The Party
1968 · 99 min
Directed by Blake Edwards. Written by Blake Edwards. Starring Peter Sellers, Claudine Longet, Natalia Borisova, Jean Carson.
Hrundi V. Bakshi, an accident-prone actor from India, is accidentally put on the guest list for an upcoming party at the home of a Hollywood film producer. Unfortunately, from the moment he arrives, one thing after another goes wrong with compounding effect.
Critics 83% · audiences 88% · streaming on Prime Video, YouTube (free)
What they said about The Party
- 1968
The Party may very well be one of the most radically experimental films in Hollywood history; in fact it may be the single most radical film since D.W. Griffith's style came to dominate the American cinema.
— Peter Lehman - 1968
Despite the offensiveness of Sellers's brownface routine, The Party is one of his very best films...Taking a page from Tati, this is neorealist comedy, purposefully lacking a director's guiding eye: look here, look there.
— Saul Austerlitz
How it got made
The Party was the only non-Pink Panther collaboration between Peter Sellers and Blake Edwards. Producer Walter Mirisch knew that Sellers and Edwards were considered liabilities; in his autobiography I Thought We Were Making Movies, Not History, Mirisch wrote "Blake had achieved a reputation as a very expensive director, particularly after The Great Race." Sellers had played an Indian man (Dr. Ahmed el Kabir) in his hit film The Millionairess (1960), and another Indian physician in The Road to Hong Kong (1962). He is mostly remembered as a similar klutz as Inspector Jacques Clouseau in The Pink Panther series.
The film's interiors were shot on set. The original script was only 63 pages in length. Edwards later said it was the shortest script he ever shot from, and that the majority of the content in the film was improvised on set.
The film started shooting in May 1967 under the title RSVP, and lasted for 12 weeks over the summer of 1967. Edwards and Sellers had initially attempted to film part of it as a modern silent picture with subtitles, but Sellers soon found a need to speak and develop the character of Hrundi V. Bakshi, a name he came up with on the spot. Several cast and crew members described the production as the most enjoyable of their career, with Denny Miller describing it as "heaven", stating that they knew it was something special when cast and crew not even involved with the shooting of certain scenes would stick around just to watch the filming. Claudine Longet very visibly found it difficult to keep a straight face in many scenes. Steve Franken, who played Levinson the drunken butler, thoroughly enjoyed being allowed to improvise, but noted the dangers of the foam in the water and struggled to breathe. The pool scene where his love interest Janice Kane (Corinne Cole) pours a bottle on his face was improvised due to him murmuring to Cole to clear the foam from his face as he couldn't breathe.