Compare And Contrast: THE PARTY vs AFTER THE FOX

Adam-Troy Castro recently published an essay on Blake Edwards’ 1968 Hollywood comedy The Party.

The Party is one of Edwards’ rare misfires; not awful, but certainly not a hit, either.  A virtually plotless film (more on that below) made at the height of the Summer of Love, it features some of Edwards’ and Peter Sellers’ funniest gags, yet remains unsatisfying for most audiences (The Party has its fans, but they tend to be connoisseurs of cinematic comedy).

The biggest apparent problem with The Party today is the charge that Sellers plays in brownface; i.e., he’s cast as a hapless Bollywood actor making a mess of things in Hollywood.

This, to modern audiences, is a big no-no, a white actor racially impersonating a brown ethnicity.

…only it isn’t.

The bulk of India’s population belong genetically to the same “race” (i.e., Caucasian) as the vast majority of Europeans and Americans of European descent (for that matter, so are most Middle Easterners).  Sellers did not do a racial impression because the character of Hrundi V. Bakshi shares the same “race” as Sellers himself.

Which leads to our compare-and-contrast point, my personal favorite of all Sellers’ films:  After The Fox.

Let’s fill in a little background information before we plunge ahead.

First of all, Sellers himself.  He was a renown (read “genuinely insane”) comedy actor (as opposed to a comedian) with an uncanny penchant for submerging himself completely in oddball roles.

Inspector Clouseau is his most famous character, but his trio of roles in Dr. Strangelove -- Captain Mandrake, President Muffley, and Dr. Strangelove himself -- best demonstrates his astonishing range and versatility (one of the great tragedies in cinematic history is that an on-set injury prevented Sellers from playing the role of Major Kong [Slim Pickens in the final film], who rides the H-bomb down in the movie’s most iconic shot; it had been Stanley Kubrick’s intent to place the fate of the world squarely in Sellers’ hands in all three of Dr. Strangelove’s plotlines).

Sellers rode high in the 1960s and appeared in numerous comedies ranging from What’s New, Pussycat? (another film that’s grown more problematic with age) to The Bobo (never heard of The Bobo? Well, there’s a reason for that…).

The Party’s Hrundi V. Bakshi fits perfectly into that oeuvre.

As mentioned above, Bakshi is not a bad person, just a luckless one.  He tries hard and is eager to please, but no matter what, things go awry.

The shoestring thin plot of The Party is this:  After he ruins a big budget Hollywood epic, the studio intends to blackball Bakshi but by mistake his name is added to the invitation list of a big party the studio head is throwing.  

Hilarity -- or a reasonable facsimile thereof -- ensues.

The Party’s cinematic antecedents can be traced to Jacques Tati and, of all people, Jerry Lewis, though an argument can be made its roots go back to the semi-improvised early comedies of Mack Sennett’s studio.

Tati was an art crowd darling.  He made only a handful of films, but his M. Hulot quartet (M. Hulot’s Holiday, Mon Oncle, Play Time, and Traffic) are genuine cinematic masterworks and hilarious to boot.

Tati’s style was intensely physical but never violent in the manner of American slapstick.  He fell out of favor with French studios because he would spend lavishly on huge sets to pay off a single, subtle gag; his return-on-investment wasn’t good enough for producers’ bottom line.

Lewis, while better known as a performer, also proved to be a director of no small talent; let us give him the credit due for his work behind the camera.  While his personal misfire (the never completed The Day The Clown Cried) marred his directorial reputation, two of his films -- The Bellboy and The Errand Boy -- resemble Tati’s work although far more boisterous in execution.

Both Tati and Lewis (in those two films) jettisoned conventional narrative.  Mon Oncle is about a beloved uncle getting his nephew’s father to pay more attention to his family, The Errand Boy is sent undercover to find fiscal waste but ends up a comedy star who saves the studio; that’s as close as either gets to a plot.

Tati and Lewis’ films start with a basic set up then just let things grow from there.  When it works -- as it did with Sennett and Chaplain and Tati and Lewis -- it produces hilarious but expensive results.

When it doesn’t work -- and lordie, everybody tries real hard in The Party -- one ends up with an unfunny mess.

(I’m being unfair.  The Party isn’t unfunny, it’s just not consistently nor compellingly funny all the way through.)

