What s up tiger lily
What s up tiger lily
What’s Up, Tiger Lily?
1966, Comedy, 1h 20m
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User Reviews
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
In its own nature, the film being made fun of within the film What’s Up, Tiger Lily is inherently silly. It’s a James Bond rip-off done to the Nth degree, where based on only a few films its Japanese B-movie counterpart does everything just in imagery alone to make it a ludicrous action-movie experience. Just in the opening moments, even before Woody Allen appears on the screen to explain the method to the madness in the film, is quite funny in a bad-movie sort of way. And I think that it’s probably not too unexpected that it puts a divide in Woody Allen’s audience. There’s the group that’s more into just his later style of wit and humor, and I can tell that for those it’s not surprising to see some not really ‘getting’ into this style of wacky, off-the-wall, cartoon humor. But after seeing a couple of more dramatic films recently, this one really did the trick. It’s the film that was the most likely to spawn the underground Night of the Living Dead parody of 1991, along with Kung Pow (the former being better than the latter), but it also has a kin-ship, if not ascendancy, of the ZAZ comedies of the late 70s and 80s, and even a tinge of Mel Brooks.
So, for me, this is actually one of my favorite Woody Allen comedies. Not really up as high in terms of cinematic ‘quality’ (in terms of craftsmanship, I mean) as his 70s films, but with material like this, it’s almost required not to carp. Woody and his team of writers and voice actors almost have it cut out for them. There’s much to wonder, perhaps, in what the ‘real’ plot of this Japanese spy film (Kokusai himitsu keisatsu: Kagi no kagi, or International Secret Police: Key of Keys) is almost as funny as what the writers come up with. Spies and assassins are on the look out for, get this, an Egg salad recipe! But, of course, this is just as much a gimmick as is, well, much of the rest of what comes out of the actor’s mouths. At times I wasn’t even sure if it was all Woody Jokes, or which were (twenty minutes, apparently, are not by Woody Allen’s group but by someone else, though it’s hard to tell which is a credit to most involved), but I didn’t care. It’s got the kind of jokes that, on a certain plain, can allow you to laugh like an idiot.
Certain gags just come with the territory of the film itself, and are heightened by the added bits during fights. But much of the film is based on the wit Woody’s known for, though here sometimes to equally ‘bad-pun’ and juvenile terms, even featuring (practically never in any of his other films) rock and roll and cartoon-like voices (my favorite the snake-obsessed henchman) right out of Looney Tunes and Ren & Stimpy. So many lines strike up laughs to greater or lesser degrees it’s hard to really spot them out, but it’s suffice to say that by the time it’s done- and through its end credits featuring an eye-exam- you’ll know whether you’ll want to watch it again like a ZAZ or Brooksfilm to memorize the quotable lines and bits, or put it in the lower, deeper-to-find section in your video collection. Things like a spy who bursts into an operatic love song during tense confrontation scenes, and with puns like «two Wong’s don’t make a right», are what you can expect in this film, but there’s more, and it will either ignite the anything-goes funny button, or just not do it for you. One thing’s for sure, you’ll never see the Lovin’ Spoonful the same way again.
By the way, this review reflects the Woody Allen dub of the movie (of what’s 2/3 there anyway), and it’s available on the DVD; recommended over the other dub that’s been floating around too.
I have noticed several posts here about how people had seen this movie years ago and thought it was hysterical, but then have recently seen it on TV and wondered why they thought so back then. The answer is that you are probably watching a different version.
Although I am sure someone more in tune with the background of this movie can explain it in more precise and detailed terms, the version being shown on networks like TCM has been re-written, re-dubbed and is a lot less funny than the original. I have a copy from a 1982 video tape and that original version is great. I saw the TCM broadcast version and couldn’t believe how badly the jokes were changed and how unfunny this film now is, most likely in the name of political correctness. I can certainly understand anyone being dissatisfied with the film as it is now. However, if you can, find an old video of this classic and watch it the way it was meant to be seen.
What’s Up, Tiger Lily? was Woody Allen’s directorial debut. Kind of.
