What's Up, Doc?

Back to Peter Bogdanovich, who followed up his Oscar-winning film The Last Picture Show with something almost completely opposite, 1972's What's Up, Doc? It was an homage to screwball comedies of the 1930s, particularly Bringing Up Baby.

That earlier film featured Cary Grant as a buttoned-up academic whose life is turned upside down by a daffy dame, Katharine Hepburn. In What's Up, Doc? the academic is Ryan O'Neal, a musicologist, and the dame is Barbra Streisand, who creates havoc wherever she goes.

The plot surrounds four identical carrying cases. One of them contains igneous rocks, which are part of O'Neal's research. Another is Streisand's, and carries her clothing and a dictionary. A third has top secret documents, and has been stolen by a man (Michael Murphy), who is being followed by a government agent (Phil Roth), who, trying to be inconspicuous, is always toting a bag of golf clubs. The fourth belongs is full of precious jewels belong to a rich woman.

All of these bags and characters end up in the same hotel in San Francisco. The hotel clerk and the house detective (Sorrell Booke) want to steal the jewels. O'Neal is accompanied by his very tightly wound fiancee (Madeline Kahn, in her film debut), and Streisand, who is in the hotel to try to get something to eat, ends up latching onto O'Neal (the reason is never quite clear). Of course all the bags get mixed up, and much zaniness ensues.

What's Up, Doc? is very funny, but can not be considered a great film because there is almost nothing original about it. In addition to the screwball comedies of yore, the film owes a lot to It's A Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad, World (right down to the Jack Davis-inspired poster). The climactic sequence, a chase up and down San Francisco streets, made me smile throughout, but is itself an homage to Bullitt, from a few years earlier, when Steve McQueen chased a criminal through the same streets. There is even an inside joke at the end, when Streisand tells O'Neal: "Love is never having to say you're sorry," which was a line from O'Neal's earlier picture, Love Story. "That's the dumbest thing I've ever heard," he replies.

Though a palimpsest of other movies, What's Up, Doc? is a lot of fun. It shows just how great a comedienne Streisand was. Her film career, to me, has always seemed like it didn't live up to its potential. Perhaps, aside from the films she directed, she never put it on the front burner of her endeavors. O'Neal, while no Cary Grant, deadpans wonderfully, and oh how great was Kahn, who is put through all sorts of indignities (Streisand sends her to the wrong address for a party, and it ends up being a dilapidated building bull of thieves). Liam Dunn, as a judge at the end of the film, almost steals the whole show.

The gags are funny but familiar--lots of slamming doors in the hotel corridor, and during the chase sequence there's the old "two guys carrying a pane of glass across the street" bit. Bogdanovich, a student of film, gazed backwards in the making of this film. That's fine, but not transcendent.