We’re feeling loopy and a little loony tunes under lockdown, and bet you are, too. We want to run around in the great outdoors, chase after a pizza-delivery guy and maybe throw a cream pie in someone’s face, all of which happens in the madcap comedy “What’s Up, Doc?”
As light and ticklish as a cockatoo feather, Peter Bogdanovich’s ode to 1930s shenanigans is a guy-meets-gal story with pratfalls, silly jokes and perfectly timed slamming hotel doors. It doesn’t have a lot on its mind other than movie love and its own style — or does it?
The dizzy story almost defies synopsis and involves spies and crooks and scholars and assorted identical red-plaid bags, all spinning like precariously balanced plates. At its core, though, there’s Ryan O’Neal as Howard Bannister, a sober, bespectacled music professor who arrives in San Francisco with his hilariously no-nonsense fiancée, Eunice Burns (a sublime Madeline Kahn in her feature debut). Their future and the film’s denouement is sealed the minute Judy Maxwell, an anarchic force played by Barbra Streisand, sets her sights on Howard.
Bogdanovich made “What’s Up, Doc?” after “The Last Picture Show,” the ecstatically received film that established his reputation as one of New Hollywood’s wunderkinder. Vincent Canby, writing in The New York Times, dug “What’s Up, Doc?,” calling it a “beautifully disordered farce.” Writing in the paper the following month, The New Yorker’s future art critic Peter Schjeldahl was having none of it. Slamming it harder than a Marx Brothers door, he called it a “plague,” “offensive in the extreme” and a “simulacrum of a movie, a celluloid zombie.” Yikes!
What’s up, reader? Are you Team Canby or Team Schjeldahl? Does “What’s Up, Doc?” make you laugh or wince or maybe both? If you’re a fan of classic 1930s screwball, do you find Bogdanovich’s stylings inspired or inane? How does it compare to its most obvious inspiration, Howard Hawks’s “Bringing Up Baby,” a 1938 flop that was eventually hailed as a classic? And what is it like to encounter an adorably nutty Streisand in the full bloom of her 1970s movie stardom, before she was enthroned as the empress of all popular culture?
“What’s Up, Doc?” is widely available to rent or buy online; here’s a guide. Please watch it over the weekend and let us know what you think in the comments section below. The cutoff for feedback is 6 p.m., Eastern time, Monday. We’ll read what you have to say and publish our thoughts on the film and your observations on Tuesday.
Source: Movies - nytimes.com
