Name a director who’s been making feature films for half a century. Seriously, try it. King Vidor may hold the Guinness World Record for the longest directing career – 67 years, from a silent short in 1913 to a short documentary in 1980 – but only 40 of those years were spent on full-length movies. Neither Stanley Kubrick nor Alfred Hitchcock, two of history’s greatest and longest-serving filmmakers, surpassed 46 years.
So it’s worth acknowledging that, in the spring of 1966, almost 50 years ago, Woody Allen was putting the finishing touches on What’s Up, Tiger Lily?, his first feature-length film. For context, Allen, 80 – currently working on a new comedy film and TV series for Amazon – debuted as a director the same year that both Star Trek and Batman premiered on television.
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What’s more impressive than the length of Allen’s career, however, is its almost literary consistency. The progress of Allen’s filmography is the progress of culture and film itself, and by returning to his first film, 50 years on, one can retrospectively see the inevitable development of both.
Tiger Lily is a weird directorial debut, in that Allen doesn’t direct much at all. It’s a silly dub-over of a 1965 Japanese spy movie, swapping the original soundtrack and dialogue for tunes by The Lovin’ Spoonful and Jewish one-liners. So instead of understanding the original story – about a plot to steal cash from anti-government guerrillas – we’re watching a Japanese man named Phil Moskowitz search for the world’s best egg salad recipe.
Re-watching Tiger Lily today reveals a lot about Allen’s formula, which hasn’t changed much in 50 years. Like virtually all his films, it’s both timeless and dated; while The Lovin’ Spoonful bits (allegedly added by studio executives afterward to Allen’s great disgust) rip modern moviegoers from the moment and remind them exactly in what decade the movie was made, the best gags defy age entirely. They’re wordless jokes that can’t be transcribed – men excitedly sniggering while peeping through a keyhole, talking about Miracle Whip or feeding a chicken to a cobra.
It feels very much like a first film, an 80-minute experiment that tests the boundaries of a one-dimensional concept. That naiveté indicates both the mentality of 1960s cinema and the humour of a boyishly goofy 30-year-old Allen.
Of course, we all know where Allen’s career has gone, from these early sketch-comedy years to his cinematic zenith in the late 1970s and ’80s, a decline through the ’90s and settlement into whatever he is now—a cultural icon maligned by societal outrage whose movies are, with a few exceptions, pleasantly predictable and predictably pleasant.
But if you connect those dots back 50 years, it’s all there in Tiger Lily – that bizarre juxtaposition between a nebbish man and sexier women; his experimentation with the film medium; misplaced Yiddishisms (“a salad so delicious you could plotz”); jokes revealing sexual inadequacy and quiet desperation; his self-aware cameos, wherein he addresses us, a reminder that we’re still just watching a movie, his movie.
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The hidden value of silly entertainment has recurred as a theme throughout Allen’s career; it literally saves his life in Hannah and Her Sisters. But he’s always been hesitant to define that value as anything more than accepting the randomness of life. The action in Tiger Lily pauses at one point, cutting to Allen sitting next to an interviewer, who asks, “Woody, because the story is a little bit difficult to follow, would you give the audience and myself a brief rundown of what’s gone on so far?” Allen, deadpan, stares directly into the camera, and replies, “No.” It’s never been his job to explain anything—his job is simply to make us laugh.