PlatinumRead Just so...so bad

FeistyUpper If you don't like this, we can't be friends.

Steineded How sad is this?

Darin One of the film's great tricks is that, for a time, you think it will go down a rabbit hole of unrealistic glorification.

Bill Slocum Watching Peter Sellers playing a lust-crazed German shrink amid gorgeous women, Swinging-Sixties ambiance, and a sparkling Burt Bacharach score should make for a fast-flowing breeze. But herky-jerky direction and a surprisingly amateurish script by first-time filmwriter and actor Woody Allen render "What's New Pussycat" hard to take.Billed a sex farce when it came out in 1965, and rather ahead of its time in that regard, the film presents us with the singular torment of Michael James (Peter O'Toole), a prisoner of his killer charisma who wants to be faithful to lover Carole (Romy Schneider) but can't say no to the many felines who purr for his attention. His analyst Dr. Fassbender (Sellers) and friend Victor (Allen) watch in jealous rage.Sellers was just coming off a near-fatal heart attack, and maybe trying too hard to show he still had game. As Fassbender he leaps, shrieks, rolls on the carpet, yet still seems half the man he was in films like "Waltz Of The Toreadors" and "The Millionairess". He's amusing but underrealized with lines that stretch for laughs he doesn't always get. "You're a monster, and a monster in that order," he bellows at his heavy-set wife. Huh?O'Toole was a sensation at this time from more serious roles; seeing him cut up like this, slamming his skull against doors and slipping off stairs, was a revelation and a marker for later comic turns in better films. Here, he struggles with a role conceived for Warren Beatty, looking almost constipated as one lovely after another drapes herself over him. "Women have always overcome my basic shyness," he explains.Allen was the new guy here, and for that you almost want to cut him some slack. He could have done worse for a first script, like say "Stardust Memories" or "Hollywood Ending". But watching Woody trying to be funny can be almost as painful as watching him try to be serious. "This can't work," he has one early conquest tell Michael. "I'm 34 and you're 12."A more central problem than the three mentioned above were two others behind the camera. Director Clive Donner kills some of the funnier bits with lame blocking (an opening featuring Fassbinder and his wife arguing in a series of dizzying zoom shots sets the chaotic tone) and allows O'Toole to be lit so green at times he appears malarial.Producer Charles K. Feldman seemed more interested in creating "happenings" than films, throwing together talents at random and letting whatever they came up with dictate the final product. In one scene we watch a badly overacting Allen try to kill O'Toole in a sauna, yet the next scene has O'Toole alive and dry in an unrelated group-psychoanalysis scene. I can't write about the ending, not because it would be a spoiler, but because I have no idea what it was about. Neither will you.There's a handful of witty lines in "Pussycat", sometimes even two in a row. That Bacharach/Hal David music is tremendous listening. Tom Jones scored the hit title song, but the songs "Here I Am" (Dionne Warwick) and "My Little Red Book" (Manfred Mann) are even better, the latter especially when danced to by the gorgeous Paula Prentiss.Prentiss is the most beautiful woman I've seen in movies - until she opens her mouth. You could say that "Pussycat" suffers from a similar issue, pretty from a distance, annoying close-up. It has so much sex appeal, it's almost angering how casually it disappoints.

