Film review

  • What’s New, Pussycat?

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Clive Donner (1965)

    It gets off to a great start with the Bacharach-David title song over Richard Williams’ animated credits.  Although the song’s lyrics and arrangement are dynamically OTT, its melody is yearning; the whole thing is wonderfully delivered by Tom Jones.  The Williams animations are amusingly zippy and zany.  These first two or three minutes are probably the most satisfying in the whole film.  What’s New, Pussycat? now has historical interest – this was Woody Allen’s first screenplay and screen appearance, and Peter O’Toole’s first comic role in cinema.  But whereas the opening titles and music transport you to the 1960s enjoyably, the nearly two-hour film that follows does the same in a bad way.  Directors entrusted with big Hollywood comedies of the era boasting starry international casts must have been under instructions to knock the audience dead using a bludgeon.  Like The Pink Panther (1963), for example, What’s New, Pussycat? is tiresomely frenetic.

    O’Toole is Michael James, editor of a fashion magazine in Paris.  Michael is irresistibly attractive to and irresistibly attracted by beautiful women.  Because it’s hard to remember so many names, Michael tends to address nearly every one of them as ‘pussycat’.  But he does want to be faithful to his fiancée, Carole (Romy Schneider), and seeks help from psychoanalyst Dr Fritz Fassbender (Peter Sellers) on how to succeed.  Fassbender is largely distracted in his own romantic pursuit of another of his patients, Renée (Capucine) – a vain pursuit since she’s chasing Michael and can’t stand Fassbender.  Michael’s one male friend, neurotic Victor Shakapopolis (Woody Allen), is another hopeless romantic in the sense that he’s hopeless when it comes to romance – until Carole has the idea of briefly flirting with Victor to make Michael jealous and consequently, she hopes, more loyal.  Michael gets accidentally involved, nevertheless, with exotic dancer Liz Bien (Paula Prentiss) and parachutist Rita (Ursula Andress).  The only woman interested in Fassbender is his formidable wife Anna (Eddra Gale), whom he loathes.

    There’s good stuff from Peter O’Toole and Woody Allen.  At first, O’Toole is a bit too eager to make clear he’s not just a serious actor, but he soon proves his comic gifts.  So tall and slim that he’s a ready-made cartoon, he moves at terrific speed, speaks just as quickly and does both with bracing dexterity.  Even on his debut, Woody Allen is Woody Allen but he, too, has a few bits of exuberant physical comedy that now seem surprising, when Victor tries to impress Carole with his carnal and cultural appetites.  Up close and personal with her, he puts opera on the record-player as an aphrodisiac accompaniment.  He’s repeatedly interrupted by a succession of people knocking on the bedroom door.  Each time, he pauses the record then restarts it and leaps almost acrobatically (for Woody anyway) back to Carole’s side on the bed.  Allen’s script includes, as well as some fine one-liners, a couple of nicely surreal visual gags:  even though this is the 1960s, the figure of Toulouse-Lautrec walks across shot to take his seat outside a Paris café, at a table shared with Van Gogh, Gauguin and Emile Zola.

    Toulouse-Lautrec also gets mentioned, as Victor’s ‘favourite small man’ – a subject with which Woody Allen is already preoccupied.  It’s one of several examples of What’s New, Pussycat?’s self-referential side, which indulges the main male egos involved.  The results can be funny, as in a parody Cyrano de Bergerac sequence where Michael tries to help Fassbender woo Renée, who appears at the window of her top-floor apartment.  Although O’Toole raises laughs here, he’s making fun of his own reputation as a superlative speaker of verse, and Michael James’ own line of work is forgotten (it counts for very little throughout the film).  In another scene, at the bar of a strip club, Michael briefly meets with an uncredited Richard Burton, with whom O’Toole had just co-starred in Becket, released in the year that also saw Burton and Elizabeth Taylor’s (first) wedding.  ‘Haven’t you met me somewhere before?’ asks Burton.   The reply from O’Toole (rather than Michael) is, ‘I can remember the name, but I can’t place the face …remember me to what’s-her-name’.

