| | Remembered dimly as Peter Sellers's only venture into "serious" acting, Never Let Go has a lot of other things to recommend it, mostly because it manages to include a lot of the lurid elements that gained it an X rating in 1960. It has a near-demented melodrama plot, as two desperate obsessives collide in a bizarre feud. Richard Todd, doing meek and put-upon, is a sales rep for smug Peter Jones's cosmetics firm whose life is turned upside down when his car is stolen by Adam Faith. Looking like an inhabitant of Royston Vasey in The League of Gentlemen, Sellers plays a grinning small-time crook who runs a legitimate garage that serves as a front for the car thieves and is sugar daddy to teenage tartlet Carol White. Typical of Sellers's demonic rottenness is a scene in which he breaks down-and-out Melvyn Johns's heart by stamping on his beloved terrapin. "Peanut" Todd's crusade to get back his auto (catchphrase "what about my car?") brings trouble too: he gets repeatedly beaten up, abandoned by his wife (Elizabeth Sellars), and dragged to the edge of madness for a final punch-up in a garage. With a delightfully sleazy, jazzy John Barry score, lots of the color of criminal London circa 1960, and a parade of welcome character actors (John le Mesurier, David Lodge, Noel Willman, Nigel Stock), Never Let Go has its soapy spells, but it's a fascinating relic. --Kim Newman More...
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