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The joke is that the party is the one from La Notte, only with a decade's alienation being allowed to spill over in a transcendent slapstick deluge. The preamble introduces Peter Sellers as Hrundi V. Bakshi in a brownface commentary reaching back to Gunga Din's last stand, the thespian detonates a movie set then gravely plays the sitar to adduce the noble Clouseau dilemma: Is the man out of whack, or is the world? From blacklist to guest list is but one slip, the soiree at the swanky mansion provides a most pellucid articulation of Blake Edwards' view of the world as a widescreen minefield of gags to be crossed gallantly. Tinkling lounge music, modernist architecture, the muddy shoe that floats down the fountain and lands on the hors d'oeuvres platter. Grace in the face of faddish mannequins, a dart on the forehead of the cowboy star who can't tell Indian from Injun. "Who's the foreigner?" Long studies of Tati abound, Buddy Lester on hand for the Lewis kinship, Laurel and Hardy redivivus at the dinner table with low chair and swinging kitchen door (cp. From Soup to Nuts). Fried chicken first on plate and then speared on a dowager's tiara, off comes the tiara and with it the wig, the whizzing marble cherub receives the punchline—a pure Edwardsian daisy-chain. Hollywood new and old, where the moony tune of ingénue (Claudine Longet) cannot quite cover the groans of the search for a toilet. "When I saw what havoc that I wrought, my poor old knees went to water." The meticulous yet relaxed snowballing of silent-comedy idiom becomes, beautifully, what a '68 uprising calls for: The Exterminating Angel's bear necessities become the Aquarius elephant in the room, for one night strictures wash away in euphoric chaos. With J. Edward McKinley, Denny Miller, Steve Franken, James Lanphier, Fay McKenzie, Jean Carson, Corinne Cole, Dick Crockett, Herb Ellis, and Marge Champion.
--- Fernando F. Croce |