What's New Pussycat?

What's New Pussycat?; comedy, USA/ France, 1965; D: Clive Donner, S: Peter O'Toole, Peter Sellers, Romy Schneider, Woody Allen, Capucine, Ursula Andress

The editor of a woman's fashion magazine, Michael James, falls in love with Carole, but doesn't want to marry her even though she is trying to change his mind. He thus goes to therapy to the unusual psychiatrist Dr. Fassbender who gives him all the wrong advice. Michael is namely a notorious womanizer and feels a marriage might burden him in that, which is why Carole tries to make him jealous by pretending to have an affair with Victor. Michael meets many attractive women, but in the end decides to marry her, going to make a report about orgies in hotel Chantel. But there he meets all his ex-girlfriends and Fassbender, creating chaos, but marries Carole in the end.

Anarchic comedy "What's New Pussycat?", the first script work of then unambitious Woody Allen, is one of those kind of comedies that start terribly and end brilliantly. Wacky, somehow deliberately "hasslely" intoned, full of unusually-twisted dialogues ("Silence when your shouting at me!") and bizarre names of characters, an energetic Peter Sellers as Dr. Fessbender as well equipped with a wonderful animated opening credits equipped with the title song by Tom Jones, this film is a real parody on all and everything. One of the funniest sequences is the one where the drunk Fassbender and Michael are romantically talking in front of the building of Mrs. LeFevre that she has a "face like an autumn moon". When another woman shows up on a nearby window, they tell her: "We are not talking to you, you cow!", and when LeFevre says she doesn't hear them that well, they respond with: "You have a face like the autumn moon! What's wrong, are you deaf!?" Allen is hilarious in the random scene in which he is driving a sports car through the tables, as well as the finale which is a fantastic fun, full of hilarious jokes left and right, which is why the story, despite its flaws, works.

Grade:++