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!"

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: 7 out of 10: Long before Airplane or Mystery Science Theater 3000 or even my own mix-up of an uncut bootleg of Chōjin densetsu Urotsukidōji and Led Zeppelin II (Blows Pink Floyd and the Wizard of OZ out of the water.) there was What’s Up Tiger Lily.

A very young Woody Allen acquired the rights of a Japanese James Bond knockoff called Kokusai himitsu keisatsu: Kagi no kagi (Literal English title International Secret Police: Key of Keys) and dubbed in his own dialogue.

The film starts with some non-dubbed footage involving bondage, a shootout, and a circular saw. Then Woody appears with an interviewer what he has done with the film. The film then restarts Woody’s dubbing in place and with the exception of two short interruptions by Woody (both very funny) It is the Japanese import with a new script and story.

The dub itself is quite funny and well done. One can definitely see the roots of some of Woody Allen’s comic themes in this work. The overall story of the world’s greatest egg salad recipe is quite well done and the voice work is applicable and fits the on screen characters well.

What’s Up Tiger Lily benefits from good source material to work with. Longtime fans of Mystery Science Theater 3000 know that even the best riffing can suffer from deadly boring source material. (Red Zone Cuba for example). What’s Up Tiger Lily’s source material is colorful, action packed, and has a very attractive cast. In fact I would love to see the original source material.

On the down side, since the film is dubbed, when the movie has no dialogue the experience can drag. Unlike an Airplane or a Mystery Science Theater 3000 riffing session, What’s Up Tiger Lily isn’t a 10 jokes a minute affair. Even more detrimental the Lovin Spoonful show up periodically to present an unrelated music video. This both dates the effort horribly and kills the flow of the humor.

What’s Up Tiger Lily is a must see for fans of Mystery Science Theater 3000 and of Woody Allen’s early comedy. (And fans of the Lovin Spoonful I guess).

One should pay respect to ones elders and it is a very fun time.

If you like *Mystery Science Theater 3000,* chances are you'll get a kick out of this mildly amusing Woody Allen farce. Although the concept is ingenious (22 years before the misadventures of the Satellite of Love), the jokes are not as funny as they could or should be, and there is far too much emphasis on Allen's sexual hang-ups. There are a lot of scenes that could have been hysterical, but which turn out to be uncomfortably unamusing. Still, for its campiness and originality, you should try to catch this film sometime.