Bear with me on this one, the film is basically the Toho movie Kokusai himitsu keisatsu: Kayaku no taru (Key of Keys) from 1964 with a comedy dub over it. And by comedy dub I mean totally over the top silly stuff, yet somehow someway it works.
I don’t like Woody Allen, I find his movies boring and pretentious but this was an unexpected surprise and nothing like I’ve seen from him before (Probably because it’s not technically one of his movies).
It takes a lot to get me laughing out loud especially in hysterics but What’s Up, Tiger Lily? managed it several times. Sure a lot of it is really silly and makes you wonder quite what in the blue hell you’re watching but when it’s funny it’s very very funny.
I found myself unleashing with a hearty belly laugh multiple times throughout the film and I honestly can’t remember the last time a film managed that. Sure the really funny moments aren’t exactly frequent but when they arrive you know about it.
If you like low brow humor, like really really low brow humor you might get a kick out of this.
Some real belly laughs
A very novel idea
Stupid musical interludes
Some stuff just too silly to be funny
Let that be a lesson to aspiring filmmakers, like Walt Disney’s empire all started with a mouse, the most prolific, emblematic and iconic director of his generation started his career with nothing but a joke. And if one should applaud the instinct of producer Henry G. Saperstein who found the 1965 Japanese spy film «Key to Keys» so confusing it was a better idea to reinvent the lines and Lenny Bruce to turn down the project, Woody Allen should take the credit for having turned a silly wannabe James Bond into a masterpiece of purely artisanal comedy.
«What’s Up, Tiger Lily?» aka «Woody Allen Number One» turned a successful comedian with a certain ability for self-derision to a director with high comedic potential, one his career never contradicted in the 70s before he displayed his Bergmanian side. And all it took was the idea of redubbing a foreign film with random lines from American voice actors and turn what would have been some random and forgettable ‘secret code’ mission (maybe a missile or a Swiss vault code) into the quest for an egg salad recipe that would earn its possessor eternal wisdom. It’s not just silly, it rises below silliness like Mel Brooks’ «Producers» rose below vulgarity.
Obviously, that «Key to Keys» flick was made during the big spy-film craze and wasn’t exactly meant to be taken seriously but what Woody Allen did is simply give the film its ticket to immortality by enhancing its comedic power. It could have been a forgotten Japanese film made totally risible by the passing of time, now it’s become the one that made a name of Woody Allen and incidentally made me laugh, laugh and laugh. Laughing out loud every twenty seconds was an experience I was truly missing.
The secret of the hilarity is simple: when we watch these 60s movies, by many standards they look dated, hell even legitimate Bond movies have their silly parts. We know it. Allen knows that the public knows and so he transforms unintentional humor into an intentional one, he becomes the master of laughs and he does it in an extremely random and effortless way. A guru shows a plan saying it’s the villain’s house «does he live in that paper?» «no, idiot, he lives in real house», that’s when I understood I was getting into an interesting territory.
Later, a man sees a bunch of prostitutes and calls one of them «mother» and. well, I can just plug every gag in this review, let’s just say the film was so funny that I had to rewind the scenes again, film them on my phone and send the clips to my father to tell him how funny it is, I think it stretched my viewing for about half an hour. The mouse bit got me mad. It’s interesting that this is not exactly remembered as the first Allen movie, I always thought it was «Take the Money and Run», I guess this is the debut’s debut, the film that allowed him to make his bones, a warm up.
But let’s not trivialize the concept of gag-dubbing, did you know that Michel Hazanavicius who directed the «OSS» movies with Jean Dujardin and Best Picture winner «The Artist» in 2011 started with a similar concept. It was in 1993 where he took footage from classic Warner Bros movies and redubbed them in French, using the real voice-actors, and turn it into a comedy titled «The Great Diversion» (or Misappropriation) where John Wayne became George Abitbol the classiest man on Earth. The film is a cult-classic in France.
You might also be familiar with a sadly forgotten 90s cartoon named «Samurai Pizza Cats» bought by Saban studios. They didn’t have the original screenplays and so the American team came up with their own lines and the cartoons became a hilarious case of parodic humor, self-referential and fourth-wall-breaking humor. The French version was equally hilarious and I couldn’t believe it when I learned that the original cartoon was more serious.
