Peter Sellers he also said that in Sellers's previous films he had "been at his worst recently". In 1969 Sellers starred opposite Ringo Starr in the Joseph McGrath-directed film "The Magic Christian". Sellers portrayed Sir Guy Grand, an eccentric billionaire who plays elaborate practical jokes on people. The critic Irv Slifkin remarked that the film was a reflection of the cynicism of Peter Sellers, describing the film as a "proto-Pythonesque adaption of Terry Southern's semi-free-form short novel", and "one of the strangest films to be shown at a gala premiere for Britain's royal family". The film, a satire on human nature, was
The Magic Christian (film) film features the unsuccessful transplant of a black person's head onto a white person's body. Passengers start noticing, through the ship's closed-circuit television, that their captain (Wilfrid Hyde-White) is in a drunken stupor and gets carted off by a gorilla. In a crescendo of panic, the guests try to abandon ship. A group of them, shown the way by Youngman Grand, instead reach the machine-room. There, the Priestess of the Whip (Raquel Welch), assisted by two topless drummers, commands more than a hundred slave girls. They are naked except for loincloths. Rowing five to an oar, their wrists are manacled