Ghost in the Noonday Sun

Ghost in the Noonday Sun (1973)

A pirate crewman kills his captain after learning where he has hidden his buried treasure. However, as he begins to lose his memory, he relies more and more on the ghost of the man he just murdered to help him find the loot.

Date of release
1973-01-01
TMDB
4.9 / 10 (8)
Runtime
1h 33m
Genres
Adventure, Comedy
Director
Peter Medak

Casting

Interesting facts

Ghost in the Noonday Sun is a 1974 British comedy film directed by Peter Medak starring Peter Sellers, Anthony Franciosa and Spike Milligan. The film suffered a difficult production due to Sellers's erratic behavior and was not theatrically released. Medak described the film as "the biggest disaster of my life" in 2016.

Production

The novel Ghost in the Noonday Sun was published in 1965. The New York Times called it a "rollicking tale". The Los Angeles Times called it "a rousing tale."

Sellers persuaded Medak, a friend of his, to make the film. "He was an incredible guy," said Medak of Sellers. "His invention would go into supersonic flight. You couldn't stop him. He had classical comedy genius." Wolf Mankowitz wrote the first draft but it was later estimated a dozen writers worked on the script. According to Sellers "It started life as a straight pirate yarn. But we got to work on it and turned it into a crazy comedy.

The film was shot in and off the coast of Kyrenia, Cyprus, and at Bray International Studios near Maidenhead, England. "Everything started going wrong days before shooting began," said Medak. "The Greek captain delivering the pirate ship to Kyrenia's magnificent seventh century harbour was so drunk that he crashed the ship into the quay instead of the narrow strip of water."

Peter Sellers arrived on location displaying strange behaviour, attributed to the end of his relationship with Liza Minnelli. Shortly after filming began, Sellers began to lose confidence in the project and when Spike Milligan arrived to shoot his scenes, Sellers asked him to assess the footage that had been shot thus far. Milligan looked at the rushes and said "this is on a disaster course".

Sellers subsequently became deliberately uncooperative and would often pretend to be sick. On one occasion he was rushed to hospital with a suspected heart attack, only for Medak to spot newspaper photographs of Sellers dining with Princess Margaret in London two days later.

Read on Wikipedia · Text from Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0. Data from Wikidata.

Recommended