I guess gag-dubbing has its place among the great comedic devices as it speaks something universal about the art of humor which is to distort reality or get as far from it as possible. I used to play a game with my daughter: I turned the volume down during ads or a serious movie and made up my own lines, the more random, the more idiotic and the more gross-out it was, the louder she laughed.
Of course, Allen couldn’t make a big career out of one simple gimmick, but the final credits sequence proved that he had a few other tricks under his sleeve and it would take more than a «tiger» in his comedic tank to drive his inspiration.
This isn’t auteur Woody Allen, this is incredibly early and silly Woody Allen and it’s hilarious.
He took a cheap Japanese James Bond type movie, mixed up the scenes and redubbed it into English but having changed the dialogue completely. So while the original movie dealt with a spy story the new one deals with the ultimate egg salad recipe because he who owns it controls the world. Yes, that’s right. You now have people fighting and searching for an egg salad recipe.
And that’s pretty much it. The situations are made all the more ridiculous from what the characters are now saying. Things like the hero Phil Moskowitz, a fine Japanese name if I ever heard one, calling his foes names like «Saracen Pig» and «Turkish Taffy» as he fights them. The aptly named «Cobra Man» who sounds a lot like Peter Lorre and he’s getting his cobra ready to marry a chicken. And who can forget the High Macha Of Rashpur, a totally real sounding place and they’re on the waiting list for a country and as soon as there’s an opening, they’re in.
Above all else, don’t try to take this seriously.
Woody Allen gives a Japanese-directed James Bond-styled actioner a new soundtrack, including different dialogue telling a new story. Allen’s changes turn the film into a spy versus spy quest for the recipe of the world’s best egg salad.
I’m a huge Woody Allen fan. The idea behind this film is promising and the basic premise of Allen’s story, grafted on to a pre-existing film, International Secret Police: Key of Keys (Kokusai himitsu keisatsu: Kagi no kagi), from 1965, by Senkichi Taniguchi, is funny, if silly. However, this is one of the very few Allen films that just doesn’t work for me. The Taniguchi film seems chopped up to a point of incoherence (maybe it’s presented here in its entirety and in the same order, but that would mean that its running time is around 60 minutes or less), although that could be a factor of the changed dialogue. I found myself wishing there was an alternate soundtrack that was a legitimate dubbing of the original film.
Although there are a few very funny scenes, one-liners and ideas in Allen’s new story, most of it isn’t very funny. Too many scenes seem like they may be serious translations of the Japanese dialogue. There are too many occurrences of silly vocal noises, but not enough to make that a motif so that it’s funny. There are too many long sections where the film is mostly boring. The untranslated beginning goes on far too long. The mini-interview with Allen that explains the film’s premise would only be funny if it weren’t true. The Lovin’ Spoonful scenes aren’t funny, and perhaps weren’t intended to be—they seem like a studio attempt to try to put more butts in theater seats upon the film’s release by featuring a popular rock group. It doesn’t seem like Allen spent much time on thisthe dialogue seems largely improvised and mostly disjointed. In short, the film is basically a mess, and only worth viewing for Woody Allen completist, and men with a serious Asian woman fetish (it’s also worth noting that Taniguchi seems to share a foot fetish).
What would have worked better, and probably would have made the film much funnier, is if Allen would have written and directed both the film that we’re seeing visually and a completely different story for the soundtrack. Much more time would have to be spent crafting each component to make them seem unrelated but coherent and funny. That’s an experiment that remains to be done, to my knowledge.
There are enough positive aspects that the film doesn’t deserve a 1—as I noted, there are times that What’s Up, Tiger Lily is funny—but the best I can do is a 5 out of 10.
This is juvenile. At least the jokes are.
But those of us who follow Woody closely don’t particularly watch his films because they are intrinsically good. Rather, they provide us with a collection of essays on film-making that plumb some rather deep ideas. Or at least his real movies do.
