What's Up, Tiger Lily? (1966)

In comic Woody Allen's film debut, he took the Japanese action film "International Secret Police: Key of Keys" and re-dubbed it, changing the plot to make it revolve around a secret egg salad recipe.

Directors:

Woody Allen, Senkichi Taniguchi

Writers:

Woody Allen, Julie Bennett,

Stars:

Tatsuya Mihashi, Akiko Wakabayashi, Mie Hama

Cast

Cast overview, first billed only:
Tatsuya Mihashi	...	Phil Moscowitz (archive footage)
Akiko Wakabayashi	...	Suki Yaki (archive footage)
Mie Hama	...	Teri Yaki (archive footage)
John Sebastian	...	Himself (as The Lovin' Spoonful)
Tadao Nakamaru	...	Shepherd Wong (archive footage)
Susumu Kurobe	...	Wing Fat (archive footage)
Sachio Sakai	...	Hoodlum (archive footage) (as A No Star Cast)
Hideyo Amamoto	...	Cobra Man (archive footage)
Tetsu Nakamura	...	Foreign Minister (archive footage) (as A No Star Cast)
Osman Yusuf	...	Gambler (archive footage) (as A No Star Cast)
Woody Allen	...	Himself / Dub Voice / Projectionist
Zal Yanovsky	...	Himself (as The Lovin' Spoonful)
Joe Butler	...	Himself (as The Lovin' Spoonful)
Steve Boone	...	Himself (as The Lovin' Spoonful)
Frank Buxton	...	Dub Voice (voice)

Storyline

So you want Plot? Woody Allen bought a Japanese spy movie, removed the voice track, and replaced it with one of his own. He doesn't seem to have bothered with the original script at all. Typical Joke: "Back off! My secret spy camera has taken pictures of you all through your clothes. Unless you release me, your naked photos will be sold in every school yard in Tokyo within the hour. Unless you are totally comfortable with your body, you must release me." Very funny, but also very unusual.

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Plot Keywords:

egg salad | recipe | prologue | dancing | reverse footage | 

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Taglines:

WOODY ALLEN STRIKES BACK!

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Genres:

Adventure | Comedy | Crime | Thriller

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Certificate:

PG

Details

Country:

USA Japan

Language:

English Japanese

Release Date:

2 November 1966 (USA)

Also Known As:

Lily la tigresse

Filming Locations:

Yokohama, Kanagawa, Japan

Company Credits

Production Co:

Benedict Pictures Corp., National Recording Studios, Toho Company

Technical Specs

Runtime:

80 min 76 min (DVD edition)

Sound Mix:

Mono

Color:

Color (Eastmancolor)

Aspect Ratio:

2.35 : 1

Did You Know?

Trivia

The original Japanese film's plot is about a search for a secret microfilm, not a recipe for egg salad.

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Goofs

When the Port of Yokohama is shown, the captions call it "Yokahama".

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Quotes

Smiling young man: Would the owner of the rickshaw with license plate number 406, please remove it. Your coolie has a hernia.

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Crazy Credits

Woody Allen is laying on a couch eating an apple while a woman stripper is taking her black dress and undergarments off in front of him. Meanwhile the end credits scroll up on the right side of the screen. The credits say: The characters and events depicted in this photoplay are fictitious. Any similarity to actual persons living or dead is purely coincidental. And if you have been reading this instead of looking at the girl, then see your psychiatrist, or go to a good eye doctor (the credits now scroll faster and give and eye test): E 1 FP 2 TOZ 3 LPED 4 PECFD 5 EDFCZP 6 FELOPZD 7 DEFPOTEC 8 LEFODPCT 9 FSFPTFED 10 ????????? 11 By this time, the stripper is about to remove her underwear. Woody stops her and says, "I promised I'd put her in the film somewhere." (only his voice is dubbed) THE END (appears in the lower left)

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Connections

Spoofed in Escape from It's a Wonderful Life (1996)

User Reviews

The Spy Who Dubbed Me

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.