Harding’s face is three inches from Duffy’s. Duffy produces the chit that exempts him from running while his ankle heals and holds it under Harding’s nose. Harding snatches it away.
    “Now you will run.”
    “You bastard!” Duffy sneers, and Harding laughs. It is an incredible scene, Harding standing like a giant, hands on hips, laughing.
    “Run,, Duffy, run. On you’ll be on duty all weekend. I’ll see to that. Run, Duffy, run:”
    Duffy glares at him, purest hatred, but his position is clear. Duffy runs. And runs.
    Harding runs him hard, up and down the hill, until he is near the point of collapse.
    “You’re not very fit, are you Duffy: Now, let’s see you run up the slope. Run, Duffy.”
    Duffy stumbles, slides, he is desperate now. He rips and tears at the ground to aid his failing feet. He gains footing, loses it, gains it again, struggling on in a frantic manner. But he makes it, up and down. Falls and tumbles most of the way down.
    “You’re lazy and unfit, Duffy. You should be able to run up and down there a dozen times. Let’s see you do it again.”
    Duffy, stooped and quivering, doesn’t move. He is finished. “Come on, Duffy, get moving.”
    He shakes his head, eyes closed: “Can’t,” his voice rasps.
    “I said move, Duffy,” and he laughs again, “You are weak and gutless, Duffy. You’re a snivelling coward. And forget about getting to Surfers this weekend. You’ll be on mess duties both days.”
    He laughs, and laughs, and then walks away. “Alright, everyone back on the truck,” And Duffy crumbles to earth, and you have to help him all the way.

...Did you find a job?
Yeah, I got something at the striptease. I help the girls dress and undress.
Nice job.
Twenty francs a week.
Not very much.
It’s all I can afford...
...Silence when you’re shouting at me!...
...What in the name of all that’s gracious is a semi-virgin?...
...You’re grotesque!
Lascivious adulterer!
Don’t you dare call me that again until I have looked it up!...
...Foiled by a cheap cinematic trick....
...We played strip chess. She had me down to my shorts and I fainted from tension...
    Not everybody gets off to a good start. Woody Allen was so popular around the New York clubs as a stand-up comic that when he wrote a film script, they gave it the works. I had already encountered him in Playboy Magazine where he did a very funny photo-spread sending up the Karma Sutra, a copy of which I am still seeking. But that gave me no idea to what lay ahead, and neither did his first movie, What’s New Pussycat?
    He got it filmed in Paris (which is probably where he learned never to leave New York again), they gave him a big budget and stars—Peter O’Toole, Peter Sellers, Ursula Andress, Cappucine, Paula Prentise, Romy Schneider and even allowed Woody himself, in his first role, to play a major supporting character. And it was a complete turkey!
    Really, it would be a film to be avoided at all costs, were it not for the interest factor of Woody’s first try. All of the essential components of his subsequent films, those very elements of which he would become the supreme master, are present here, and they all go badly wrong. Perhaps his genius was that he got to make all his mistakes at the first try.
    The film has many Allen type jokes, all of which misfire. Toulouse-Lautrec panhandles with his sketchbook around a modern Paris street café. Peter O’Toole bumps into Richard Burton in a bar and they both have forgotten each other’s name­­—“Say hello to what’s-her-name,” O’Toole calls after him. As assailants close in, Sellers hides behind Ursula Andress declaring: “She’s a personal friend of James Bond.” When Sellers uses a fake conference as an excuse to escape his frightful wife, she says: “You went to the Psychiatrist’s Conference last week.” He replies: “That was the Freudian, this is the Jungian.” Good, sophisticated, intelligent jokes abound, and none of them managed to be funny. It all ends in a silly French farce of bedroom doors flapping and then a dreary chase in go-carts. Terrible.
    Perhaps what went wrong is best demonstrated by Peter Seller’s character. In order to make a psychiatrist funny, Allen thought he needed to put him in a ridiculous wig, give him an absurd accent and have him do continual prat falls. Thereafter, he would realise that such characters should be done straight, allowing the essential absurdity of what they do to come through of its own accord, just as he did with his own character.