But even in this lark, which isn’t all his anyway, you can see his approach to film even before he became an important figure in the community. He believes in dual narratives: the story and the story about the story. Its a French New Wave idea. (Indeed, he plays King Lear in Godard’s best movie.)
He believes in creating absurd humor between these two layers. Actually, he was mining this as a standup comedian and writer well before getting involved in film-making. He credits Alfred Jarrey and it shows.
How best to have one story laid on another? You just buy a story and make another on top. Simple. Make sure the audience has at least one sequence that is fully outside both layers. Here, it is a shift to the «projectionist’s» hand that segues into a encounter of silhouettes.
Of course, the idea of the thing is far funnier than any execution could be, but even that fact is to the point.
Back during the Colorization Wars of the 1980s, Woody Allen was uncharacteristically public about defending the history and artistry of his craft against those who were eager to take old black & white classics and turn them into digitized coloring books. Chief among the foes of the cinematic art were Ted Turner, who had used his power as a media mogul to buy up control of a huge backlog of films by MGM, RKO, Warner Bros. and other studios as fodder for his cable TV channels. Whether as philistine or shrewd capitalist, Turner hoped to prolong the money-making life of old movies by making them look vaguely newer through color. Of this, Woody said, «To change someone’s work without any regard to his wishes shows a total contempt for film, for the director and for the public.» To which Ted replied «WHAT’S UP, TIGER LILY?» It was not a question.
And unfortunately, Ted had a point.
It may never be known if KEY OF KEYS was/is a good film, but it is apparent that for all of his efforts, Woody couldn’t save it for American audiences. Rearranging the scenes and putting smart alec remarks and inane non sequiturs into the unsuspecting mouths of the actors must have been fun and maybe even an educational experience for the neophyte filmmaker. The result it like a 3-D MAD Magazine satire or a trial run for the type of comedy that would make its breakthrough with AIRPLANE! and THE NAKED GUN. But in the end, TIGER LILY isn’t all that funny, or at least not consistently funny. For every good chuckle there are a dozen lead balloons and too much of the dialogue is used to explain the convoluted plot. If appearances are anything, the reconstruction of the film was a rush job and it all was done on the cheap.
So the interesting thing about TIGER LILY is not its value as art or entertainment, but the ethics behind it. You can’t blame Woody for taking on the project; it must have been a challenge and it was certainly an opportunity to move his career into a new direction. But, as the Ted Turner situation would make apparent, TIGER LILY is not the film that the makers of KEY OF KEYS had envisioned. That is not to say that in its original Japanese form, the film was a CITIZEN KANE or a MALTESE FALCON or even a MANHATTAN, but whatever it was, Allen greatly altered the way it would be experienced by most of the world. Of course, Woody never claimed that his version of the film was meant to replace or even compete with the original, but just the same he negated another director’s work.
If anything TIGER LILY is a lesson in both the plastic and the fragile nature of film as an art. Whether with mischief or malice, a little imagination can alter not just the tone of a film but its message and its vision. And as the BROKEBACK MOUNTAIN parodies that made their way to Youtube.com proved, you don’t even have to be a professional to become a re-director.
Жизнь как творчество
Земную жизнь пройдя до половины, я очутился в сумрачном лесу…
Комедия «Что случилось, тигровая лилия?» («What’s Up, Tiger Lily?»)
11.04.2011
 | Режиссеры: Вуди Аллен, Сенкичи Танигучи |
В ролях: Татсуя Михаши, Акико Вакабаяши, Мие Хама, Тадао Накамару, Сусуму Куробе, Сачио Сакаи, Хидейо Амамото, Тетсу Накамура, Осман Юсуф, Вуди Аллен, The Loving Spoonful и др.
Авторы сценария: Вуди Аллен, Джулия Беннет, Фрэнк Бакстон, Луиза Лассер, Лен Максвелл, Микки Роуз и Брайан Уилсон
Продюсер: Чарльз Йоффе
Композитор: The Loving Spoonful
Производство: США
Год: 1966
Длительность: 80 мин.
Бюджет/Сборы: — / —
IMDb:ID 0061177
Назад! Моя секретная шпионская камера
только что сделала снимки всех вас сквозь одежду.
