Pay no attention to me, sir. I'm merely spectating.
First things first: Yes, Blake Edwards's The Party has a brownface problem since it revolves around Peter Sellers being cast as an Indian actor brought over from Bombay to be an extra in a Hollywood epic. Look past it, though, and you'll be rewarded with some prime Edwards/Sellers slapstick. Besides, it's not like Sellers's character, the well-meaning if clumsy Hrundi V. Bakshi, is being held up for ridicule. He's merely trying to navigate his way around an exclusive Hollywood shindig that he got invited to by mistake.
In the interest of expediency, Edwards and his co-writers Tom and Frank Waldman only take 11 minutes to get Hrundi to the titular event. First, though, we get a classic fakeout opening, in which Hrundi prolongs his death scene in the war film he's acting in to such an extent that even the actors on his side start shooting at him to get him to stop blowing on the bugle the props department unwisely entrusted him with. Then, after blowing another shot by wearing a wristwatch, he accidentally sets off an explosion, blowing up an expensive set before the cameras are rolling. In retaliation, producer C.S. Divot (a pre-Love Boat Gavin MacLeod) calls up studio exec Fred Clutterbuck (J. Edward McKinley) to have the hapless Hrundi blackballed, but instead his name winds up on the guest list for the party Clutterbuck is throwing that night.
Immediately upon his arrival at Clutterbuck's ultramodern residence, Hrundi loses one of his shoes and in the process of retrieving it creates more inconveniences for himself and others, establishing a pattern that is repeated over the ensuing 88 minutes. This is true when he meets one of his heroes, western star Wyoming Bill (Denny Miller), whose conflation of Hrundi with the other kind of Indian is a reminder of the casual racism that held sway in Old Hollywood (which The Party serves as something of a wake for). It also carries over to the running gag about the waiter (brilliantly played by Steve Franken) who becomes progressively drunk on the alcohol Hrundi repeatedly turns down. The tipping point comes, though, when the mansion's high-tech control panel catches his eye. Whether he means to be or not, Hrundi simply can't help being an agent of chaos.
Tellingly, the only other outsider at the party is aspiring French actress Michele Monet (Claudine Longet), who arrives on Divot's arm, but doesn't leave with him. Instead, her allegiance shifts to Hrundi when she joins him on the far side of the pool, where he frequently retreats to distance himself from the latest mess he's created. And there are plenty of those, from a caviar handshake that gets passed around to the destruction of an upstairs toilet which somehow doesn't flood the house. Instead, Edwards opts to fill it with soap suds when Clutterbuck's daughter and her friends crash the party with a painted elephant and Hrundi convinces them to clean it off out of respect for his culture. Would that Edwards and Sellers had thought of that before they chose to paint him.