A wicked thought crossed my mind midway through re-watching the Blake Edwards/Peter Sellers farce “The Party,” one of three times the great British funnyman donned brownface to play Indian characters.
What would have happened had Sellers, a comic legend and a gifted mimic who loved accents more than anything, had taken a shine to the most musical of accents in English, the patois of Jamaica and “de islands, mon?”
The once-and-always Inspector Clouseau had donned French, German, various American, Welsh, Scots and Cockney voices on screen and radio over the years. How did he resist Jamaican? Could Hollywood have resisted letting him?
Hollywood had given up blackface — reluctantly — during the Civil Rights movement. But old timers like director David Lean and star Alec Guiness thought they could get away with passing an Englishman off as a sage and inscrutably cute Indian in “A Passage to India,” as late as 1984.
In 1960’s “The Millionairess” Sellers played a moral, principled and idealistic Indian doctor who resists the endless overtures of the world’s richest woman (Sophia Loren) as he treats London’s poorest patients. Perhaps he and his “Pink Panther” partner Edwards figured that gave him license to don the makeup and the accent again for “The Party.”
The character is an Indian actor, an innocent new to Hollywood and Hollywood ways, brought over to legitimize a California-shot “Gunga Din” styled tale of a heroic native servant who tries to save his regiment of bagpipers from slaughter at the hands of the Afghans, Sikhs or whoever.
Hrundi Bakshi is a fop, a careless klutz who hams it up, forgets to remove his wristwatch before takes and accidentally sets off a “We’ve got ONE shot at this” special effects explosion destroying an entire set before cameras are rolling. He’s fired, “finished” in this business, one and all declare.
But that doesn’t mean he can’t be accidentally invited to the studio chief’s (J. Edward McKinley) lavish, “Who’s Who” dinner party set at his ultra-modernist mansion high in the Hollywood Hills.
The character is — as the stereotype goes — unfailingly polite. He is also a humble innocent, desperate to fit in and out-of-his-depth. Hrundi is a teetotaler who avoids alcohol and has no clue what those folks rubbing their gums are doing in one bathroom he tries to duck into, or what those others are smoking in another.
Is Hrundi offensive on the page, made moreso by casting an English funnyman in brownface to play him? Possibly. The fact that this widely-acknowledged classic has never been remade, despite efforts to do that (with or without a subcontinental caricature) is telling.
But here’s what makes this peak-Edward/peak-Sellers farce funny. It’s not so much the obsequious, always clueless (confidently so) “foreigner” amongst the social swells of the cinema business. It’s not how “they” treat him — tolerantly indulgent to a fault.
It’s not even the mayhem that we expect and occasionally see erupt all around his naive presence in this alien world.
It’s the anticipation.
Hrundi soils a white shoe getting out of his Morgan three-wheeler as he parks for the party. What will he go through to surreptitiously clean it? Might the pool that flows through rooms and under the floors of the mansion play into that? Or the wait staff?
He walks in on duded-up cowboy star Wyoming Bill Kelso (Denny Miller, comically-costumed and funny) as he’s trying to impress his date at the billiards table. What might Sellers — who had run-ins with pool tables in other films — cook up here?
So much of the house is remote controlled — from gas fireplaces and peeing cherub fountains to the very floors that conceal so much of the pool. What temptations does that control panel offer our innocent?
And what will be the consquences of turning down every drink the dipsomaniacal waiter (Steve Franken) brings him?
Edwards teases and baits us into expecting this and anticipating that as the picture builds towards the merry mayhem almost everyone attending seems to shrug off as the long evening unfolds.
A starlet (Claudine Longet) must be rescued from a boorish producer (Gavin McLeod). The studio chief and home owner has to deadpan his way through every mishap he sees coming and cannot prevent.
One and all — even Hrundi — mutter about finding “good help these days.” The cowboy allows himself many an “Injun” joke around his new “little buddy” from India.
And that “little buddy?” “Pay no attention to me, sir. I am merely spectating!”
Just don’t bother him with your Yiddish, Hollywood “types.”
“You’re MESHUGAH!”
“I am not your sugar!”
No elephants were harmed in the making of this movie, but a baby one is a tad manhandled by hippie kids who crowd around her and lead her all over the soundstage mansion set.
Through it all, a jazz combo plays on, even with a tide of soap suds closing in on them like an iceberg in the path of the Titanic.
The most memorable screening of “The Party” of my experience was a film society showing I caught in grad school, where it played like the comic blockbuster it was back in its day.
Viewed again, it’s laboriously slow in getting up to speed. The opening movie-shoot-goes-wrong sequence is under-edited and the third act feels barely edited at all.
It makes a great snapshot of the ’60s — the fashion, the dancing, the changes in “tolerance” (almost everybody is nice to “the foreigner”) and Henry Mancini’s riff on swing band rock and roll are a hoot.
Watch the Black maid (Frances Taylor) among Hollywood “liberals” take over the dance floor, shocking one and all. And keep an eye peeled for the cowboy actor sight gag/product placement –what he sneaks out of the catered dinner party with — a bucket from “The Colonel.”
Sellers is funny enough in the lead role, but if you ask yourself if the character would have been amusing as merely an Englishman out of his element, you have your answer as to whether or not the performance is a racial caricature.
“The Simpsons” settled that argument some years back.
Think about Inspector Clouseau’s martial artist valet if you want further evidence that Edwards was nothing if not a filmmaker “of his time.” And remember all those “Seinfeld” episodes featuring broad Asian stereotypes for a taste of how long these attitudes and portrayals persisted.
The naive bull in the Hollywood china shop hook of “The Party” still plays and there are enough laughs here to recommend this classic — perhaps worthy of a remake, even a Bollywood one.
The original? It’s not Edwards’ best, nor Sellers’ best or best film work with Edwards. But it makes a decent comic time capsule of a simpler era, when Hollywood could lead the civil rights way, or play catchup once it realized that putting even a gifted mimic in brownface might not be as funny as it once seemed, even to the white folks who decided to do it.
Rating: TV-14, drug abuse, alcohol abuse
Cast: Peter Sellers, Claudine Longet, Gavin McLeod, Denny Miller, Kathe Green, Frances Taylor, Herbert Ellis, J. Edward McKinley and Steve Franken.
Credits: Directed by Blake Edwards, scripted by Blake Edwards, Tom Waldman and Frank Waldman. An MGM release on Tubi, other streamers.
Running time: 1:39
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