcy but mostly filmed in and around Swansea, Amis’s basis for Aberdarcy.

Lucky Jim was Amis’s first novel, first published in 1954 by Victor Gollancz. That Uncertain Feeling was first published in 1955. It was also adapted by the BBC in 1986 as a TV series with the original title starring Denis Lawson and Sheila Gish. The film’s title was changed to the better Only Two Can Play apparently to avoid confusion with titles such as That Uncertain Feeling (1941) with Merle Oberon and That Certain Feeling (1956) starring Bob Hope, Eva Marie Saint and George Sanders.

It was a big UK hit, just behind The Guns of Navarone, Dr No and The Young Ones.

The cast are Peter Sellers as John Lewis, Mai Zetterling as Liz, Virginia Maskell as Jean Lewis, Kenneth Griffith as Ieuan Jenkins, Raymond Huntley as Vernon, David Davies as Benyon, Maudie Edwards as Mrs Davies, Meredith Edwards as Clergyman, John Le Mesurier as Salter, Frederick Piper as Mr Davies, Graham Stark as Mr. Hyman, Eynon Evans as Town Hall Clerk, John Arnatt as Bill, Sheila Manahan as Mrs Jenkins, Richard Attenborough as Gareth L Probert, Howell Evans as Library Policeman, Tenniel Evans as Kennedy, Laurence Luxton as American GI and Driver, and Desmond Llewelyn as a Vicar.

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© Derek Winnert 2014 Classic Movie Review 1,844

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