    The ego-in-chief, though, is Peter Sellers.  When Anna catches her husband in a compromising situation with Ursula Andress’s Rita, Fassbender’s scornful riposte is that the latter is ‘a personal friend of James Bond’.  This weedy Dr No joke was supposedly ad-libbed but Sellers, according to Woody Allen, was determined to have the lion’s share of the script’s best lines.  You may also suspect that Sellers insisted on how he should look – he wears a long-haired black wig and consistently bizarre clothes.  His appearance and involved Teutonic accent warn potential funny-man rivals in the cast:  comic genius at work, do not disturb.  Peter Sellers gives a disastrous performance, nearly laugh-free.

    It seems remarkable in retrospect that What’s New, Pussycat? found favour with three demanding, and very different, American critics of the time – Pauline Kael, Manny Farber and Andrew Sarris.  Perhaps a ‘psychiatric farce’, as Kael describes it, was then still enough of a novelty to give the film a progressive flavour.  I often don’t really understand Farber and that’s certainly the case when he writes that ‘Clive Donner’s direction gets a hardness of line, a whiplike individuality by compressing his actresses into a murderously confined space’.  Andrew Sarris reported in The Village Voice that ‘I have now seen What’s New Pussycat? four times, and each time I find new nuances in the direction, the writing, the playing, and, above all, the music’.  I think life’s too short to test if Sarris’s claim works for me, too.

    Although both male critics were more enthusiastic than Kael about the film, neither they nor she betrayed the least concern about how women are used in What’s New, Pussycat?  It now looks alarmingly dated in this respect and being untroubled seems to date these three critics also.  Sex-bomb Ursula Andress’s performing name is her real name, which is just as well.  Otherwise, you might – on the basis of her Venus Anadyomene debut in Dr No (1962) and Pussycat – take the surname as a jokey pun on ‘undress’:  she spends most of her screen time here in skimpy underwear.  Brainy, gifted people were involved in Clive Donner’s film yet it operates according to the same formula as the Carry Ons.  Men are insatiable sex maniacs, though often thwarted and vulnerable.  Women are babes or battleaxes, their function either to take their clothes off and drive the men even crazier or bully them.  In What’s New, Pussycat?, Anna Fassbender is eventually kitted out in a Valkyrie costume, complete with horned helmet, and wields a spear.

    It’s to Romy Schneider’s credit that, thanks to her coherent but nuanced comic playing, Carole comes across as a woman rather than a male fantasy figure.  Schneider also has chemistry with Peter O’Toole.  In the closing stages, though, nobody has a chance against the film’s hyperactive mayhem.  The climax, involving everyone who’s anyone in the story, is a high-speed go-karting sequence that seems interminable until it ends quite arbitrarily.  I’m with Andrew Sarris on the music only if he means just the theme song.  Burt Bacharach and Hal David wrote three numbers for the film, the other two sung by Paul Jones and Dionne Warwick.  These, or snatches of them, are slipped into the narrative irrelevantly.  You barely register Paul Jones at all.  You hear Dionne Warwick only because her voice is so naturally distinctive.  The (ab)use of these songs and their performers is typical of What’s New, Pussycat?’s squandering of talent.

    28 March 2026

     

     

  • The Last Guest of the Holloway Motel

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Ramiel Petros and Nicholas Freeman (2025)

    ‘Last’ films don’t usually tell happy stories.  This documentary – a first feature by two young Americans, showing at this year’s BFI Flare festival – is no exception:  halfway through its ninety-odd minutes, The Last Guest of the Holloway Motel is shaping up as one of the unhappiest true stories you’ll ever see on a cinema screen.  The title location – on Santa Monica Boulevard, West Hollywood, off Route 66 – has gone downhill in recent times.  When it first caught the eye of Ramiel Petros and Nicholas Freeman, the Holloway Motel was soon to be converted into temporary accommodation for homeless people.  The only evidence of current human life there was an elderly man, sitting out on a balcony with a glass of wine and a laptop.  This was the motel manager, an Englishman called Tony Powell, about to be evicted from the premises after decades running the place.  Petros and Freeman originally planned to make a short film about the motel’s closure and Powell’s reluctant departure from it.  Once they found out who Tony Powell used to be, their project expanded.

