dignified manner. He followed it later that year with Hy Averback's I Love You, Alice B. Toklas, playing an attorney who abandons his lifestyle to become a hippie. Roger Ebert of the Chicago Sun-Times gave the film three stars, remarking that Sellers was "back doing what he does best", although he also said that in Sellers's previous films he had "been at his worst recently". In 1969 Sellers starred opposite Ringo Starr in the Joseph McGrath-directed film The Magic Christian. Sellers portrayed Sir Guy Grand, an eccentric billionaire who plays elaborate practical jokes on people. The critic Irv Slifkin remarked that the film was a reflection of the cynicism of Peter Sellers, describing the film as a "proto-Pythonesque adaption of Terry Southern's semi-free-form short novel", and "one of the strangest films to be shown at a gala premiere for Britain's royal family". The film, a satire on human nature, was in general viewed negatively by critics. Roger Greenspun of The New York Times believed that the film was of variable quality and summarised it as a "brutal satire". "Period of indifference": two marriages, three Pink Panther films (1970–1978) After a cameo appearance in A Day at the Beach (1970), and a serious role later in 1970 as an aging businessman who seduces Sinéad Cusack in Hoffman, Sellers starred in Roy Boulting's There's a Girl in My Soup opposite Goldie Hawn. According to The Times, the film was a major commercial success and became the seventh most popular film at the British box office in 1970. Andrew Spicer, writing for the British Film Institute's Screenonline, considers that although Sellers favoured playing romantic roles, he "was always more successful in parts that sent up his own vanities and pretensions, as with the TV presenter and narcissistic lothario" he played in There's a Girl in My Soup. The film was seen as a small revival of his career. Sellers's next films, including Rodney Amateau's Where Does It Hurt? (1972) and Peter Medak's Ghost in the Noonday Sun (1974), were again poorly received, and his acting was viewed as frenetic rather than funny. Despite these setbacks, Sellers won the Best Actor award at the 1973 Tehran Film Festival for his tragi-comedic role as a street performer in Anthony Simmons's The Optimists of Nine Elms. Fellow comedian and friend Spike Milligan believed that the early 1970s were for Sellers "a period of indifference, and it