By Lee Pfeiffer
There are those who consider the Peter Sellers/Blake Edwards 1968 collaboration "The Party" to be an underrated comedy classic, while others feel it is a complete misfire. Count me among the latter. I can appreciate the audacity of making a minimalist comedy that was largely designed to be improvised- but there lies the rub. Sellers and Edwards succeeded in their quest to make this experimental film based on a threadbare script (60 pages) but the movie has a patchwork, almost desperate feel about how to fill up 99 minutes of screen time with what amounts to approximately 15 minutes of inspired material. Sellers is in top form, performance-wise, playing Hrudni V. Bakshi, an almost surrealistically polite Indian actor who we first see playing the title role in a big budget remake of "Gunga Din". With millions of dollars on the line, it's up to Bakshi to carry off his pivotal death scene so that a massive explosion can be detonated that will destroy an expensive set. In the film's funniest scenes, Bakshi drives the director crazy by screwing up even the simplest of tasks and prolonging his death scene for an absurd period of time. Then, carrying through on the age-old "Ready when you are, C.B" joke, he inadvertently ends up detonating the explosives and destroying the set before the cameras are rolling. Bakshi is immediately fired and his name is added to a studio blacklist so that he will never be hired again. Through a slight error, however, the studio boss, Fred Clutterbuck (J. Edward McKinley) mistakenly assigns his name to the invitation list of a party he is holding at his posh L.A. home. Thinking he has been forgiven for his costly mishaps, Bakshi is all too happy to attend the party, where the Hollywood "A" list crowd will be assembled.
Things start off promisingly as Sellers' ability for clever improvisation pays off. His initial Maxwell Smart-like bumblings are low-key enough to be believable. He mingles with the ever-growing crowd of snobbish party-goers and makes the acquaintance of a beautiful actress, Michele Monet (Claudine Longet), who is constantly being sexually harassed by her date, a hyper-mode, chauvinistic studio executive, C.S. Divot (Gavin MacLeod) who becomes increasingly desperate to bed her right there in the house where the party is taking place. For reasons never explained-and which defy credibility- she finds herself smitten by the innocent Bakshi and the two flirt, much to the consternation of Divot, who is the executive who fired Bakshi only the day before. In another strained plot device, he fails to recognize the same bumbling man he chastised and fired. The film traces Bakshi's increasingly disastrous mishaps at the party, which become more surrealistic with every passing minute. Comic actor Steve Franken appears as a tuxedo-clad waiter who walks about serving champagne on a tray but who has a nasty habit of taking liberal gulps of the bubbly himself. Edwards features the character in interminable amounts of footage, as the waiter becomes increasingly drunk. Although the scenes are skillfully played by Franken, the one-note joke becomes another repetitious absurdity. By the end of the film Edwards pulls the plug on any semblance of sanity and resorts to pure chaos. The midst of over-flowing toilets, sexual escapades, overbearing kids and their drill instructor-like nanny (a woefully underutilized Jean Carson), Edwards centers the action on a large swimming pool where, inexplicably, the household teenagers arrive with their hippie friends and a baby elephant (!) in tow, though it is never explained how suburban kids get their hands on a baby elephant. Then the pool is submerged in a never-ending sea of soap bubbles as everyone parties with the semi-submerged elephant. Keeping in mind that the film was released at the dawn of the hippie era, every major studio tried desperately to tap into the youth market, Blake Edwards included. Devoid of any meaningful concept of how to end the movie, he obviously decided that if he put in blaring music and a bunch of drunken or drug-induced party goers, the psychedelic imagery would mask the lack of genuine comedic content. The epilogue of the movie finds Bakshi mercifully back in real life, but driving a vintage 1930s three wheel classic British sports car by the Morgan Motor Company. (The car's appearance in the film became somewhat iconic.) He pays a visit to Michele's apartment and it becomes clear the two will form an unlikely romance.
Despite my reservations about "The Party", I can heartily recommend the new Blu-ray release from Kino Lorber. The first reason is because there are many people who seem to think this film is terrific and the opinion of this reviewer is definitely in the minority. The second reason is the quality of the Blu-ray itself, which does justice to one of the film's greatest assets, its creative production design by Fernardo Carrera. The transfer looks great and the colors practically leap out of the screen. Over a decade ago, MGM, which initially released the film on DVD, commissioned extras to be shot for inclusion in a special edition of "The Party". For reasons unknown, those extras were never released in the United States but were included on a UK DVD release. Why MGM didn't feel the extras were worth including in the North American market is a mystery because they feature extensive insights from Blake Edwards and other cast and crew members. Fortunately, Kino Lorber managed to rescue some of these bonus extras for inclusion on this release. One featurette details the over-all making of the film, while another is particularly fascinating, as it points out how this movie marked the first time that a video assist technique was employed on a major studio film. The innovation involved attaching a video camera to the main 35mm camera, thus allowing Edwards to view what he had just shot instead of having to wait for the dailies. It was a refinement of a technique that Jerry Lewis had been experimenting with for years. Edwards realized this would change how films were shot and at one point ended up buying the rights to the technology before relinquishing them back to the inventor, who by this point, had found a way to build a video camera inside the 35mm camera. Edwards states that he simply didn't have time to run the company while in the middle of making films, though he acknowledges that his decision probably cost him a small fortune in future profits. The Blu-ray also includes the original trailer and career over-views of Edwards and producers Walter Mirisch and Ken Wales.
So there you have it: a rare case where I can't recommend the main feature but enthusiastically recommend the Blu-ray special edition.
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