Если вы не отпустите меня,
ваши фотографии в обнаженном виде
через час будут продаваться в каждой школе Токио.
Если ваши тела не идеальны,
вы обязаны отпустить меня.
Типичная шутка из фильма
Ранние работы Аллена радуют своим многообразием и бьющей через край авторской фантазией — взять хотя бы такие непохожие друг на друга фильмы как «Спящий«, «Любовь и смерть» и «Все, что вы всегда хотели знать о сексе…«. Но при всем при этом то, что Вуди сделал здесь, стало для меня полной неожиданностью.
Но самому Аллену фильм не понравился. Он изначально считал его замысел неудачным и работал под давлением продюсеров. Да и сам прием переозвучивания готового фильма, как оказывается, тогда не был в новинку на американском телевидении.
Еще одним поводом для недовольства Аллена стало включение студией в фильм музыкальных номеров в исполнении группы «The Loving Spoonful». Это в очередной раз убедило Вуди в том, что свои собственные картины должен ставить только он сам. Саундтрек фильма вышел в качестве отдельного альбома группы.
В общем и целом это интересное и свежее кино, которое стоит посмотреть всем, а поклонникам творчества Вуди — особенно.
В двух словах: оригинально
User Reviews
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
In its own nature, the film being made fun of within the film What’s Up, Tiger Lily is inherently silly. It’s a James Bond rip-off done to the Nth degree, where based on only a few films its Japanese B-movie counterpart does everything just in imagery alone to make it a ludicrous action-movie experience. Just in the opening moments, even before Woody Allen appears on the screen to explain the method to the madness in the film, is quite funny in a bad-movie sort of way. And I think that it’s probably not too unexpected that it puts a divide in Woody Allen’s audience. There’s the group that’s more into just his later style of wit and humor, and I can tell that for those it’s not surprising to see some not really ‘getting’ into this style of wacky, off-the-wall, cartoon humor. But after seeing a couple of more dramatic films recently, this one really did the trick. It’s the film that was the most likely to spawn the underground Night of the Living Dead parody of 1991, along with Kung Pow (the former being better than the latter), but it also has a kin-ship, if not ascendancy, of the ZAZ comedies of the late 70s and 80s, and even a tinge of Mel Brooks.
So, for me, this is actually one of my favorite Woody Allen comedies. Not really up as high in terms of cinematic ‘quality’ (in terms of craftsmanship, I mean) as his 70s films, but with material like this, it’s almost required not to carp. Woody and his team of writers and voice actors almost have it cut out for them. There’s much to wonder, perhaps, in what the ‘real’ plot of this Japanese spy film (Kokusai himitsu keisatsu: Kagi no kagi, or International Secret Police: Key of Keys) is almost as funny as what the writers come up with. Spies and assassins are on the look out for, get this, an Egg salad recipe! But, of course, this is just as much a gimmick as is, well, much of the rest of what comes out of the actor’s mouths. At times I wasn’t even sure if it was all Woody Jokes, or which were (twenty minutes, apparently, are not by Woody Allen’s group but by someone else, though it’s hard to tell which is a credit to most involved), but I didn’t care. It’s got the kind of jokes that, on a certain plain, can allow you to laugh like an idiot.
Certain gags just come with the territory of the film itself, and are heightened by the added bits during fights. But much of the film is based on the wit Woody’s known for, though here sometimes to equally ‘bad-pun’ and juvenile terms, even featuring (practically never in any of his other films) rock and roll and cartoon-like voices (my favorite the snake-obsessed henchman) right out of Looney Tunes and Ren & Stimpy. So many lines strike up laughs to greater or lesser degrees it’s hard to really spot them out, but it’s suffice to say that by the time it’s done- and through its end credits featuring an eye-exam- you’ll know whether you’ll want to watch it again like a ZAZ or Brooksfilm to memorize the quotable lines and bits, or put it in the lower, deeper-to-find section in your video collection. Things like a spy who bursts into an operatic love song during tense confrontation scenes, and with puns like «two Wong’s don’t make a right», are what you can expect in this film, but there’s more, and it will either ignite the anything-goes funny button, or just not do it for you. One thing’s for sure, you’ll never see the Lovin’ Spoonful the same way again.
