The Owl and the Pussycat

It's great to see "Pussycat" in widescreen at last. Streisand and Siegel make a good team and the movie is still pretty racy, even by today's standards, although it would have been racier still if some bluenose hadn't removed one of Barbra's more notorious expletives from the soundtrack. Fans of the original well remember the scene in which she tells a bunch of hooligans that are harassing her and Siegel to "F---- off!" Amazingly, this line has now been dropped from the DVD version so that the two scenes that come next make little sense, including her follow-up line, "people are so touchy these days, you have to watch every word." The cropped VHS tape may have looked terrible but at least it did retain the line with the F-word, probably the first time it was ever uttered by a big female star in a major motion picture. (Of course, now screenwriters have over-used it to such an extent that you suspect they wouldn't be able to get along without it if it were ever banned from use.) Some aspects of the film would probably be politically incorrect today, such as certain homophobic slurs the hooker screams at the writer, and it's pretty hard to imagine this relationship lasting too much longer after the fadeout. Still the stars are compulsively watchable.