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TCM BREAKFAST CLUB SCREENING What’s New Pussycat? I 1965 Directed by Clive Donner

Zany and freewheeling, What’s New Pussycat? marks Woody Allen’s big screen debut and boasts a cast of iconic 60s actors including Peter O’Toole, Peter Sellers, Ursula Andress and Capucine. TCM writer David Humphrey says the movie – which is being screened to coincide with the release of Peter O’Toole’s latest film, romantic comedy Venus, on January 26 – should be relished as a time-capsule from the Swinging England era.

Don’t look for a moral message in What’s New, Pussycat?, or on set and, typically, his character does the same in the film. indeed, a message of any kind whatever. As one critic There are a lot of other insider jokes and references in WNP? For memorably said about this madcap romp: “Don’t over-analyse example, Capucine plays a character called Renee Lefebvre, and it”. That’s sound advice. If What’s New Pussycat? – hereafter Lefebvre just happened to be the actress’s surname in real life. WNP? – was a person undergoing psychoanalysis, one can Meanwhile Ursula Andress’s chortle at Peter Sellers’ ad-libbed imagine the shrink at his wit’s end trying to find anything of comment that “she knows James Bond” is entirely spontaneous substance behind the frivolous shell. For WNP? is played strictly as she had, of course, appeared in the first 007 movie, Dr No for laughs, and is hilariously of its time, i.e. the Swinging Sixties, (1962), as bikini-clad Honey Ryder. the decade when promiscuity was rampant, if not respectable (think Kennedy, Profumo et al). Which is not to say that WNP? is So how on earth did that title originate? Well, it turns out to be a bad movie: on the contrary, it has an infectious joie de vivre one of the favourite lines of Hollywood lothario Warren Beatty and is worth catching again just for the pleasure of seeing when hailing a woman friend. The film had in fact begun as a emerging talent such as Woody Allen and Peter O’Toole, still semi-autobiographical project for Beatty, a man with legendary hungry for success. Allen, making his movie debut as both attraction to women, a quality shared by the movie’s principal scriptwriter and actor – taking the part of Victor Shakapopulis - character, Michael James, played deliciously over the top by was just 29 when the film was made: he celebrated his birthday Peter O’Toole. But Beatty pulled out when producer Charles

TCM : SKY 319, NTL 419 AND TOP UP TV 25/ANYTIME TCMONLINE.CO.UK TCM 2: SKY 320 Feldman refused his plea to cast Leslie Caron, his then Directed by Clive Donner – who’d made his name with TV dramas girlfriend, in place of Capucine. Beatty’s petulance didn’t harm such as Danger Man and Sir Francis Drake (both 1961) – the his career: he went on to storm box offices with Bonnie and movie is deliciously garnished with Allen’s wisecracking New Clyde a couple of years later and O’Toole meanwhile was able York humour, and includes such brilliant passages as this: confirm a sizeable comedic talent lay behind the intrepid good looks he’d shown off in Lawrence of Arabia (1962). As a Michael James: Did you find a job? historical document, WNP? is totally absorbing: a glossy, Victor Skakapopulis: Yeah, I got something at the striptease. I indulgent antidote to the grim kitchen-sink dramas then playing help the girls dress and undress. at the Gaumonts and Odeons, the movie is like a kid let loose in Michael James: Nice job. a candy store, gleefully fixating on sex, almost daring the reviewers to call for it to be banned. A few years earlier, Brian Victor Skakapopulis: Twenty francs a week. Rix’s saucy Whitehall Farces with their French maids and Michael James: Not very much. bedroom innuendoes may have provoked tut-tuts from Digusted Victor Skakapopulis: It's all I can afford. of Tunbridge Wells, but this was in a different league altogether: joyous, mocking, exultant. And it had the bonus of music by Burt WNP? did well on both sides of the Atlantic, and for those Bacharach, including that theme belted out with animalistic Anglophile Americans transfixed by the three British Bs – Bond, passion by earthy Tom Jones. A plot seems almost superfluous, Beatles and Burton – there was even the bonus of a cameo by but here it is nonetheless: hopeless philanderer Michael James is the man himself, Richard Burton, as Man in Strip Club. And lest determined not to cheat on his fiancée Carole, but is not helped you think WNP? was of no lasting significance, it did earn glory by the fact that every woman he meets seems to fall in love with at the Academy Awards when Bacharach and lyricist Hal David him. Enter hairy analyst Dr Fritz Fassbender (Peter Sellers having collected an Oscar for the Best Original Song (it was What’s New, enormous fun once more at the expense of the Teutonic race), Pussycat? of course). who’s also a womaniser and hence fascinated with James’s discourses. The finale threatens to be disastrous when all the characters check into the Château Chantelle hotel for the weekend not knowing of each other's presence. Tumultuous denouements of this kind were very much in vogue at the time, Further reading: Woody Allen on Woody Allen by Woody Allen and Stig favoured, for example, by both Monte Carlo or Bust (1969) and Bjorkman (Faber and Faber); Mr Strangelove: A Biography of Peter Those Magnificent Men In Their Flying Machines (1965). Sellers by Ed Sikov (Hyperion Books)

ESCAPE TO A WORLD OF FILM THIS JANUARY WITH TCM.

TCM launches into the new year with a month brimming with comedies, classics, tributes and celebrations, including the UK TV premiere of the TCM original production, Edge of Outside (2006) as part of Hollywood Directors Week from 15th - 21st January. Classic Comedy Weekend will bring laughter into the New Year on 6th and 7th January, with a selection of belly-aching films including Blazing Saddles (1974) and Caddyshack (1980).

The King is Born from 7th - 13th January on TCM 2, marking the 72nd anniversary of Elvis Presley's birth with a week of films that confirmed him as the undisputed king of Rock 'n' Roll. Including Jailhouse Rock (1957), Viva Las Vegas (1964) amd 1970s documentary Elvis: That's The Way It Is.