Tired Tabby

What's New Pussycat? is a comedy built on so many shaky assumptions that it ought to sue for nonsupport. It seems logical to anticipate fun aplenty when a cordon of first-rate talents gather to make the fur fly, but on this mournful occasion all hands appear joined in a conspiracy to leave Pussycat out in the rain.

Peter O'Toole deserves the faintest applause for his fussy posturing as a Parisian fashion editor. He is supposedly irresistible to women, and they to him. So he delays marrying a determined frauelein (Romy Schneider), consults a sex-crazed Viennese analyst (Peter Sellers), and calls forth memories of his sexual prowess, filmed appropriately in dull blue-grey hues. When O'Toole isn't reminiscing, he is bedding or about to bed Romy, a Crazy Horse stripper (Paula Prentiss), a groundling nymphomaniac (Capucine) or a nymphomaniac who descends by parachute (Ursula Andress). Sellers dresses up his cliche role with a pageboy wig and temper tantrums and is funnier than his costars, who play their parts as if for their own amusement.

In his disappointing double debut as a scenarist and second banana, Nightclub Comedian Woody Allen has written a small flat role for himself and fleshed it out with perhaps a dozen workable gags. The rest of the dialogue is doggedly juvenile, so Director Clive Donner whips it into a frenzy, rummaging eclectically through a whole range of comedy styles, like a man tying tin cans to the tale of an old torn.

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