jzappa This, the first time Woody Allen wrote and played in a film, is indeed an easygoing laugh-a-minute introduction to his unmistakable neurosis humor, though it is not a proper introduction to the height of his genius as a writer or an on-screen persona, which in its cinematic infancy here is in its mostly widely recognized distillation, an intellectual nebbish whose life is a never-ending uphill battle to deduce why he can't score with any women. Like his first three efforts at the helm, What's Up, Tiger Lily?, Take the Money and Run and Bananas, What's New Pussycat? is a prime example of the swinging '60s vogue, but whereas in Take the Money and Run, for instance, his cinematic approach hearkens back to early documentaries and silent comedies, this romp is under the much more generic direction of Clive Donner, who had before been an assistant director.But even as an especially commercial production with a then modern pop soundtrack, which absorbed the movie lots of success (though the most memorable use, a Dionne Warwick track, was much overlooked), and a slapdash editing job, it has some impressive elements not limited to the wit and inspired silliness contributed by Woody. Peter O'Toole had already done Lawrence of Arabia, Becket and Lord Jim before this silly little farce, which was a cool and slick showcase of his range. He plays a strapping, earnest young man who struggles to remain faithful to his fiancé but cannot seem to avoid women who want to sleep with him. Peter Sellers plays his analyst, a Deutsche pervert who hates his nagging, brutish wife and proposes to follow his patient O'Toole and "study his behavior." Sellers provides one of his most hilarious performances, making it seem so easy to alternately embellish and subdue his Germanic caricature while completely inhabiting his ridiculous '60s swinger get-up.So this is a classic screwball sex comedy of its time and captures the era not in the material, or even in production value, but in sight and sound. The movie was a box-office success, appealing of course to date moviegoers and mainstream audiences who saw the names Peter O'Toole, Peter Sellers, Capucine, Ursula Andress, Tom Jones and Burt Bacharach, but also, surely, to those who were cynical of the gender double-standard as well as Sellers' Teutonic psychiatrist. But yeah, definitely well worth a look, full of laughs.

Karl Self This is an amazing, rainbow-coloured roller-coaster of a Sixties movie, and probably the most swingingest of them all. It might be even more swinginger than Hugh Hefner's leopard-leotard underpants, baby! Very silly and aimless but at the same time extremely well acted by an incredible cast -- essentially all the famous actors of the era, and their mums, are in it. While watching this movie I thought "who is this actress who looks so much like Romy Schneider", and whaddayaknow, it is Romy Schneider. This was Woody Allen's first movie (as an actor, I mean) and he appears side by side with Peter Sellers, whom he certainly learned a few tricks from.It is sadly not a very good movie in that the direction is almost absent. Coz direction is so square baby, so yesteryear, so Disraeli's soiled underpants, you dig? This is somewhat, but not completely, compensated by the actors having a lot of fun and strutting their stuff (especially Peter O'Toole). And Paula Prentiss is drop-dead gorgeous. Those eyes, that silly beehive, that husky voice ...You have to see this as the quintessential Sixties movie. If that's your cup of tea, your bag, your bit of fluff on the side (you dig, baby?), then you'll have a lot of fun. It is the mother of Austin Powers. Ideally you should be watching this with a group of swinging friends that are tripping on your grandma's cough syrup.

Edgar Soberon Torchia Written by Woody Allen, "What's New Pussycat" is emblematic of the sexual behavior of the middle 1960s, a sample of op and pop art designs, and a blend of cinematic influences, from Lubitsch to Fellini (including not only a parody of the harem scene from "8 1/2" but also an actress from that film, Eddra Gale, as Sellers' wife, Anna Fassbender). Not as successful as it could have been (although it was a financial hit), the film is actually more noise than Lubitsch and more pastiche than Fellini, due mainly to Allen's typical patchy early scripts. The cast is more than capable, but you often feel Peter O'Toole and Peter Sellers are struggling with their parts, that Romy Schneider's role is more inclined to domesticity than to the 1960s changing mores, and that Ursula Andress is only part of the exotic décor. But Capucine and most of all Paula Prentiss (wearing mod clothes specially designed for her) are very funny, Capucine as Renee Lefebvre, a nymphomaniac who dominates her husband (and everybody, with a whistle), and Prentiss as Liz Bien, a poetess turned stripteaser with suicidal tendencies. Prentiss is so good here, that I have always wondered why Allen never made another film with her. She seemed like a very good match back in 1965, but they don't even cross a word in the film, although both work in the Crazy Horse Saloon. Maybe the crazy film persona she established in "Pussycat" resulted too outré and weird compared to Allen's New York neurotic with a bag of jokes that are often unfunny (like his attempts at seducing Schneider and Katrin Schaake). Nevertheless, to round up the package for our enjoyment, Burt Bacharach wrote the score and the hit title song; Tom Jones, Dionne Warwick, and Manfred Mann sang in the soundtrack, Richard Burton (as a patron in the Crazy Horse Saloon) and French pop singer Françoise Hardy (as a secretary in the last scene) made uncredited cameos, and animator Richard Williams (two decades before "Who Framed Roger Rabbit?") designed the opening credits.