Hoffman [DVD]

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Product Description ------------------- Peter Sellers gives a rare - and remarkable - dramatic performance as Benjamin Hoffman, a lonely middle-aged businessman who blackmails a beautiful young secretary (Sinead Cusack) into spending a week with him. But what begins as a seemingly sinister ordeal will slowly reveal itself to be an uncommon bond of tender yearnings, dark secrets and some very surprising realizations about the possibilities of love. Critics and audiences alike were touched by Peter Sellers' powerful and moving performance in this rarely seen gem of a film directed by Alvin Rakoff (A VOYAGE ROUND MY HER) and featuring a haunting theme song by legendary British vocalist Matt Monro. .com ---- Hoffman is an odd cross between There's a Girl in My Soup and The Collector and is clearly one of the few film projects Peter Sellers took seriously enough to work hard on. Secretary Miss Smith (Sinéad Cusack) is blackmailed by meek, middle-aged Mr. Hoffman (Sellers) into spending a week of domesticity with him in his flat, while she tells her fiancé (Jeremy "Boba Fett" Bulloch) that she's with her grandmother in borough. At first, the tone is creepy as Cusack dreads the terrors of sharing a bed with Sellers, but it becomes more poignant as both characters learn to see each other as people. The script gives Sellers a lot of funny business, lines, and whimsical turns, but he plays Hoffman as a repressed soul half-ashamed of his attempts to be funny, telling genuinely good jokes as if he expects no one will laugh. Cusack, more interesting than expected, keeps up with her costar and almost makes the strangely upbeat last reel believable. --Kim Newman