What's Up, Doc?

 What's Up, Doc? is a movie that I've known about for most of my life.  Something about Barbra Streisand once repelled me (I can't recall what it was) and, so, I've avoided this 1972 farce directed by Peter Bogdanovich until my 70th year on this Earth.  (Bogdanovich is dead now as is Streisand's co-star Ryan O'Neill; Streisand herself is 82 and known today, partly, for the so-called Streisand Effect, that is, drawing adverse attention to yourself by foolishly attempting to enforce legal rights and incurring, thereby, a backlash. The march of time is cruel, appalling, and relentless.)  My ill-informed prejudice denied me the pleasure of watching this delightful picture when I was younger, and, perhaps, more susceptible to the movie's arduous slapstick comedy.  But I'm happy to have rectified this critical error in judgement.

What's up, Doc? as the name implies is a cartoonish slapstick comedy.  Although some of the witty chatter sounds a little like Thirties screwball comedy, the heart of the film is invested in scary and chaotic gags, the sort of strenuous antics perfected by people like Buster Keaton and Harold Lloyd.  Bogdanovich is faithful to his source material -- in fact, the movie would play fine as a silent feature with only a few intertitles.  Streisand, of course, is a famous chanteuse, but the movie perversely affords her only two opportunities to perform -- she sings the opening number "You're the Top", a Cole Porter tune, but not on-screen and, then, renders a beautiful version of the piano ballad  from Casablanca, "As Time Goes By".  Streisand has a perfect intonation and a truly gorgeous voice -- I had forgotten how good she is.  But most of the picture involves the heroine in peril, dangling from roof tops or pursued by villains in toboggan-style car chases down the streets of San Francisco.  She's as young and athletic as her co-star and acquits herself in the picture's action scenes with gamine determination and agility. Ryan O'Neill in the Cary Grant part is excellent as well and, of course, prettier than Streisand who is handsome but not exactly beautiful.  

The plot is carefully contrived and nonsensical.  Four identical overnight bags (characterized by a red plaid pattern) are in play.  One bag contains Professor Howard Barton's musical igneous rocks -- the eccentric and mild-mannered professor is promoting the theory that cave-men invented music by rapping out diatonic tunes on stones.  Another bag is full of a king's ransom of jewelry.  A third bag, the prize of competing gangs of spies, contains top-secret government secrets.  The fourth bag, owned by Streisand's character, Judy Maxwell, is full of her underpants and other garments.  Of course, the bags are mistaken for one another, stolen by the various gangsters, jewel thieves, and spies who populate the periphery of the movie and most of the film involves madcap chases to retrieve one suitcase or another from the clutches of the people trying to steal them. The movie takes place largely in the rooms and corridors of the 17th floor of San Francisco's Bristol Hotel, the place where a musicology conference which Howard is attending with his screechy, overbearing fiancee - acted by a painfully plain Madeline Kahn in her ingenue role.  The scenes in the hotel corridor with various villains and protagonists slipping in and out of adjacent rooms play like a bedroom farce by Feydeau or one of the British purveyors of this sort of thing (for instance, Michael Frayn's Noises off), but the movie is surprisingly chaste -- although the dialogue is suggestive in a pre-Code sort of way, there's no sex at all actually shown or, even, implied in the film.  

The plot is too complex to summarize.  Suffice it to say that Howard is sent to a drugstore to get some buffered aspirin -- the comedy is in the adjective "buffered" insisted upon by Howard's bullying fiancee.  Wandering the streets, Streisand's character, Judy Maxwell, a sort of female hobo in a snappy Carnaby Street cap, is famished.  She sees the hunky Howard and falls for him immediately -- so she spends the rest of the movie pursuing him.  Judy is a polymath, a perpetual student, and she knows everything about everything -- of course, she's a perfect match for the shy, studious, if ineffectual, Howard.  The bags get confused with one another and everyone runs around chasing everyone else, the whole thing climaxing in a spectacular slapstick chase parodying the movie Bullitt down the nearly vertical streets of San Francisco.  Bogdanovich is nothing if not hard-working and the loose ends all have to be tied-up in a trial scene that is the movie's one serious defect -- it goes on too long and the harried Judge is a bit over-the-top even by the standards of this film.  The picture has the happy ending that the audience has been foreseeing from the film's first ten minutes and is satisfying in all respects.

What's Up, Doc? is shot in bright, analytical compositions by Laszlo Kovacs, the geometry of the gags is well established and makes the physical comedy work.  You have to see a movie like this in the right mood.  Some of the comic chaos is, to my eye, more than a little nightmarish.  In one scene, the dawn aftermath of a fire and brawl that resulted in much broken glass (and Streisand dangling twenty stories above the street from a hotel window sill), the camera lovingly surveys the ruins and pans over shattered glass, charred furniture, and tangled up debris -- the effect made me almost sick.  Furthermore, some of the physical comedy, if taken too seriously, is quite upsetting.  I know some people who have a horror of Laurel and Hardy for these reasons -- it's too dark, cruel, anarchic, and the destruction is simply too real.  The same can be said about many of the bravura sequences of chaos in this movie -- cars and motorcycles crash, people get flung around violently, huge panes of glass are broken, and hapless workers who are mere bystanders have their handiwork ripped to pieces.  Speeding cars zoom through an intersection, narrowly missing a poor guy on a tall ladder again and again, until, of course, at the very end of the gag, the inevitable occurs.  Ryan O'Neill is so pretty that he's a sort of joke in himself, a cartoon figure. In one scene, an image that launched a million male stripper routines, he parades around bare-chested in his tight white underpants with a little plaid bowtie (the color of the overnight bags) decorating his throat.  At the end of the movie, Streisand says something like "Being in love means never having to say your sorry", the famous line from Love Story also starring O'Neill -- he replies "That's the dumbest thing I ever heard."

The film critic John Simon panned this picture, commenting notoriously on Streisand's appearance, saying that she reminded him of a rat crossed with a white aardvark.  I now understand the animus on display.  One of the music critics plays a fellow called Simon (Kenneth Mars) who speaks in pretentious dialogue with John Simon's infamous Transylvanian accent; the critic is given a whole repertoire of fey and irritating mannerisms.  Obviously, Simon took offense, denounced the picture as without humor, mocked Bogdanovich for attempting to make a picture of this sort since he was (Simon claimed) totally lacking in talent, and threw in a vicious personal attack on Streisand to boot.  But the movie is, in fact, brilliantly made, very skillfully directed, and actually extremely funny -- Bogdanovich got the last laugh.  

There's a hair-raising stunt 2/3rds of the way through the picture.  Streisand is careening downhill on bicycle rigged up to deliver groceries -- it has a big box on the front between the handlebars.  The bike is basically out-of-control and moving at top speed.  O'Neill sprints alongside the bike, catches up to it, and jumps onto the box on the front of the contraption.  You want to applaud O'Neill's courage and athleticism -- the stunt is done in a long take without the use of stunt double.  O'Neill could have been a success in cowboy movies, but, so far as I know, he didn't work in that genre.