What's New Pussycat

Woody Allen is a funny guy. He has written some great lines for film and print. But in the early years of his cinematic career, he wrote a few films that might be called juvenile. This is one of those films.

"What's New, Pussycat?" feels like the convergence of "Rowan and Martin's Laugh-in" and "It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World." It has a wonderful cast, but if you want to see Romy Schneider, Capucine, Peter Sellers, Peter O'Toole or Woody Allen himself, there are better films that showcase their talents. I hope the cast had plenty of fun making this romp, so there is justification for its existence. Otherwise, I find it to a tiresome, unoriginal sequence of scenes done better elsewhere.

The plot is thin, concerning the central character, Michael James (Peter O'Toole), who is a womanizer. He is lucky enough to have beautiful women drop into his lap, but most of them are hopeless flirts, nymphomaniacs and one-dimensional parodies of the 60's liberated woman. Good bedroom farces don't need wacky music to be funny and are based upon more than people inconveniently bumping into each other.

The film is not a total waste. There are a few really good lines. And it is populated with plenty of female beauty. But it would be a few years yet until Woody Allen would write his best work. "What's New Pussycat?" was his first filmic venture. "Sleeper" would follow eight years later in 1973. In 1977, his writing talent would take a substantial leap with "Annie Hall."