(Oops, consider this Wednesday morning’s post)
With Sandy’s movie collection still packed up in Utah, I got to pick most of the movies this year. The one I went back and forth on the most was 1966 What’s Up Tiger Lily? Basically, then hot stand up comic Woody Allen and friends was hired to comically dub over a Japanese Bondian spy film, International Secret Police: Key of Keys (which was already campy, which helped) and make it an outright comedy. The idea was so novel at the time that Allen appears in a prologue explaining the whole thing.
I’ve been meaning to show this forever, but it always fell victim to “I have other things I want to show more” and “It’s a comedy, so other people might not think it’s funny.” Comedies are like that, right? Also, I first saw it and fell in love with it as a maybe 12 year old at a triple Woody Allen feature at the Pickwick Theatre. Love & Death was definitely on that bill, although I can’t remember if the third film was Bananas or Sleeper.
Anyway, the jokes are often juvenile and dumb (to me, in the best way), so again, would people seeing it for the first time find it as funny as I do? On top of that, the presentation was imperfect. The DVD is so old it doesn’t have subtitles. This meant, with the regular level of noise in the room, that several of the strongest lines got stepped on.
(I also brought along, although we didn’t watch it, my old Clan of the Cave Bear DVD, one of those woefully dumb double sided ones that also featured the film in “full screen” mode.)
Still, people seemed moderately entertained by it. And then later, when I asked people what their favorite film this year was (not “best” film, the reason will become apparent down the line), and to my pleased surprised several said What’s Up Tiger Lily? So…score. My fears were unfounded.
I don’t know if there’s rights issues, but there still hasn’t be a Blu Ray release of this. Maybe Allen is blocking it, which would be rich. THIS is (potentially) what he’s embarrassed by?
However, the real general consensus was that somebody (I would vote, of course, for Indicator, but I’d even take Shout! Factory, although they tend to do compromised products) release a set of those International Secret Police movies. They look fantastic. Their only drawback was that apparently there weren’t any attractive women in Japan at the time, so we get stuck with Mie Hama (Bond girl and the villainous chick from King Kong Escapes) and Akiko Wakabayashi (the Martian Princess from Ghidrah the Three Headed Monster).
