Peter Sellers had two movies in theaters in 1979. Being There arrived in December and earned him an Oscar nomination. The other was The Prisoner of Zenda, whose posters proudly put “Peter Sellers & Peter Sellers” above the title. That gimmick tells you almost everything this version is selling. Anthony Hope’s 1894 novel had already been filmed straight several times. This time around, it was handed to a comedian who rarely met a disguise he didn’t want to try on.

On his 80th birthday, Ruritania’s King Rudolf IV (Peter Sellers, Dr. Strangelove) takes a hot-air balloon ride over his kingdom and doesn’t survive the trip. The crown passes to his dim son, Rudolf V, giving Sellers role number two. Rudolf’s brother Michael (Jeremy Kemp, The Blue Max) would very much like the throne for himself, so two loyal courtiers (Lionel Jeffries and Simon Williams) go looking for a stand-in who can keep the heir out of danger until the coronation. They find Syd Frewin, a London cabbie who happens to be the new king’s spitting image. Enter Sellers number three.

Director Richard Quine (How to Murder Your Wife) puts plenty of the budget on screen, with Vienna and Salzburg standing in for Ruritania. Henry Mancini (The Pink Panther) supplies a stately score that takes the royal pageantry far more seriously than the screenplay does.

There’s also a healthy reunion of Sellers regulars and Pink Panther alumni. Elke Sommer (A Shot in the Dark) is here, along with Catherine Schell (The Return of the Pink Panther) and Graham Stark. Princess Flavia is played by Lynne Frederick (Nicholas and Alexandra), Sellers’ wife at the time, in what would be her final film. A young Stuart Wilson (Lethal Weapon 3) also turns up among the villains.

Three Peter Sellers for the price of one, and the exchange rate swings wildly. Syd, the working stiff dropped into a royal mess, gets the best of it. The two Rudolfs rely more heavily on broad accents and exaggerated mannerisms, sometimes to the point where the joke gets buried underneath them. The movie wants to be both a farce and a proper swashbuckler, but it never quite decides how much weight to give either one.

Even the production itself sounds like it had trouble finding its footing. Writers Dick Clement and Ian La Frenais later described the film as a difficult, unloved experience, and Sellers reportedly clashed with Quine during the shoot. One disagreement became especially Sellers-like: he refused to work alongside a green steam engine, so the crew repainted it blue.

Seen now, The Prisoner of Zenda feels like an odd little stop near the end of Sellers’ career, tucked between the revived Pink Panther films and the much more celebrated Being There. There are flashes of the performer who could turn a voice, a walk or a glance into a joke all by itself. There just aren’t enough of them to make this royal outing essential.