The Party (1968)
Directed by Blake Edwards
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.
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What critics compared The Party to
Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan (2006)
Directed by Larry Charles
Characters
Cohen is being compared to Peter Sellers, and in a way Borat is reminiscent of Sellers' Bakshi in The Party, a disruptive Other presence, but Blake Edwards' picture was bracingly inclusive (low gags and sophisticated slapstick, foreigners and natives, Hollywood classicism and hippie openness -- hey, this was '68) where Cohen's transgressive humor is pettily divisive.
With Sellers cast as an amiable, old-fashioned klutz lost among the technological gizmos and runaway decadence of the modern world, The Party is Edwards’ attempt to import Jacques Tati to Hollywood, specifically Tati’s 1958 film Mon Oncle, which sets his Monsieur Hulot loose in an automated house.
There, in a tribute to Jacques Tati’s Mon Oncle, Sellers’ Bakshi fumbles his way around the producer’s modern Art Deco home, failing to properly operate the automatic doors and furniture and vainly navigating the house’s numerous pools.
Remember in " The Party " when Peter Sellers was trying to cut his Cornish game hen, and it flew off his plate and onto the hat of the society lady?
Though Edwards confines much of the action to a single location, he opens The Party with a hilariously outsized goof on a Gunga Din sequel gone awry.
Sellers gets to do his funny accent as an accident-prone Indian actor brought to Hollywood, fired for inadvertently sabotaging the movie (a briefly hilarious parody of Gunga Din), and invited in error to a posh party at the studio chief's home.