Fur and Feathers Flying

By M.G.

A knock. Felix awakens and stumbles sleepily to the door. "I have to see you, Mr. Sherman," cries a pair of plaintive Brooklyn adenoids outside. "We make it a rule not to open the door after midnight," Felix answers. "We?" says the voice. Felix's tape recorder emits several terrifying growls. "Wolf and I. Wolf is a Doberman pinscher." The small voice tells him: "As God is my judge, I am a little girl all alone here in the hallway."

Felix (George Segal) opens the door, and it seems as if hell's fire has swept through the Brooklyn Battery Tunnel. It is the buxom neighbor he has reported to the building superintendent for prostitution. "Hello, pansy!" shrieks Doris (Barbra Streisand). "Hello, fink! Fink pansy! You rat! You fruitcake! Rat fink fruitcake! Creeps as yourself don't have dogs named Wolf. What creeps like you have are little faggy hairy bitty things with names like Pooky and Doodoo!"

With that, The Owl and the Pussycat sets out on a sea of hysteria, and their cramped tub somehow manages to stay afloat. Felix is the owl, a pedantic would-be writer who works in a Fifth Avenue bookstore. Doris is the pussycat, a randy stray from New York's back alleys who has been in two television commercials, a movie entitled Cycle Sluts, and countless beds. By the time she gets through screaming at Felix, they are both evicted--Felix wearing a skeleton suit to frighten Doris out of the hiccups, Doris clad in her best crotch-length nightie with a pair of shocking-pink hands appliqueed on the breasts. Together they begin just the kind of odd courtship one would expect of two such urban animals. They claw, they scratch, they separate, they make up. Both are elaborately cloaked with pretense: Felix as the unpublished author, Doris as the actress-hooker.

Clawing Comedy. The film owes much to Bill Manoffs witty and engaging Broadway play (in which the pussycat was black). Director Herbert Ross (Goodbye, Mr. Chips) is a former choreographer who staged Miss Streisand's musical numbers in Funny Girl. He took a considerable gamble in changing the pussycat part, but it has paid off handsomely.

Appearing in her first nonmusical, Barbra does not sing a note, but her feline yowling is pure musical comedy. Even George Segal, a fine dramatic actor with minimal comic talents, here displays glints of honest humor. When Doris cannot fall asleep without the television going, Felix gets behind a goldfish bowl and does an uproarious series of sketches. Occasionally, the film tries to take itself seriously, which is ludicrous. But when Streisand and Segal stick to their clawing comedy, watching the fur and feathers fly is high entertainment.

M.G.

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