Cinema: The Party

• Share

Hrundi V. Bakshi is an Indian actor who was imported from New Delhi to play a heroic bugler in a new Bengal Lancer-Gunga Din-style movie being shot in California. This is his big chance, but he blows it—first with his bugle, when he wrecks a scene by continuing to blat out battle calls instead of dying of his wounds, then by blowing up the fort that is about to be stormed in the film's big fight scene. The enraged director fires him, and arranges to have the name Hrundi V. Bakshi inscribed on Hollywood's blackest blacklist. It is inscribed instead on the list of guests to be invited to a party at the producer's house. And that is how Peter Sellers happens to show up in brownface with a mild Oriental smile and a wild Oriental eye to turn a black-tie dinner into a hectic crescendo of slapstick, sight gag, pratfall and pandemonium.

There is also occasional humor: Sellers trying to retrieve his shoe from his host's elaborate system of interior fountains and waterways; Sellers drifting from group to group, making inscrutable attempts at conversation; Sellers listening to a songstress while exhibiting a polite rictus of squirming agony because all the bathrooms are occupied. But most of the evening is just about as trite and tedious as a real-life party would have been with such a stereotyped guest list—the dumb cowboy star, the stuffy clubwoman, the fading movie queen, the international-society siren, the current sex symbol.

This 99-minute bash was filmed with a great effort at spontaneity; Sellers and Producer-Director Blake Edwards worked with a minimal script and checked each scene with instant playback on video tape. The result of the ad-lib approach, however, is not a swinging riot of originals but a parade of old reliables. A drunken waiter weaves around with his tray of drinks, the toy arrow with a suction cup on its end finds its way to someone's' forehead as inevitably as the foaming detergent finds its way into the swimming pool.

This party, in short, is strictly for those who don't get around much.