By the way, this review reflects the Woody Allen dub of the movie (of what’s 2/3 there anyway), and it’s available on the DVD; recommended over the other dub that’s been floating around too.
I have noticed several posts here about how people had seen this movie years ago and thought it was hysterical, but then have recently seen it on TV and wondered why they thought so back then. The answer is that you are probably watching a different version.
Although I am sure someone more in tune with the background of this movie can explain it in more precise and detailed terms, the version being shown on networks like TCM has been re-written, re-dubbed and is a lot less funny than the original. I have a copy from a 1982 video tape and that original version is great. I saw the TCM broadcast version and couldn’t believe how badly the jokes were changed and how unfunny this film now is, most likely in the name of political correctness. I can certainly understand anyone being dissatisfied with the film as it is now. However, if you can, find an old video of this classic and watch it the way it was meant to be seen.
What’s Up, Tiger Lily? was Woody Allen’s directorial debut. Kind of.
Bear with me on this one, the film is basically the Toho movie Kokusai himitsu keisatsu: Kayaku no taru (Key of Keys) from 1964 with a comedy dub over it. And by comedy dub I mean totally over the top silly stuff, yet somehow someway it works.
I don’t like Woody Allen, I find his movies boring and pretentious but this was an unexpected surprise and nothing like I’ve seen from him before (Probably because it’s not technically one of his movies).
It takes a lot to get me laughing out loud especially in hysterics but What’s Up, Tiger Lily? managed it several times. Sure a lot of it is really silly and makes you wonder quite what in the blue hell you’re watching but when it’s funny it’s very very funny.
I found myself unleashing with a hearty belly laugh multiple times throughout the film and I honestly can’t remember the last time a film managed that. Sure the really funny moments aren’t exactly frequent but when they arrive you know about it.
If you like low brow humor, like really really low brow humor you might get a kick out of this.
Some real belly laughs
A very novel idea
Stupid musical interludes
Some stuff just too silly to be funny
Let that be a lesson to aspiring filmmakers, like Walt Disney’s empire all started with a mouse, the most prolific, emblematic and iconic director of his generation started his career with nothing but a joke. And if one should applaud the instinct of producer Henry G. Saperstein who found the 1965 Japanese spy film «Key to Keys» so confusing it was a better idea to reinvent the lines and Lenny Bruce to turn down the project, Woody Allen should take the credit for having turned a silly wannabe James Bond into a masterpiece of purely artisanal comedy.
«What’s Up, Tiger Lily?» aka «Woody Allen Number One» turned a successful comedian with a certain ability for self-derision to a director with high comedic potential, one his career never contradicted in the 70s before he displayed his Bergmanian side. And all it took was the idea of redubbing a foreign film with random lines from American voice actors and turn what would have been some random and forgettable ‘secret code’ mission (maybe a missile or a Swiss vault code) into the quest for an egg salad recipe that would earn its possessor eternal wisdom. It’s not just silly, it rises below silliness like Mel Brooks’ «Producers» rose below vulgarity.
Obviously, that «Key to Keys» flick was made during the big spy-film craze and wasn’t exactly meant to be taken seriously but what Woody Allen did is simply give the film its ticket to immortality by enhancing its comedic power. It could have been a forgotten Japanese film made totally risible by the passing of time, now it’s become the one that made a name of Woody Allen and incidentally made me laugh, laugh and laugh. Laughing out loud every twenty seconds was an experience I was truly missing.
The secret of the hilarity is simple: when we watch these 60s movies, by many standards they look dated, hell even legitimate Bond movies have their silly parts. We know it. Allen knows that the public knows and so he transforms unintentional humor into an intentional one, he becomes the master of laughs and he does it in an extremely random and effortless way. A guru shows a plan saying it’s the villain’s house «does he live in that paper?» «no, idiot, he lives in real house», that’s when I understood I was getting into an interesting territory.
