Lily la tigresse

It's almost necessary to watch this with a friend or two. You'll need to make sure your friends are familiar with movie conventions of the mid-sixties. If they aren't, they might not laugh. If they are, you'll probably laugh at the same time and have fun. To be brief, WHAT'S UP, TIGER LILY is a Japanese detective movie made in 1964 and dubbed into English two years later for comic effect. The perpetrators are Woody Allen, Louise Lasser and a few others. In an unusual move, Woody Allen sets up the joke at the beginning, explaining on camera that's he's removed the soundtrack to the original, rewritten the dialogue and made it a comedy. What makes WHAT'S UP, TIGER LILY above-average, other than the fact that people don't just dub entire movies with gag-dialogue having nothing to do with the plot, is that it takes the humor which clearly already exists in the original and twists it. Although the original is foreign, it is very similar to any number of American or British detective movies of the time, such as OUR MAN FLINT or THE LADY IN CEMENT. Anybody who went to a double-feature in 1966 had sat through such a movie. The dubbed dialogue is not entirely removed from what is clearly the intent of the original dialogue. There are funny visuals in this movie. Woody Allen's dialogue spins on the visuals and makes fun of them up to a point, but it is, actually, a pretty good movie in the first place. It's not as if Allen took a bad movie and ridiculed it. The visuals are entertaining in themselves. Allen's plot involves a search for the world's greatest recipe for chicken soup. Every time the characters think they've found the recipe, we see them inspecting strips of microfilm. Obviously, the original involves a search for microfilm. So, the plot is obvious. Our maverick detective will track down the bad guys and win. Why not eliminate the original dialogue and treat us to a feature-film's worth of one-liners? If you like GET SMART, you'll probably like this movie. If you don't like GET SMART, you probably won't like it. But if you can't see why Allen bothered with this, you'll need to ask yourself why so many movies in the late sixties spoofed the spy genre. Woody Allen didn't operate in a vacuum here. A note on the recent altering of Woody Allen's dialogue: I have WHAT'S UP TIGER LILY on a DVD released by IMAGE ENTERTAINMENT. It contains both the soundtrack Woody Allen did for the 1966 release and what the packaging calls the "television audio" track. Very condsiderately, IMAGE provides an option for comparing the dialogue where Woody Allen's dialogue has been replaced by the dialogue of whomever has RE-RE-dubbed it for TV. I've compared some of them and am saddened to think that Allen's humor has been forcibly blunted for current broadcast. But IMAGE does let us hear the difference, and that's more than TV audiences may be getting. If you see this on TV and think the dialogue is strangely tepid, try the DVD. You'll be able to hear what Woody Allen intended. (I have to qualify this, though, because he seems to have had to put up with a certain amount of studio interference in 1966.) Finally, I'll say that you'll probably recognize a few of the actors in this movie. Two of the women appeared in a James Bond movie, and the main actor, Tatsuya Mihashi, who died only last year (in 2004) appeared in several prestigious films. Therefore, Woody Allen isn't trouncing on helpless fools here.

It's not "Manhattan", it's not "Sleeper" and it's not "Small Time Crooks" but it's funny, it's wacky in that 60's way and it's not the bad stinker of a movie people here think it is. Watch it with a some friends or some beer (or both) and just enjoy it. Sour grapes because Woody did what a lot of film nerds want to do? And the whole "Saracen pigs! Saxon dogs! Roman cow!" when Phil Moskowitz karate chops villains is a precursor to Austin Powers' "judo chop". This movie is a one off, and a pretty good one off as well.

"Loooooooooooove has found meeeeeeeeeeeeee, and I have found the waaaaaaaaaaay!"

It's rather too late for YOU, the reader, but "What's Up, Tiger Lily?" is best seen cold, when you know NOTHING about it AT ALL. So the only thing I will say is that years and years ago a friend of mine saw it the theater and laughed constantly ALL the way through it. When the movie was over he had to be taken to the hospital because he kept on laughing and nothing could make him stop. True story.

A woman steps into the room wearing a towel. She and her lover gaze longingly at each other. "Name three presidents!" she says.

In the wake of his early successes as a writer, Allen obtained the rights to an extra-cheesy Japanese spy thriller, threw out the entire soundtrack, then wrote and dubbed in a new script. Mix in a "what has this got to do with anything?" soundtrack by the folk-rock 60s group The Lovin' Spoonful and a few new scenes, and the result is the infamous WHAT'S UP, TIGER LILY? And it is one of the most bizarre movies you're likely to see this lifetime, a film which has attained cult-movie status of the highest order.

The movie is uneven--but that is actually part of its charm. Where else can you see big-haired 60s mamas get down like psycho killers to the innocuous music of The Lovin' Spoonful? Or tacky special effects, inept hop-and-chop fighting, and ridiculously bad cinematography reworked into the story of a bunch of spies on the track of a recipe for the world's best egg salad? And some of the lines are a hoot and a half. My own favorite: "Bring plenty of dynamite. It's a big mother!" Hardcore Allen fans, who often approach him as if he were God, will probably be embarrassed by this movie. Allen himself is pretty embarrassed: he's been trying to live it down for years. But if you have a taste for the bizarre--not to mention some good, I mean REALLY good egg salad--TIGER LILY is the movie for you. Recommended to egg salad junkies, bad hop-and-chop movie watchers, and cult-film enthusiasts everywhere.

Gary F. Taylor, aka GFT, Amazon Reviewer

What's Up Tiger Lily? is one of the absolute funniest movies I've ever seen, although I think I'm the only 14-year-old on the planet whose ever even heard of it. It's highly original, side-splittingly funny, and has a great soundtrack (from The Lovin' Spoonful, a band I'm sure I've never heard of but probably would've if I were older), although the only drawback is that the two five-minute dance scenes, while somewhat funny at first, drag on and on to the point of having to fast forward. And have the remote handy; you'll have to stop some of the scenes right in the middle because you'll be laughing too hard to hear them. A movie I'd highly recommend, especially to anyone who's ever seen MST3K.