How a Japanese spy thriller became a comedy about the world's best egg salad

Entertainment · Published 3 October 2026 Swipe more like this →

In short: In 1966, Woody Allen took a serious Japanese espionage film and completely repurposed it. By stripping away the original dialogue and dubbing over it with a bizarre, farcical script, he transformed a gritty spy story into a chaotic search for a secret recipe, marking his debut as a feature director.

The project began when producer Henry G. Saperstein acquired rights to several Toho films, including the 1965 thriller International Secret Police: Key of Keys. Rather than producing a standard localization, Saperstein opted to rewrite the narrative entirely. Woody Allen was brought in to craft a new, comedic mystery, resulting in a film that bears no resemblance to the original plot. Allen rearranged scenes and inserted new footage to create a one-hour movie from the original 93-minute runtime, though he later distanced himself from the work in a 2020 interview.

The production process was fraught with technical hurdles. Because the original one-hour cut was deemed too short for theatrical distribution, Allen filmed additional scenes in New York. These segments were plagued by noisy sets, requiring the dialogue to be dubbed later. Due to scheduling conflicts, editor S. Richard Krown provided the voice for Allen in these specific sequences. Further complicating matters, the film was expanded without Allen's consent during post-production to include clips from a third entry in the series, International Secret Police: A Barrel of Gunpowder, alongside musical performances by the band the Lovin' Spoonful.

The final product is a collage of sight gags, puns, and farce centered on secret agent Phil Moskowitz. His mission to recover a stolen egg salad recipe from rival gangsters is interspersed with unrelated scenes, including a striptease by China Lee. While critics at the time were divided—with The New York Times finding the premise tiresome and Variety noting the novelty of the mismatched audio—the film has maintained a legacy as a unique experiment in cinematic recontextualization. It remains a curious artifact of 1960s satire, bolstered by a soundtrack that reached number 126 on the Billboard Pop Albums charts.

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