• John Ginn's Valley Arts Blog
• Movies in the Valley
• Au Revoir, Avalon!
• Movie Reviews
• Arts Calendar

What's Up Tiger Lily? (1966)
Directed by Woody Allen and Senkichi Tanigucchi
Written by Woody Allen, Julie Bennett, Frank Buxton, Louise Lasser, Len Maxwell, Mickey Rose, Bryan Wilson
Stars: Tatsuya Mihashi, Akiko Wakabayashi, Mie Hama, John Sebastian, Tadao Nakamaru, Susumu Kurobe, Sachio Sakai, Eisei Amamoto, Tetsu Nakamura, Osman Yusuf
Genre: Spy / Spoof / Spyspoof / Comedy /Woody Allen / Japanese / Egg Salad Espionage
Content: brief sex talk, suave coolness, strippers a-Go-Go

What's Up, Tiger Lily?
1960s Japanese spy flick gets a drubbing with a dubbing

"What's Up, Tiger Lily?" is probably of more interest now as a museum piece than as a comedy. In a post-modern age in which too many films deconstruct themselves and are filled with self-knowing winks and asides, Allen's reworking of a 1965 Japanese spy film might seem pretty tame, but in 1966 this was probably considered to be pretty clever. I saw it originally sometime in the early 1970s, and I remember laughing a lot; it seemed pretty audacious at the time. Now, it seems rather commonplace, though some of the comedy still draws a laugh.

The story goes that a studio bought the American distribution rights to a Japanese spy film. This was solidly in the age of Connery Bond, and the original film's influences are obvious. The film is a very low budget, paint-by-numbers, version of a Bond film, with a group of spies and bad people playing games with each other as they apparently search for some microfilm. According to Hitchcock's rule about the Maguffin, it doesn't really matter what the search is about. It's what happens on the journey that really matters. In the case of the Japanese original, even without subtitles or dubbing it is pretty obvious that what happens on its journey is not all that compelling. When the distribution company approached Allen with the project, he proposed dispensing with the film's original story and turn it into a comedy, with an entirely new script.

Allen's first move was to play up the pointlessness of the Maguffin even more by turning all the action into a struggle for control of the ultimate egg salad recipe. According to legend, as the film has it, whoever controls the perfect egg salad recipe can control the world.

This premise is something of a one-note joke, and the film itself could have devolved into a cheap bit of silliness. It is not that difficult to mock a movie, if that is your intent, a la Mystery Science Theatre. But Allen's script, as silly as it's premise is, does tell a coherent story about egg-salad recipe espionage, and it is sometimes so convincing that it is difficult to imagine what the original actors would be talking about if it wasn't egg salad. Adding to the trick, Allen works in several recurring motives and grace notes that miraculously pay off in later scenes. There was definitely some thought put into this.

But in spite of his script, much of the film's main entertainment value comes from the nakedly revealing depiction of what defined “cool” and “suave” in the 1960s. When one of the film's "Bond Girl" equivalents enters a motel room clad only in a bath towel and purrs "Name three U.S. presidents," and the Bond wannabe crosses to her naming presidents with arch insinuation, it tells you pretty much everything you need to know about how uncool a lot of that era really was.

One word of warning to younger readers now, however, who might feel the urge to snicker in superiority. Forty years from now it could be humbling to realize how laughable we might seem now to future audiences. Such is the way of the world.