Edwards was fond of improvisation in his films.  His greatest success with Sellers was the original Pink Panther in which Sellers replaced Peter Ustinov, the original Inspector Clouseau.

Clouseau was supposed to be a third tier character in The Pink Panther and Sellers appears way down on the billing after David Niven, Capucine, Robert Wagner, and Claudia Cardinale.  The script was written and the movie shot to focus on Niven and Wagner’s uncle / nephew jewel thieves -- but Sellers stole the whole damn movie right out from under them.

(Recasting Clouseau was Edwards’ stroke of brilliance.  Ustinov would have played Clouseau as a fool, and the visceral reaction to that was to despise him.  Sellers played Clouseau as an idiot, and audiences loved him.)

Edwards’ other improvisational comedies typically fared better than The Party because they at least featured a clear plot line for both performers and audiences to focus on.  The Party literally doesn’t know where it’s going, and that’s detrimental to the film as a whole.  (Compared to Casablanca, another heavily improvised film where the crucial difference was everyone knew the story had to end with Rick making a decision, there’s nothing like that to help The Party.)

The Party isn’t bad, just unsuccessful.  As mentioned, it’s a misfire, not a mistake.  Considering Blake Edwards also made Breakfast At Tiffany’s, The Pink Panther, The Great Race, and Victor / Victoria, we can cut him some slack.

Back to Sellers and his astonishing range and gallery of characters:  On the heels of his smash success as Inspector Clouseau in The Pink Panther, Sellers was offered the role of Aldo Vanucci in After The Fox.

Vanucci is the polar opposite of Inspector Clouseau, a criminal instead of a cop, cunning and competent instead of brainless and bumbling.  A master of disguise, Vanucci gave Sellers the opportunity to play numerous sub-impersonations such as a prudish priest, a carabinieri, and an intense Italian film maker among others.

After The Fox was co-written by Neal Simon and Cesare Zavattini, the latter a long time associate of the film’s director, Vittorio De Sica.  This is not to say any of them were better at their craft than Edwards, but clearly the structure they provided works to the final film’s benefit.

After The Fox offers a clear, linear plot:  Retired criminal Aldo Vanucci is lured out of retirement (i.e., escapes jail) to come home and provide for his mother and star struck sister.  Given the task of smuggling stolen gold into Italy, he comes up with a scheme to make a movie about smuggling stolen gold into Italy and thus enlists the authorities to help with his crime!

I’ll be frank, a big reason I love this movie is how accurately it depicts Italian culture and various character types.  Yeah, it’s over the top and deliberately played to excess, but every gag is firmly based on reality.

English Sellers captures the essence of so many diverse Italian personality types (and, briefly, an American tourist as well) so perfectly he deserves the title of honorary paisan. 

So how is Vanucci different from Bakshi in The Party?

Bakshi is not a bad person, he’s shown to have a heart of gold and high personal standards, he just can’t cope with the world around him (a trait he shares with Tati’s M. Hulot).  His Indianess is depicted very slightly -- his accent, his apartment décor, his sitar playing.  Unlike Vanucci being Italian in After The Fox, there is no reason for him to be specifically Indian.  

He could be any poor schlub, a soul brother to Lewis’ bellboy. 

Aldo Vanucci in After The Fox fills several key functions for that movie.  After The Fox’s plot hinges on volatile lower class Italian family dynamics -- it would not be the same story with different characters.

This is not the same as saying those versions would be bad, but as Yojimbo ripped off Dashiell Hammett’s novel Red Harvest and was remade as A Fistful Of Dollars which in turn was remade as Last Man Standing which returned the story to Hammett’s original milieu, so each version stands distinct and different from the others.

But Seller’s Bakshi adds nothing as a character to The Party.  Except for a handful of specific gags, his role could have just as easily been played by Tati’s M. Hulot, Lewis’ Stanley, Rowan Atkinson’s Mr. Bean, or Jaleel White’s Urkel and the final film wouldn’t be significantly different (for that matter, it wouldn’t need to be set in Hollywood, either, just any environment where self-appointed cultural elites can’t escape from a gauche lower status person).

Compare Bakshi to Vanucci and it’s clear Sellers’ isn’t punching down in After The Fox.  For all his criminality, Vanucci’s highly scrupulous and clearly capable.  He takes his lumps but he’s not the human punching bag Sellers played in The Party.

© Buzz Dixon