THE PARTY
(1968)
The
successful director/actor partnership between Blake Edwards and Peter Sellers
had already produced gold with the character of Inspector Clouseau, but in THE
PARTY I believe they brought out the very best in each other. It’s a hugely
funny master-class in on-screen comic timing and how to exploit a premise for
maximum laughter.
Sellers
plays Hrundi Bakshi, an unassuming Indian actor who’s also an unwitting walking
disaster-area. Like Clouseau he is accident-prone, but unlike the arrogant French
detective Hrundi is blessed with the sweetest of natures, endlessly patient and
polite but in blissful ignorance of the havoc he wreaks.
In
the opening scene, this is established marvellously on a film set. Hrundi is
the brave bugler on a hill-side in a period movie of GUNGA DIN. Whilst the big
shoot-out goes on below him, he heroically blows out a warning. So strong is
his actorly need to give service that he refuses to die no matter how many
bullets he’s peppered by. Each time we think he’s dead he valiantly struggles
back up, almost indestructibly sounding increasingly weak notes until finally
the director is forced to call ‘Cut!’ He ruins a take of a staged over-powering
of a guard by wearing a modern-day wristwatch. However, the last straw is when
he accidentally detonates the vastly expensive money-shot fort set prematurely.
His firing results in the studio head vowing he will never work in the movie
industry again. Innocently, he asks “Does that include TV?”
Due
to a error in the office, Hrundi is invited to the studio boss’s lavish
Hollywood party –and this is the location for almost the entire body of the
film, one long marvellous buffet of sight gags. Edwards is masterful at staging
the elements and then allowing them to play out, matching the timing not just
of Sellers but of the supporting comedy players with his camera positioning and
discipline of comedy rhythms.
The
party has all the typical Tinseltown cliches such as the sleaze-bag wigged
agent trying to promote/exploit the reluctant actress (Claudine Longet). As the
gruff studio head toting an ever-present cigar, J. Edward McKinley gives a
pleasingly deadpan performance who Edwards regularly cuts to as he lugubriously
surveys this carousel of Hollywood hangers-on. At one point, he pulls off a
one-liner worthy of George Burns when a minion tells him his wife has fallen
into the pool. He coolly looks at his cigar: “Get her jewellery”.
Peter
Sellers shows not just impeccable physical comedy timing but great subtletly.
Watch his discreet sniffing and then dumping of the strawberry soup entrée or
his beautifully-sustained internal excruciation at waiting outside the bathroom
while Longet softly trills the treacly ‘Nothing To Lose’. His Indian accent is
precise. sounding exactly like Deepa Chopra and his manner perfectly conveys
the great pains to avoid causing any social embarrassment or inconvenience. The
more endearingly he tries to remain unobtrusive, the wider his mahyem spreads. This
is a comic peformance of considered and executed genius. Sequences of Sellers
are laugh-out-loud funny. Savour his experimentation with the tannoy system in
the house, reciting ‘Birdy num nums’ and unknowingly causing the cowboy actor
to rip the pool table baize as he coils up and then deliciously hits the
plosive of ‘Howdee PART-a-ner’.
Edwards
also shares the comic wealth across the cast. There is the professional war
between the waiter, Steven Franken, who gradually descends into alcoholic
catastrophe as he drinks more booze than he serves, and the Maitre’ D who bids
to cover for him until he resorts to strangulation (a terrific running
sight-gag captured in the swinging kitchen doorway). Edwards’ direction is sublime. He has the
talent to frame a gag superbly and the confidence to know when to cut or hold a
shot for greatest effect, like the growing amusement of watching Bakshi’s
toilet fully roll unfurl right to the end in one shot.
The
script supports the precision, not padding out or diluting the laughs by other
functional linking scenes. It even allows Hrundi a little depth of steel under
the endlessly affable exterior when he bravely defends Longet against the
agent’s bullying demeaning of her: “‘In India we don’t think who we are. We know who we are”. This is then undercut
nicely as the agent retorts:
“You’re
a meshuggah”.
“I’m
not your sugar”.
THE
PARTY is almost a sustained modern throwback to silent comedy, yet in the
climax there is the literal gate-crashing by 1960’s youth, courtesy of the
boss’s daughter and her friends with an elephant modishly daubed with
psychedelic colours and slogans ‘Chicken Little was right’. Hrundi’s offense at
their stunt causes the party then to become a foam washing party to clean the
pachyderm, and all ends well with him possibly ‘getting the girl’.
Attend
THE PARTY and revel in the sheer infectious joy of Hollywood comedy masters at
the top of their game…
No comments:
Post a Comment