WHAT'S NEW, PUSSYCAT?

Woody Allen is analyzed by Peter Sellers

WHAT'S NEW PUSSYCAT? (1965). Director: Clive Donner. Screenplay by Woody Allen.

Dr. Frtiz Fassbender (Peter Sellers) is a very weird psychoanalyst with a jealous, Wagnerian wife (Eddra Gale). Most of Fassbender's clients are in serious need of help, including Michael James (Peter O'Toole), who has a fiancee, Carol (Romy Schneider of Sissi), but who just can't keep away from admiring women. Fassbender has the hots for another client, Renee (Capucine of The Pink Panther), but she, too, prefers Michael. Then there's Victor (Woody Allen in his film debut), who supposedly has a girlfriend but who winds up in a dalliance with Carol. And we mustn't forget Liz (Paula Prentiss of Follow the Boys), who decides she wants to marry Michael after a one-night-stand and keeps trying to commit suicide. All of these characters and more wind up at a trysting place where there are rooms named after great lovers ("We've put two cheating men in the Don Juan room." says the proprietor.) If What's New, Pussycat? sounds riotous be warned that it's often more frenetic than funny and that the treatment is a bit smarmy and silly instead of sophisticated. Sellers is wonderful and most of the cast are at least enthusiastic. The opening with Fassbender and his wife is rather hilarious, however, and there are amusing moments throughout. The film's frankness was probably refreshing in this period. At one point Sellers/Fassbender analyzes Victor/Allen. Ultimately, Sellers is the more versatile and brilliant comedian; Woody developed his nebbish persona (from his stand-up act) in this movie and has never veered from it one iota.The title tune is warbled by the then-very popular Tom Jones, who used to get panties thrown at him by the ladies in the audience during his live shows.

Verdict: Silly stuff, but very popular in its day -- Allen's first movie and first hit. **1/2.

THE QUEENS

Raquel Welch and Jean Sorel

THE QUEENS (aka Le fate/1966.) Various directors.

This Italian anthology film dealing with comedic relationships between men and women has a large cast and different directors and features such weak screenplays it's a wonder it was even made. The first story is a silly concoction in which a man saves a strange woman (Monica Vitti of Modesty Blaise) from assault. The second is a weird, confusing trifle with a police officer dealing with an even stranger woman (Claudia Cardinale), who has an adorable baby, and lives in a very odd apartment overhanging a gallery thronging with people -- only there doesn't appear to be any wall, just a big open space over the gallery. The third story stars Jean Sorel [A View from the Bridge] and Raquel Welch [One Million Years B.C.] as neighbors who are married to others. Sorel wonders if his wife is carrying on with another man the way he is carrying on with Welch. This segment is the shortest and leads to nowhere, completely wasting the two sexy leads. The fourth story, which had possibilities, deals with a waiter, Giovanni (Alberto Sordi), who is importuned to sleep with a guest, a countess (Capucine), during a party. When he is hired as a chauffeur, his new employer's wife turns out to be ... the countess. She only recognizes and lusts after him when she's drunk. This segment has an especially flat ending. Vitti and Sordi give the most memorable performances.

Verdict: An intriguing idea betrayed by very poor and ill-conceived screenplays. *1/2.

WALK ON THE WILD SIDE

Barbara Stanwyck

WALK ON THE WILD SIDE (1962). Director: Edward Dmytryk.

"I know what it's like to love someone and not be able to do anything about it."

In the novel A Walk on the Wild Side by Nelson Algren, the protagonist, Dove Linkhorn, is a 16-year-old drifter who winds up in the sex business when he's paid to deflower [supposed] virgins for eager voyeurs. In the Hollywood adaptation, Dove is now thirty [played by British Laurence Harvey], a former caregiver for his dying father, and is shocked to discover that his lady love, Hallie (Capucine), has become a prostitute at a famous New Orleans brothel. The story is still set in New Orleans in the 1930's, but everything else is screenwriters John Fante and Edmund Morris' invention and has virtually nothing to do with Nelson Algren. Dove has gone to work for the Italian store owner Teresina (Anne Baxter) while hoping to re-connect with Hallie, a sculptress who is now hooked up with brothel owner Jo Courtney (Barbara Stanwyck), who seems to think Hallie is her personal property. Courtney's husband Dockery, (Don "Red" Barry) has lost his legs, and Jo deludes herself that her feelings for Hallie are not lustful [this latter business is more tacit than explicit]. When Dove does his damnedest to get Hallie back, all Hell breaks loose, resulting in tragedy. The "Doll House" is the least bawdy "bawdy house" that I've ever seen on film, and I've no doubt some viewers at the time had trouble figuring out whether Hallie was a prostitute or not. Jane Fonda has a supporting part as Kitty, another lost gal who winds up at the Doll House, and Richard Rust, who played the bellboy who marries the blond in Homicidal, is vivid as one of Jo's nastier associates. The performances are okay, with Fonda and Stanwyck, especially Stanwyck, taking top honors, although the material is far beneath the latter. It's pretty much beneath everyone, in fact.

Verdict: Vaguely entertaining and well-made but kind of schlocky in spite of it. **

FELLINI SATYRICON

The pictorial splendor of Satyricon

FELLINI SATYRICON (1969). Director: Federico Fellini. 

"Better to have a dead husband than to lose a living lover."

Petronius' episodic novel "Satryicon," which survives in fragments, is one of the oldest works of literature that still survives in any form. Fellini's film version, which is "freely adapted," is just as episodic and fragmented as the book. The film is full of pictorial splendor and often striking settings and scenic design, making it rather good to look at for the most part, but its lack of a strong narrative structure occasionally makes it exasperating and eventually tedious. The story, such as it is, takes place in ancient Rome and concerns Encolpio (Martin Potter), who tries to wrest his lover, a sixteen-year-old slave boy named Giton (the unprepossessing Max Born), from his, Encolpio's, former lover, Ascilto (Hiram Keller). Unfortunately for Encolpio, when asked to choose between the the two men, the fickle Giton decides upon Ascilto. Giton eventually disappears from the film as the two other men have a variety of bizarre adventures, including attending the garish feast of a pretentious rich man, and becoming slaves of the weird Lica (Alain Cuny). whom Encolpio has to marry before the former is beheaded. In scenes that were not in the novel, Encolpio and Ascilto murder the guards of a hermaphrodite with magical powers, and kidnap her, basically turning into two thugs. Another added Fellini-sequence has Encolpio battling a man made up as a minotaur in a maze beside an arena. Although Encolpio's bout with impotency and attempts to cure it are in the novel, it doesn't seem to occur to him or anyone else that he might regain his potency by bedding a male [after all the only one he is in love with is Giton] instead of the typically grotesque females paraded across the screen by Fellini. It's strange that Fellini made a film with so many homoerotic aspects to it, although most of the characters in it seem bisexual, if not pansexual. Apparently in the novel Encolpio was a former gladiator, so his begging for mercy from the "minotaur" in an almost cowardly fashion -- he says he's just a student and not a fighter -- makes little sense and might even be considered homophobic to a degree. [But the movie seems as confused on that subject as the novel probably was. ] The sudden collapse of a Roman apartment building is an effective sequence, and there are others. The film has sub-titles but because of the international cast it is also dubbed -- and quite badly. Among the many attractive and hideous faces on view, the only recognizable actor is Capucine [The Pink Panther]. 

Verdict: Sometimes this resembles a really bad Russian sci fi flick but if it's more artistic it's not necessarily more successful. **1/2.