Only those intimately acquainted with Peter Sellers could know that the superb physical hijinks of the demented psycho-therapist, Dr. Fritz Wolfgang Fassbender— garbed in a ludicrous burgundy velvet suit and absurd Richard III black wig—were being performed by a man whose heart had stopped not once, but eight times, during a twenty-four hour period at Cedars of Lebanon Hospital six months earlier. (It had been put out in the press that Sellers suffered only a mild attack.)

With his star uninsurable, producer Charles Feldman earmarked £ 200,000 of his own money to cover the unthinkable (but very real possibility) that Sellers might die before the completion of What’s New, Pussycat?—a film he had convinced a 28-year-old Woody Allen to write “as a pretext to go to Europe and chase girls.”

Feldman, along with director Clive Donner, gathered together the largest group of kooks they could find. The result was sheer anarchy on-screen and off: perfect entertainment for what was then being perceived as—but not yet officially dubbed—the “swinging sixties.”

Several in the cast of this madcap sex comedy had serious drinking problems— including Peter O’Toole (a huge international star after Lawrence of Arabia), leggy Texas beauty Paula Prentiss, and patrician French ex-model, Capucine, who had played Inspector Clouseau’s wife in the original Pink Panther the year before, and was also Feldman’s mistress.

Of course, this only served to intensify their splendid individual oddities and wild mood swings. How the film was actually made, much less completed, is something of a miracle in itself.

Austrian beauty, Romy Schneider, and lanky Swiss-born, Ursula Andress, happily signed on as well, adding even more sexual zaniness. (Andress had made a spectacular impact two years earlier, in an extraordinary cinematic moment, as the original “Bond Girl,” Honey Ryder, in Dr. No: Aphrodite rising from the sea in a startlingly white belted bikini, a long sheathed knife on one seductive hip.)

The film opens at the Fassbender home—a 3-storey architectural nightmare that looks like something Salvador Dali might have sketched on a cocktail napkin. While they rush from floor-to-floor his wife, Anna, is accusing him at the top of her lungs of being a “Lascivious adulterer!”

Fassbender: “Don't you dare call me that again until I have looked it up!”

Anna: “Is she prettier than me?”

Fassbender: “It she prettier than you? I am prettier than you!”

Anna: (remaining on the 3rd floor balcony) “Adulterer. Adulterer. Lascivious adulterer!”

Fassbender (running downstairs to his office): “Silence when you are shouting at me!” (rapidly leafing through a dictionary) “Lascivious adulterer is a man that is…a lascivious adulterer. What kind of book is that?” He tosses it away in disgust and hollers out the window, “You are a monster and a monster, in that order.”

It takes the genius of a Peter Sellers to make such absurd dialogue actually work. And he does it masterfully. If you’re not in love with the movie by this point, please leave the theatre.

During the ensuing scuffle, where it seems “murder most foul” must soon occur, a clock loudly chimes the hour. They break apart cleanly—and we realize this is a scene they have played many times over. “We’ll finish this later,” growls Fassbender. His three o’clock patient has arrived.

Michael Voltaire James (with Peter O’Toole in this role) is a fashion magazine editor, also a notorious womanizer. He enters to find Fassbender having a major tantrum, lying on the floor and kicking his feet like an unruly child, screaming, “I hate you. I hate you.” after his now departed wife.

There is a very funny transition back to what appears to be normalcy while both prepare for the session—then Fassbender proceeds to drink straight from the bottle while Michael, reclining on a couch, pours out his heart. It seems women have always thrown themselves at him and if he can’t stop being unfaithful to his girlfriend, whom he loves, he will lose her.

His tale now told, in a nice twist the two smoothly exchange roles, seats—even the booze—and continue on. Suddenly Fassbender jumps up and rushes to his desk, ending the sitting. “Listen, I’ll see you next Friday. I can’t take more than fifteen minutes of your sex life at one time!” The problem you see is that Fritz is just as obsessed with women as his patient.

(This, of course, soon draws them together—resulting in additional merriment such as when Peter O’Toole, amplifying all of his earlier stage training, tries to help Sellers woo his heart’s desire from outside her apartment building after an evening of heavy drinking. The beloved is Capucine’s character, Renee Lefebre—who just happens to be one of Fassbender’s patients. It is a spirited take-off of Cyrano de Bergerac.)

Back to Fassbender’s office: When Michael begs for more immediate help, the good doctor suggests he “come to some of my group analysis meetings. You'll like this…it's a real freak show. If it gets dull, we sing songs. Bring with you five hundred francs.”

If you hate political correctness, this is the film for you.

By now Fassbender is on the phone to his mistress, Zsa Zsa. “This is baby Fritzy here,” he leers. As Michael goes out he turns to the camera and remarks, “He must be a genius.”

Later, watching Peter O’Toole undress on the floor of a strip club—while dancing with sex-charged Paula Prentiss to the music of Manfred Mann—takes you back to a time and place where you could actually get away with and be applauded for such antics. (I was living in Europe for a while during the sixties; I know.)

While the wildly neurotic Paula pursues Michael, Capucine informs Sellers she is in love with O’Toole, and not him. Meanwhile, Woody Allen’s character, Victor Shakapoulis, has fallen hard for O'Toole's fiancée, Carole Werner (played by an, at-times, achingly fragile 26-year-old Romy Schneider)—and is now trying to seduce her affections away from his friend. It is Carole who is the “Pussycat” of the title.