Later, a man sees a bunch of prostitutes and calls one of them «mother» and. well, I can just plug every gag in this review, let’s just say the film was so funny that I had to rewind the scenes again, film them on my phone and send the clips to my father to tell him how funny it is, I think it stretched my viewing for about half an hour. The mouse bit got me mad. It’s interesting that this is not exactly remembered as the first Allen movie, I always thought it was «Take the Money and Run», I guess this is the debut’s debut, the film that allowed him to make his bones, a warm up.
But let’s not trivialize the concept of gag-dubbing, did you know that Michel Hazanavicius who directed the «OSS» movies with Jean Dujardin and Best Picture winner «The Artist» in 2011 started with a similar concept. It was in 1993 where he took footage from classic Warner Bros movies and redubbed them in French, using the real voice-actors, and turn it into a comedy titled «The Great Diversion» (or Misappropriation) where John Wayne became George Abitbol the classiest man on Earth. The film is a cult-classic in France.
You might also be familiar with a sadly forgotten 90s cartoon named «Samurai Pizza Cats» bought by Saban studios. They didn’t have the original screenplays and so the American team came up with their own lines and the cartoons became a hilarious case of parodic humor, self-referential and fourth-wall-breaking humor. The French version was equally hilarious and I couldn’t believe it when I learned that the original cartoon was more serious.
I guess gag-dubbing has its place among the great comedic devices as it speaks something universal about the art of humor which is to distort reality or get as far from it as possible. I used to play a game with my daughter: I turned the volume down during ads or a serious movie and made up my own lines, the more random, the more idiotic and the more gross-out it was, the louder she laughed.
Of course, Allen couldn’t make a big career out of one simple gimmick, but the final credits sequence proved that he had a few other tricks under his sleeve and it would take more than a «tiger» in his comedic tank to drive his inspiration.
This isn’t auteur Woody Allen, this is incredibly early and silly Woody Allen and it’s hilarious.
He took a cheap Japanese James Bond type movie, mixed up the scenes and redubbed it into English but having changed the dialogue completely. So while the original movie dealt with a spy story the new one deals with the ultimate egg salad recipe because he who owns it controls the world. Yes, that’s right. You now have people fighting and searching for an egg salad recipe.
And that’s pretty much it. The situations are made all the more ridiculous from what the characters are now saying. Things like the hero Phil Moskowitz, a fine Japanese name if I ever heard one, calling his foes names like «Saracen Pig» and «Turkish Taffy» as he fights them. The aptly named «Cobra Man» who sounds a lot like Peter Lorre and he’s getting his cobra ready to marry a chicken. And who can forget the High Macha Of Rashpur, a totally real sounding place and they’re on the waiting list for a country and as soon as there’s an opening, they’re in.
Above all else, don’t try to take this seriously.
Woody Allen gives a Japanese-directed James Bond-styled actioner a new soundtrack, including different dialogue telling a new story. Allen’s changes turn the film into a spy versus spy quest for the recipe of the world’s best egg salad.
I’m a huge Woody Allen fan. The idea behind this film is promising and the basic premise of Allen’s story, grafted on to a pre-existing film, International Secret Police: Key of Keys (Kokusai himitsu keisatsu: Kagi no kagi), from 1965, by Senkichi Taniguchi, is funny, if silly. However, this is one of the very few Allen films that just doesn’t work for me. The Taniguchi film seems chopped up to a point of incoherence (maybe it’s presented here in its entirety and in the same order, but that would mean that its running time is around 60 minutes or less), although that could be a factor of the changed dialogue. I found myself wishing there was an alternate soundtrack that was a legitimate dubbing of the original film.
Although there are a few very funny scenes, one-liners and ideas in Allen’s new story, most of it isn’t very funny. Too many scenes seem like they may be serious translations of the Japanese dialogue. There are too many occurrences of silly vocal noises, but not enough to make that a motif so that it’s funny. There are too many long sections where the film is mostly boring. The untranslated beginning goes on far too long. The mini-interview with Allen that explains the film’s premise would only be funny if it weren’t true. The Lovin’ Spoonful scenes aren’t funny, and perhaps weren’t intended to be—they seem like a studio attempt to try to put more butts in theater seats upon the film’s release by featuring a popular rock group. It doesn’t seem like Allen spent much time on thisthe dialogue seems largely improvised and mostly disjointed. In short, the film is basically a mess, and only worth viewing for Woody Allen completist, and men with a serious Asian woman fetish (it’s also worth noting that Taniguchi seems to share a foot fetish).
