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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, rather than one of the many he breezed through on a talent for funny voices and unleashed chaos. The set-up is that secretary Miss Smith (Sinead 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 fiance (Jeremy "Boba Fett" Bulloch) that she's with her gran in Scarborough. At first, the tone is creepy as Cusack dreads the terrors of sharing a bed with Sellers and he mutters darkly about an absent wife in terms that recall Crippen and the brides-in-the-bath murderer, but it becomes more poignant as both characters learn to see each other as people.
The worst Sellers does in bed is snore loudly, while the unattainably glamorous young woman suffers from minor ailments like a bruised heel and night-time constipation, and the at-first simple relationship between them deepens as the girl comes to understand the half-life Hoffman has been leading. The script gives Sellers a lot of funny business, acid 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 the expected dolly bird, keeps up with her co-star, and almost makes the strangely upbeat last reel believable.
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