    Born in Bristol in 1947, Tony Powell grew up to be a successful professional footballer.  After several years at AFC Bournemouth, he moved to Norwich City in 1974, shortly before their promotion to the English First Division (the Premiership, in old money), where the Canaries stayed almost throughout Powell’s time at the club.  A tall, tough-tackling central defender with a tough-guy reputation on the pitch, he was regarded as something of a father figure to junior team members. He was literally a father figure too, with two young daughters.  His wife and the little girls stayed behind in England when Powell moved to the US in 1981 to continue his soccer career – first with the San Jose Earthquakes, then the Seattle Sounders.  In the mid-1980s, he retired from football and disappeared.  His wife and children, his brother and sisters had no idea how to find him.  Tony Powell is homosexual.  Closeted during his footballing career, he moved to West Hollywood to start a gay life there.  He thought his family would never forgive him if they knew, so he cut off all contact with them.

    In The Last Guest of the Holloway Motel’s early stages, you wonder if there is enough material to sustain a feature-length documentary.  The talking heads include Powell’s former teammates, Norwich City supporters and football journalists, recalling him as a reliable player and a reliable man.  This is fine as far as it goes, but that’s not very far.  Much of what’s said is routine – as is the interspersing with these interviews of bits of soccer action, and the usual clip of Margaret Thatcher, inveighing at the Tory conference against the ‘promotion’ of homosexuality (‘children are being taught they have the inalienable right to be gay’).  As for the main talking head, you also start to wonder if Tony Powell, whether answering the filmmakers’ questions or being followed by their camera around the deserted motel, really wants to be in the film at all.  He wants to talk only in the sense that he needs to:  his many years in hiding from those who most want to find him have made Tony reticent, often prickly when Petros and Freeman try probing further.

    You can’t help thinking he has repeatedly been in the wrong place at the wrong time.  A gay man who was a prominent footballer in the late 1960s and throughout the 1970s, he arrived in West Hollywood just in time for the peak of AIDS.  We hear about his relationship with David Castro, a younger (on the evidence of photographs shown) and, from what Tony says, more confidently outgoing gay man than he himself was.  When David Castro contracted HIV, which developed into full-blown AIDS, Tony cared for him at home until he died.  The film is rarely explicit about dates.  It’s not clear, for example, when Tony divorced his wife (if he ever did).  It seems, though, that he was managing the Holloway Motel well before the turn of the millennium, in which case David died in perhaps the early 1990s.  Petros and Freeman interview his sister; since her brother died, she hasn’t seen or heard from Tony either.

    Almost needless to say, he cuts a lonely figure.  His only friends appear to be Erica, a trans woman who was formerly the Holloway’s assistant manager; a youngish man who was once a clerk at the motel; and Samantha (Sammy), Tony’s elderly chihuahua, to whom he’s devoted.  Tony finds an apartment that he can afford to rent but his health isn’t good:  he spends time in hospital for what seems to be a serious heart condition.  He’s delighted to be discharged, chiefly to be reunited with Sammy.  Not long after that, the dog dies and her owner is distraught.  At this point in The Last Guest, you just wish it would end – if only so that Tony can be left alone (in both senses of the phrase).  But Petros and Freeman had already found themselves making a film different from the one they first envisaged, and the one they’re making now takes an unexpected turn.  The filmmakers themselves may have something to do with that happening.

    Tony’s ex-wife Marilyn appears in the film only in photographs, but his two sisters have been prominent among the English talking heads, persistently anxious to make contact with him.  Petros and Freeman keep asking Tony why he doesn’t want that.  You get the impression that they’d like him to change his mind, both to energise their narrative and because they’re genuinely concerned for his welfare.  (When Tony’s suffering chest pains, it appears to be Ramiel Petros who gets him to hospital.)   Tony suddenly announces he’s going to phone one of his sisters, telling Petros and Freeman ‘I think you know me well enough to know if I say I’m going do that, I mean it’ (or words to that effect).  He does phone one sister, then zooms both sisters.  Next thing, he’s on his way to England, for an emotional reunion with them and with his brother.  (His sisters are much younger than Tony; childhood snaps from the family album convey quite how much younger – a decade or so.  I wasn’t clear if Tony was older or younger than his brother; the latter is so physically frail that it’s hard to tell.)  Tony also returns to Carrow Road, meeting with a couple of the Norwich City people we’ve heard talking about him.  Back in California, he also – even more nervously – speaks on the phone to one of his daughters.  (We hear only his voice in this conversation, and only the first moments of what he says before Petros and Freeman fade out.)   Both daughters, now presumably in their late forties, appear momentarily on screen, sitting smiling together.  Text informs us that Tony has met with them and is still communicating with his siblings.