What would have worked better, and probably would have made the film much funnier, is if Allen would have written and directed both the film that we’re seeing visually and a completely different story for the soundtrack. Much more time would have to be spent crafting each component to make them seem unrelated but coherent and funny. That’s an experiment that remains to be done, to my knowledge.
There are enough positive aspects that the film doesn’t deserve a 1—as I noted, there are times that What’s Up, Tiger Lily is funny—but the best I can do is a 5 out of 10.
This is juvenile. At least the jokes are.
But those of us who follow Woody closely don’t particularly watch his films because they are intrinsically good. Rather, they provide us with a collection of essays on film-making that plumb some rather deep ideas. Or at least his real movies do.
But even in this lark, which isn’t all his anyway, you can see his approach to film even before he became an important figure in the community. He believes in dual narratives: the story and the story about the story. Its a French New Wave idea. (Indeed, he plays King Lear in Godard’s best movie.)
He believes in creating absurd humor between these two layers. Actually, he was mining this as a standup comedian and writer well before getting involved in film-making. He credits Alfred Jarrey and it shows.
How best to have one story laid on another? You just buy a story and make another on top. Simple. Make sure the audience has at least one sequence that is fully outside both layers. Here, it is a shift to the «projectionist’s» hand that segues into a encounter of silhouettes.
Of course, the idea of the thing is far funnier than any execution could be, but even that fact is to the point.
Back during the Colorization Wars of the 1980s, Woody Allen was uncharacteristically public about defending the history and artistry of his craft against those who were eager to take old black & white classics and turn them into digitized coloring books. Chief among the foes of the cinematic art were Ted Turner, who had used his power as a media mogul to buy up control of a huge backlog of films by MGM, RKO, Warner Bros. and other studios as fodder for his cable TV channels. Whether as philistine or shrewd capitalist, Turner hoped to prolong the money-making life of old movies by making them look vaguely newer through color. Of this, Woody said, «To change someone’s work without any regard to his wishes shows a total contempt for film, for the director and for the public.» To which Ted replied «WHAT’S UP, TIGER LILY?» It was not a question.
And unfortunately, Ted had a point.
It may never be known if KEY OF KEYS was/is a good film, but it is apparent that for all of his efforts, Woody couldn’t save it for American audiences. Rearranging the scenes and putting smart alec remarks and inane non sequiturs into the unsuspecting mouths of the actors must have been fun and maybe even an educational experience for the neophyte filmmaker. The result it like a 3-D MAD Magazine satire or a trial run for the type of comedy that would make its breakthrough with AIRPLANE! and THE NAKED GUN. But in the end, TIGER LILY isn’t all that funny, or at least not consistently funny. For every good chuckle there are a dozen lead balloons and too much of the dialogue is used to explain the convoluted plot. If appearances are anything, the reconstruction of the film was a rush job and it all was done on the cheap.
So the interesting thing about TIGER LILY is not its value as art or entertainment, but the ethics behind it. You can’t blame Woody for taking on the project; it must have been a challenge and it was certainly an opportunity to move his career into a new direction. But, as the Ted Turner situation would make apparent, TIGER LILY is not the film that the makers of KEY OF KEYS had envisioned. That is not to say that in its original Japanese form, the film was a CITIZEN KANE or a MALTESE FALCON or even a MANHATTAN, but whatever it was, Allen greatly altered the way it would be experienced by most of the world. Of course, Woody never claimed that his version of the film was meant to replace or even compete with the original, but just the same he negated another director’s work.
If anything TIGER LILY is a lesson in both the plastic and the fragile nature of film as an art. Whether with mischief or malice, a little imagination can alter not just the tone of a film but its message and its vision. And as the BROKEBACK MOUNTAIN parodies that made their way to Youtube.com proved, you don’t even have to be a professional to become a re-director.