What’s Up, Doc?
Peter Bogdanovich (1972)
In 1971 Peter Bogdanovich enjoyed a major success with his third feature, The Last Picture Show, a piece steeped in nostalgia for a cultural past and the movies that were part of it. The film’s merits included an enriching ambivalence: Bogdanovich elegised the end of an era but regretted too the constraining side of early 1950s life in a small Texan town. The ambivalence didn’t extend, however, to the pictures showing at the town’s cinema, which was about to close down. You got a sense these meant more to the director than to the people whose story he was telling. Over the next few years, Bogdanovich’s movie love dominated his moviemaking, as he repeatedly mined old Hollywood genres and settings. The approach, as well as exhausting the patience of critics, soon ran out of commercial steam. In the middle of the decade, Bogdanovich made consecutive flops – At Long Last Love (1975), a tribute to 1930s musicals, and Nickelodeon (1976), a comedy about Hollywood in the age of silent cinema. Except for Mask (1985), Bogdanovich has never since regained critical favour or his box-office mojo.
The screwball comedy What’s Up, Doc? was the first and, in financial terms, by some way the most successful of Bogdanovich’s homages. I saw and remember enjoying it when it first appeared in 1972 (and when I was sixteen). It seems gruesome now, though that’s still not the majority view. Much of the audience for this BFI screening was laughing throughout and applauding at the end. The Rotten Tomatoes rating is 90% fresh – although, as usual with older films, there’s not a huge number of reviews included (forty). One of the few dissenting voices on Rotten Tomatoes gets it right. Jay Cocks in Time calls the film ‘a comedy made by a man who has seen a lot of movies, knows all the mechanics, and has absolutely no sense of humor’.
Plenty more talented people were involved. The screenplay is by Buck Henry, Robert Benton and David Newman. The star is Barbra Streisand. The supporting cast includes, in her feature film debut, Madeline Kahn. László Kovács did the cinematography. Yet What’s Up, Doc? is nerve-racking. Nearly everything, however slapstick or supposedly chaotic, feels prepared: Bogdanovich’s skills aren’t enough to give an impression of spontaneity. The film is also exceedingly pleased with itself. The plot takes off from four identical plaid overnight bags – each with a different owner and remarkably different contents – that get confused. The central relationship/romance between an absent-minded academic (Ryan O’Neal) and the free-spirited woman (Streisand) who takes over his life is indebted principally to Howard Hawks’s Bringing Up Baby (1938) although there are surely references to lots of other Hollywood comedies. The performances are, to put it mildly, repetitive. The consistently frenetic action culminates in a seriously protracted car chase through San Francisco.
Over the opening credits, Barbra Streisand sings Cole Porter’s ‘You’re the Top’ brilliantly and overpoweringly. It’s a taste of things to come. Streisand is so adept a comedienne that most of what she’s asked to do as the zany, outrageous Judy Maxwell, a serial college dropout, comes too easily to her. It’s not enjoyable – you’re conscious only of Streisand’s technical prowess. (To be fair, she’s on record as having said she disliked the film.) It doesn’t help her that, as the learned but dim musicologist-cum-geologist-cum-archaeologist Howard Bannister, Ryan O’Neal is hopeless. He has no dignity to overthrow even at the outset. His comic timing is leaden. The gulf between the two leads’ abilities ensures there’s nothing like the dynamic between Cary Grant and Katharine Hepburn in Bringing Up Baby – and makes Streisand all the more and excessively commanding. The most explicit and bizarre reference to another movie comes in the last scene, when Judy says, ‘Love means never having to say you’re sorry’ and Howard replies, ‘That’s the dumbest thing I’ve ever heard’. It’s a bit rich, barely a year after appearing in Love Story, for Ryan O’Neal to be prepared to make fun of the commercial phenomenon that made him a star and earned him an Oscar nomination (still the only one he has to his name)[1].
The cast includes, among many others, Austin Pendleton, Kenneth Mars and John Hillerman. Madeline Kahn is Eunice, Howard’s hysterically bossy fiancée. Kahn engages so thoroughly with Eunice that she manages to make you feel, as well as respect for her integrity as a performer, sympathy for a character written as merely grotesque. Like Streisand, Kahn is too strong for her material: the effect becomes monotonous. Even so, she was responsible for one of only three moments in What’s Up Doc? that I liked this time around – when Howard, cowering inside their hotel room, is desperately trying to conceal his latest embarrassing predicament and Eunice announces, in an impassioned bellow, ‘I’m coming in …!’ Barbra Streisand made me smile as she got her tongue round a long polysyllabic monologue about the merits of igneous vs metamorphic rocks (one of the few challenging things asked of her). The third and last pleasure is a cameo from Liam Dunn, as a judge trying wearily, in the aftermath to the car chase, to keep control of a noisy courtroom. Halfway through the film, there’s a shot of the San Francisco skyline in the early morning. This too is nice – the briefest of peaceful intermissions between the lowering frenzy of the story so far and the smug mayhem still to come.
6 November 2018
[1] Perhaps ‘bit rich’ also hints at why he was ready to trash Love Story. According to Wikipedia, O’Neal was sore about not receiving – unlike the much more undeserving Ali MacGraw – a percentage of the box-office profits.