    We think it’s all over … it isn’t yet.  Just as the closing credits look ready to roll, Tony’s sisters announce they’ve recently discovered, courtesy of one of those DNA testing kits, that Tony also has a son, older than his daughters; the son’s mother was a Bournemouth woman who gave him up for adoption.  A final montage of photographs includes, as well as one of Tony meeting up again with David Castro’s sister, a photo of him and his son side by side:  the film transforms before our eyes into an extraordinary variation on an episode of Long Lost Family.  It doesn’t do to get too meta about a true, poignant human-interest story, but The Last Guest not only serves to illustrate how documentary-makers can influence real events but also shows the possible effect of unexpectedly finding yourself at the centre of a documentary.  As he reaches a new low point, Tony Powell decides not just to accept that he’s the film’s lead but also to take the lead in his own story.  The Last Guest turns into something akin to those fictional dramas with a protagonist whose life’s in ruins before they reach a turning point, fight back and deliver an upbeat ending for their character and the audience.  Just as in some of those fictions, Petros and Freeman’s documentary even starts ignoring bits of the story-so-far that might get in the way of the feelgood factor.  For example, there’s no more mention of Tony’s heart problems once he’s found a new lease of life.

    This is still, of course, a fundamentally sad story.  Tony Powell starts off insisting he’s inevitably cut off from his family because they’d think him unforgivable.  Although he argues that it’s his homosexuality they could never accept, you suspect he knows all along it’s the abandonment of his children, who didn’t know for years if their father was alive or dead, that can’t be excused.  Yet it may also be a measure of Powell’s guilt about his sexuality that he felt compelled to disappear without trace, as far as his family was concerned.  What the tabloid press would have done if he’d been outed in the 1970s is one thing (we get a sample in the film of what they did do in the early 2000s, once rumours of the life he was now living in the US began to surface).  What his family would have thought was, for Tony, a more dreadful prospect – and not just because he had married and started a family of his own.  The first time he gets upset on camera is when he’s talking about the great relationship he had with his parents when he was growing up and how much he respected his father.  Tony’s sisters, well before he comes back into their lives, are adamant that they would never have minded his being gay.  You don’t doubt their sincerity, but it’s a lot easier to say that now.

    Even though the premises now have a new life too, and are serving a valuable social purpose, the empty motel functions as an expression of Tony’s prolonged exile from people, and the dead end he had reached.  Petros and Freeman are clumsy with their occasional arty embellishments.  Tony, sitting in the motel in the centre of the frame, is surrounded by superimposed images of footballers in an imagined Norwich changing room; they do a kind of striptease relay until the last-leg player is naked.  An empty armchair on a beach, first shown after David Castro’s death, is reprised with Tony, at a low ebb, seated in it.  But the film is also shot through with affecting resonances.  It’s a striking coincidence that Tony Powell’s teammates at Norwich in the 1970s included Justin Fashanu, who lived under the strain of being a Black as well as a gay top-flight footballer, until he couldn’t stand the strain any longer.  You can’t help comparing childhood photos of Tony’s two younger sisters with photos of his two little daughters – what a hero he was to the first pair as kids, how differently the second pair must have seen him.  It seems there’ve always been dogs in the Powell family.  Tony’s sister has one; in their first, very tentative phone conversation, she soon asks him if he has a dog.  (This is a week after Sammy’s death.)  When he returns to England and his sister’s home, her dog runs out to greet him.  It’s a real ice-breaker:  Tony can fuss the dog before he faces his family.  In one of his repeated assertions that the past is past, Tony says that his long-standing motto is ‘Shut the fuck up and get on with it’.  When, independently, one of his sisters talks about ‘a new chapter’ and the other about ‘a clean slate’ for Tony, their phrases are nicer ways of saying the same thing.

    In photos and the football footage from the 1970s, Powell looks a nearly stereotypical sporting pin-up of the decade:  six-foot-two-eyes-of-blue, big hair, blonde.  The hair’s grey now and thinner, as is his face, but he’s still a good-looking man.  As the film progresses, you keep thinking the elderly Tony reminds you of someone – you’re not sure who.  There’s a bit of Larry Lamb maybe, but Tony’s face is harsher, vulpine, more like Terence Stamp in old age.  You still feel it’s someone else he resembles, though.  Tony Powell makes such a persistently strong impression that, by the end of The Last Guest of the Holloway Motel, you realise that someone is probably himself.

    24 March 2026

     

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