What’s Up, Tiger Lily? [AotM]

I thought a good way to kick off our month-long look at Woody Allen would be to start with his roots. Allen started his career as a comedy writer and stand-up comedian, skills that translated for Allen into his first motion picture, What’s Up, Tiger Lily?. The movie takes the existing Japanese spy movie, Key of Keys and adds a new voiceover track, courtesy of Allen. The new story alters the original B-movie spy thriller into a story that revolves around an egg salad recipie.

As you might guess, taking an existing story and bending it into something more comedic is quite difficult, and several times What’s Up, Tiger Lily? gets too strange and bizarre. With the entire concept being a joke, more effort is being made to make jokes than to remain true to any type of story. The movie makes a tongue-in-cheek recognition of this halfway through, as the narrative is interrupted to ask Woody Allen if he wants to explain to the audience what’s going on in the confusing story. The writer’s reaction elicited one of the few laughs for me from the entire movie.

The concept of What’s Up, Tiger Lily? may have been novel in its day, but in today’s world of Rifftraxs, YouTube, and even Star Wars: The Phantom Edit, taking one movie and turning it into another is passé. The humor Allen lays down within the movie is weak, and I have trouble understanding why it would have received acclaim even it its own era. It’s repetitious to a point of banality, or random to the point of absurdity. The moments outside of the movie, the silly introduction by Allen, the midpoint interruption, and the closing credits that made me laugh, but not the movie itself.

Now, I understand that there are several versions of the movies making the rounds, with Allen’s dialogue changed in places, and the writer’s own lines overdubbed. My understanding based on comments at Netflix is that the version I saw is one of the altered versions, although much remains unchanged. I don’t honestly see how this changes things, however. It’s a weak idea, made weaker by execution. In its time, before the digital era we live in, it was a novel concept, but it’s definitely an example of a movie that doesn’t hold up well. It turns out that starting with Allen’s roots may have been a bad start for the month, and What’s Up, Tiger Lily? is a movie I have to recommend most people pass by.

-Rafe Telsch