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