Production
The Party was the only non-Pink Panther collaboration between Sellers and Edwards. Producer Walter Mirisch knew that Sellers and Edwards were considered liabilities; in his autobiography, Mirisch wrote, "Blake had achieved a reputation as a very expensive director, particularly after The Great Race." Sellers had played another Indian man in his hit film The Millionairess, and a similar klutz as Inspector Clouseau.
The film's interiors were shot on a set, at the MGM lot. The original script was only 63 pages in length. Edwards later said it was the shortest script he ever shot from, and the majority of the content in the film was improvised on set.
The film draws much inspiration from the works of Jacques Tati; Bakshi arrives at the party in a Morgan three-wheeler similar to Monsieur Hulot's cyclecar in Monsieur Hulot's Holiday. The entire film storyline is reminiscent of the Royal Garden restaurant sequence of Playtime; and the comedic interaction with inanimate objects and gadgets parallels several of Tati's films, especially Mon Oncle.
Read more about this topic: The Party (film)
Famous quotes containing the word production:
“The myth of unlimited production brings war in its train as inevitably as clouds announce a storm.”
—Albert Camus (1913–1960)
“The production of too many useful things results in too many useless people.”
—Karl Marx (1818–1883)
“An art whose limits depend on a moving image, mass audience, and industrial production is bound to differ from an art whose limits depend on language, a limited audience, and individual creation. In short, the filmed novel, in spite of certain resemblances, will inevitably become a different artistic entity from the novel on which it is based.”
—George Bluestone, U.S. educator, critic. “The Limits of the Novel and the Limits of the Film,” Novels Into Film, Johns Hopkins Press (1957)