The Party
When I was a kid, I once stumbled across The Party on TV and stayed up till 3 am watching it. The film seemed to me at the time the height of sophisticated tomfoolery. When I saw it scheduled at The Castro last week, I figured, what the hey? The Castro at 5pm, I'm in a cruddy mood...what could make better sense?
I only half-remembered you have to put all notions of political correctness aside to enjoy this 1968 vehicle for Peter Sellers in which he dresses up in South Asian brown face and affects a heavy Indian accent. I guess in 1968, the year MLK was assassinated, it was considered acceptable for an English comedian to appear in what's essentially a minstrel show as long as the assumed character is of exotic extraction. And outside of Gandhi, who knew any Indians back then? The fact that Sellers' make-up makes him look more like a first-week student in camouflage class than someone from the subcontinent adds to the embarrassment. But the few in attendance at The Castro weren't in the mood for indignation: hearty laughs ensued the first time he opened his mouth and out popped some mock Indian phrasing.
Sellers plays an actor named Hrundi V. Bakshi, imported from India to add authenticity to a Hollywood film about the British occupation or something. The opening joke, in which Sellers' plays a character within a characer -- a bugler (it's a parody of Gunga Din, I think) who takes an interminable amount of time to die, is itself interminable, a perfect example of the fallacy of imitative form. Next up: a gag in which he prematurely blows up a fort while the crew is still setting up. That one's funny enough to have been cooked up by Buster Keaton, and we're off and running for 99 minutes worth of hit-or-miss hijinks.
The rest of the film is set up when a producer, played by pre-Mary Tyler Moore Gavin Macleod, kicks Hrundi V. Bakshi off the set, but a secretary's clerical mistake results in his invitation to a soiree thrown by the head of the studio. There we meet the usual assortment of Hollywood straw men -- windbags, showboats, doyennes, and martinets -- for Sellers to bounce off. In the process, he completely destroys the house, including a particularly funny slapstick scene in the bathroom. The Bakshi character clearly seems an extension of Sellers' Clouseau persona – a bumbler, a klutz, though without the delusional self-regard that characterized the French Inspector. This was director Blake Edwards third go round with Sellers, made before the team’s biggest success with the popular Panther films of the 70s. Some of the scenes in which crowds of people move through various set-pieces puts one in mind of the films of Jacques Tati, though the level of action going on in each frame is much more shallow and less meticulously staged. How much the Sellers/Edwards team was influenced by Tati’s direction and Mr. Hulot character, I don't know.
The funny thing is, since few of the jokes are predicated on a clash of cultures (a ridiculous bit with an elephant is one of them), there’s really no reason for the Sellers character to be Indian. He could have easily been a bumbling American, Englishman, anything. This type of broad ethnic humor, relegated to a scene or two, can just wash over an audience in a stream of riffing, but over the course of an entire film, it's hard to sustain. I suppose you could say the film's heart is in the right place, with Sellers winning the love interest (played by Claudine Longet, best known for fatally shooting her boyfriend, skiier Spider Sabich, in real life) and the Hollywood producer suffering the brunt of the humiliation. If you're an insatiable Sellers fan, browse this one up on on Netflix or better yet wait for it to run on TV way late at night when insomnia-induced lightheadedness makes you prone to giggle. Or else just watch it when you're stoned.
Linkateria:
Comments