What’s Up, Tiger Lily? (1966)

Directed by: Woody Allen, Senkichi Taniguchi | 80 minutes | action, comedy | Actors: Tatsuya Mihashi, Akiko Wakabayashi, Mie Hama, Woody Allen, Tadao Nakamaru, Susumu Kurobe, Sachio Sakai, Eisei Amamoto, Tetsu Nakamura, Osman Yusuf, John Sebastian, Zal Yanovsky

For his first film, Woody Allen had a brilliant idea: take a campy, James Bond-style Japanese film and swap the original with English dialogue. This dialogue can now deviate from what the images communicate and thus create attractive humor. It’s the type of approach that can make for a hilarious cult hit. However, “Tiger Lily” turns out to be a surprisingly unfunny job.

The film begins with the original Japanese film with the original dialogue still intact. Subtitles are not necessary, because the images of this action scene say it all. A fight breaks out in a living room between the good guys and the bad guys, and this piece of film is particularly funny because of the contrived fighting moments and the clearly Hollywood-inspired character. But then the film stops and we see Woody Allen sitting at the table with a journalist who asks him about his project. He explains himself and a little later we are watching the same movie, but with English dialogue.

It immediately becomes a lot less fun. Occasionally you will have to smile, but most of the time the film is quite soporific, especially when we are treated to a performance by the then popular rock band “The Lovin’ Spoonful”. These inserted segments take way too long and add nothing. It is only after about twenty minutes that the (new) relationship between image and sound is played in an interesting way when the main character announces: “This is the obligatory scene in which the director and his wife walk by”, after which we see a man see a woman walking through the image, and the man exclaims: “Egoist!”. The scene on this is also amusing, when his female partner says she wants to tear the man’s clothes off, and then, as he leans in to kiss her, quickly holds a pair of binoculars in front of her eyes to survey the surroundings. Scenes like this create nice contrasts between image and dialogue and play with the viewer’s expectations in an interesting way. For a moment you think Allen has hit the right note, when something funny happens again soon. The villain walks on a boat past a couple of cabins, where all whores are waiting for him, who all say hello to him. At the last one he stops and suddenly shouts: “Mom!”. The scene ends when he suddenly knocks her out. “She takes a good punch” is the dry comment.

There are still some nice finds, or very bland ones that also make you laugh because of their slackness. As in the case of our hero’s response to the name of the villain, Anthony Wong: “Two Wongs don’t make a Wight”. Very wrong and bland, but that’s why it’s funny. But the hilarity doesn’t last for more than fifteen minutes. Too often they stay close to the images or try too exaggeratedly to be funny with accents or silly laughter. The whole quest for the egg salad is quite nicely conceived and provides mild humor here and there, but the film cannot be called really successful.

Allen’s exciting promise before the start of the “actual” film that we will see images that say something completely different than the dialogue, is unfortunately too little fulfilled. Too often we work with literal jokes and typos, and too little with humor due to “clashes” between image and sound. It’s nice when the film is stopped at various moments by Allen. For example, halfway through the film, the journalist asks if Allen can explain the chaotic story to the viewer: “No”, he says curtly, and the film continues. And towards the end of the film, everything is put on pause. Initially because there is a hair on the lens that the operator has to remove, so that we see a hand and arm appear in the picture, but it results in a depiction of shadow animals in front of the projector, and a little later in an intimate kissing scene between the operator and his girlfriend. Absurd, but at least it will bring some life back to the brewery. Something that, despite the scenes discussed, is chronically lacking in this film.