What’s Up, Tiger Lily? ** (1966, Woody Allen, The Lovin’ Spoonful, Louise Lasser, Mickey Rose, Frank Buxton) – Classic Movie Review 10,296

For his feature-length directorial debut, What’s Up, Tiger Lily? (1966), Woody Allen re-dubs director Senkichi Taniguchi’s Japanese action spy film International Secret Police: Key of Keys, (1965) and makes it into a comedy about the search for the world’s best egg salad recipe. It is a thin, silly, over-stretched idea, patchily amusing rather than funny overall.

Allen completely new dialogue that has nothing to do with the original film, puts in new scenes and rearranges the order of existing ones, changing the James Bond clone into a silly comedy.

Allen’s original one-hour TV version was expanded without his permission to include additional scenes from International Secret Police: A Barrel of Gunpowder, the third film in the series, and numbers by the band The Lovin’ Spoonful, who released a soundtrack album.

Allen is one of the dub voices. Louise Lasser, Allen’s wife at the time, is also one of the voice actors, as Suki Yaki. Lasser was married to Allen from 1966 to 1970 and appeared in several of his early films, also Take the Money and Run (1969) and Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex (1972).

Mickey Rose, Allen’s writing partner on Take the Money and Run (1969) and Bananas (1971), is another Vocal Assist.

Image released the film on DVD in 2003, with both the theatrical and television (called alternate) soundtracks.

© Derek Winnert 2020 Classic Movie Review 10,296

Check out more reviews on http://derekwinnert.com

Soundtrack album by The Lovin’ Spoonful.