Clive Donner
What's New Pussycat?

Capucine and Peter O' Toole:

"Who would have thought? In an elevator!"

"It's the safest place in the world, as long as the couple's total weight doesn't exceed three hundred kilos."

Woody Allen's first work brought to the big screen, a simply crazy film, a huge cauldron of surreal gags and incredible characters, an exceptional cast for a dazzling comedy that quickly became a cult classic.

"What's New Pussycat" released in 1965 is the first step in the extraordinary film career of the New York director, it's a bizarre work where not all ideas are brilliant but the pace created within helps to somewhat mask the author's cinematic inexperience, as he relies on Clive Donner for direction. Allen mocks erotic comedy, or rather a certain way of light filmmaking in the second half of the '60s, the plot is thin but perfectly functional to the success of the film, which manages ultimately not to be a mere sequence of situations, the biggest flaw of films made by comedians from television. So, Michael James (Peter O'Toole) is a hopeless Casanova, all the women he meets can't resist him, as he's supposed to marry the lovely Carole (Romy Schneider), he turns to a brilliant and eccentric psychoanalyst (Peter Sellers) for help with his problem; but in the end, rather than curing Michael, he will try in every way to learn as much as possible to resemble him, so as to free himself of his sturdy wife and thus conquer Renee Lefebvre (Capucine), one of his patients. Allen plays Victor, a friend of Michael's in love with Carole, without money and without charm, he makes a living as a costumer in a strip club.

Filmed in Paris in the full '60s, this film is a small taste of Allen's comedic abilities; if the start is all linked to Peter Sellers' uncontrollable streak, the rest is dominated by the other characters, who through interaction create a very particular climax evolving into grotesque, ironic, and overall successful situations. Even in this film, one realizes that Woody Allen is already capable of making a choral film without much difficulty, he logically still needs a lot of experience and his first film as a director, "Take The Money And Run", will be very different from this one and with a simpler yet equally effective approach. He manages to give space to all his characters, figures dominated by their neuroses and problems (mostly of a sexual nature), who meet weekly for common sessions with Professor Fritz Fassbender (Sellers), he makes them interact and leads them to the crazy finale, the first masterpiece of images and slapstick comedy so dear to early Allen.

In the end a cute comedy that somewhat hints at some quirky and offbeat films of the period, it immediately reminded me of "Paris When It Sizzles" from the previous year, and thinking about it, Audrey Hepburn's natural comedic flair would have fit perfectly in this film.

P.S: Very beautiful opening and closing credits, music by Bacharach and theme sung by Tom Jones.