Scattered throughout this insane state of affairs are many scenes that can only be described as just plain brilliant—like when Sellers is preparing to “end it all” down at the River Seine. “Miss Lefebvre, I can stand it no longer,” he calls out to the night sky. “For the love of you I die!”

At that moment he is interrupted by the appearance of a whistling, tuxedo-clad Victor who shows up with a card table, chair, and food, to hold for himself a lonely birthday dinner. (Victor is turning twenty-nine and works as a “dresser” in a local striptease club called The Crazy Horse. He also has a few confidence problems. At a local bistro, describing the previous night with part-time girlfriend, Tempest O’Brien, he tells a friend, “We played strip chess. She had me down to my shorts and I fainted from tension.”)

Back to the docks: Annoyed by the intrusion, Sellers approaches him warily as Allen munches away on fried chicken.

Victor (looking up): “Do you have any salt?” Fassbender: “Have I got any salt? I got a boat, I got kerosene, matches, firecrackers, two swords, and this flag. But, I ain't got no salt.”

Fassbender then tries to talk Victor into leaving so he can get on with it. When Allen continues eating Sellers damns him as “a selfish gourmet” and stomps away in a sulk. Curiosity getting the better of him, Victor follows to ask what he’s doing.

Fassbender: “I am trying to commit suicide, set fire to my beautiful psychoanalyst’s body, and sail out to sea ablaze like a Viking.”

Victor: “You’re a doctor?”

Fassbender: “I am a doctor of the mind!”

When they discover they are both rejected suitors, the two soon warm to one another and strike a bargain to do the funeral first—then get on with the birthday. (I know, I know, it makes no sense—except in the film!)

Fassbender asks, “Are you any good at wrapping?”

Victor: “Yeah, I used to work in a department store. Why?”

Fassbender: “Maybe you could help me get wrapped up in that flag there.”

When it appears they can’t even do that right Sellers declares he doesn’t want “to be a Viking any more” and they go off together for a night-on-the-town.

Believe it or not, What’s New, Pussycat? was refused distribution in Norway— not because it was too frank a sex comedy—but because of these few minutes of inanity, on a moving strip of celluloid, using that nation’s flag as a prop.

This is a well populated storyline, plot being far too grand a word for what unfurls over 111 minutes. At one point all of these characters—unbeknownst to one another—check into the Chateau Chantelle Hotel, just outside of Paris, to pursue their—by now—much entangled lustful fantasies.

When daredevil Ursulla Andress drops out of the sky right into Peter O’Toole’s open sports car—as he is driving to the Chateau on assignment for his magazine—his wandering eye starts twitching again. They leave her parachute at the front desk to be washed and pressed. “No starch,” Andress says, in a close-up that is a playful self-parody of her by now famous “smoldering-yet-aloof manner”. They go on upstairs where she lies down on his bed and proceeds to tell O’Toole that jumping out of airplanes helps “sublimate my sexual tensions; it’s either that or…promiscuity.”

O’Toole: Pussycat from the sky, I can't resist you. Andress (she pouts): Don't resist. Capitulate.

What follows during the uproarious final twelve minutes has been called everything from an “incomprehensible mess” to the kind of comedic lunacy rarely seen since the glory days of legendary director Mack Sennett and his Keystone Kops.

For sheer visual comedy you won’t find much to beat Sellers’ insanely jealous opera singing wife—complete with brass horned headdress (played by real-life opera performer, Edra Gale)—leading a charge of the “by-now-trapped hotel guests” in an attempt to break through a police line. (When word of an orgy taking place starts to spread, the cops quickly raid the Chateau.) This scene would stand up well in any Monty Python film. And the Go-Kart getaway that follows is pure pandemonium.

So the next time you hear Tom Jones’ smash hit What’s New, Pussycat? (the Burt Bacharach, Hal David theme song for the picture, which was nominated for an Academy Award) think of this film and treat yourself to a copy for your home library. It’s a delicious romp from beginning to end—in which even the ridiculous dialogue makes perfect sense.

If it’s true that real belly laughs are beneficial to your health, every time you watch this free-form lunacy it should add weeks to your life!

One more thing: If you lived through the sixties this picture will make you wet-eyed with nostalgia (from laughing); if you were born too late, you’ll envy those who were fortunate enough to have been there. This is a wonderful reminder of some of the first half of that decade’s pop-culture—which was great fun, mostly light-hearted, and always…very, very sexy.

Copyright © 2006 by Michael Orr

About Michael Orr:

Michael has written numerous short subject films and documentaries, been a speechwriter and a journalist. He fell in love with movies as a youngster and continues to publish essays about American cinema. A special interest is the late 1920s when "silents, talkies, and radio all violently collide resulting in a cinematic cosmic big bang"—the focus of his recently completed novel, Hollywood’s A Scary Place! to be released soon by a British publisher. He makes his home in Toronto. He also "doctors" other people’s work and ghostwrites on occasion when the assignment is of interest. You may contact him at This email address is being protected from spam bots, you need Javascript enabled to view it .