Cinema Sunday: What's Up Doc

When it comes to romantic screwball comedy films, one tends to think of the classics like His Girl Friday, The Awful Truth and Bringing Up Baby from the 1930's and 1940's.  

Thirty years after the heyday of those classic movies, director Peter Bogdanovich decided to give this type of movie another go which brings us to 1972 and What's Up, Doc?  starring Barbra Streisand and Ryan O'Neal.  

Ryan O'Neal is Dr. Howard Bannister, a musicologist from the Iowa Conservatory of Music, has travelled to San Francisco to compete for a research grant to study the affect of rocks on music. Or music on rocks. Rocks are involved somehow. He's carrying rocks in a plaid overnight bag. Howard is there with his extremely overbearing, high maintenance fiancée,  Eunice (Madeline Kahn). 

Well, Howard may be there with his fiancée but that doesn't stop the attentions of one Judy Maxwell (Barbra Steisand). She's a bit of a trouble magnet and look, she has a plaid overnight bag. Her contains her clothes and a big dictionary.  

Howard checks in the Hotel Bristol where two more plaid overnight bags have arrived.

Wealthy socialite Mrs. Van Hoskins has sizable collection of valuable jewels in her plaid bag. Hotel employees are scheming to steal the jewels.

The mysterious "Mr. Smith" has a bag containing stolen top-secret government papers.  "Mr. Jones" is a government agent looking to steal the documents back.  

Events will of course transpire where no one will have the right plaid overnight bag. 

But the really big comedy of errors comes from Judy's insistence on insinuating herself into Howard's life.  

The man putting up the research grant Howard is competing for thinks Judy is Howard's fiancee Eunice. And Judy as "Eunice" is utterly beguiling and charming.  Howard is exasperated by Judy's deception but dang he doesn't come to realize that Judy is beguiling and charming in a way that the real Eunice is not. 

Things come to a head when the various parties who want various things from the various plaid overnight bags realize they each have the wrong plaid overnight bag.  In a showdown where all the players from all the stories bouncing around this movie are finally in one place, Judy and Howard make a break for it with all four bags.

What follows is a preposterously zany chase through the streets of San Francisco with Judy and Howard leading the way on a bicycle, a dragon from a Chinese parade and Volkswagen Beetle purloined from a wedding party.  

In the end, Eunice moves on from Howard while Howard is on a plane back to Iowa where he finds Judy Maxwell is on the same flight.

Ah, Howard's actually happy to see Judy and professes that he loves her and we fade out. 

The framework of Bringing Up Baby is fairly apparent in What's Up, Doc? with the nebbish, absent minded science person with a shrewish and controlling fiancée caught in the cross hairs of a flighty, joyful woman who lives in the moment, proceeds to make the science guy's a living hell until he realizes that he's never truly lived before. 

Judy Maxwell is a fascinating character. Her deal is she keeping getting kicked out of various colleges. Not for a lack of intelligence. Judy has a wide and varied knowledge of many subjects from art to history to geology to mathematics and chemistry and so on and so on. 

Judy likes college. The colleges do care for her propensity for causing chaos and trouble so hence the number of times she's been expelled.  

The "It's That Person Who Was In That Thing" Dept. 

Sorrell Booke shows up as Harry, the corrupt hotel detective trying to steal the jewels. Booke was  Boss Hogg on The Dukes of Hazzard.  

As is the custom of this blog, anytime the Dukes of Hazzard is mentioned, I am required by federal law to post a picture of this person.

 

Madeline Kahn makes her film debut here as Eunice Burns. Kahn will revisit the role of the prickly, controlling fiancée in Young Frankenstein.  

More Mel Brooks connections: 

Kenneth Mars is Hugh Simon, the arrogant, snobbish German competing with Howard for the research grant. Mars has also done this sort of schtick in The Producers as Franz Liebkind as well as in Young Frankenstein as the police inspector.  

Liam Dunn as Judge Maxwell  was in Blazing Saddles as Rev. Johnson

John Hillerman as the hotel manager was most famous for his role as Higgins on the television series Magnum, P.I. but he too was also in Blazing Saddles as Howard Johnson

Finally, let's give it up for Graham Jarvis as the bailiff  in Judge Maxwell's courtroom. Jarvis has made a career out of being That Person Who Was In That Thing in hundreds of TV shows and movies in a variety of supporting roles. I specifically remember him as the aide to General McArthur who provides the briefing to the senior staff on the "Big Mac" episode of M*A*S*H. 

There's a great line in the end that needs some context. Two years before What's Up, Doc?, Ryan O'Neal starred with Ali McGraw in the tear jerking romantic tragedy called Love Story which includes the infamous line: "Love means never having to say your sorry." 

At the end of What's Up, Doc?, Howard has apologized to Judy and Judy replies, "Love means never having to say your sorry."  (Barbra bats her eyelashes a few dozen times.)

Then Howard (played by Ryan O'Neal) says, "That's the stupidest thing I ever heard."  

Apparently Barbra's quoting of Ryan O'Neal's movie got a big laugh with test audiences so which obscured Ryan's equally funny comeback so Peter Bogdanovich used Barbra's eyelashes to create a buffer between the two lines. 

What's Up, Doc? is a crazy wack-a-doodle of a movie with a plot that doesn't always make sense but we're not here for the plot. We're here for the laughs of which there are plenty and for the sparkling chemistry between Barbra Streisand and Ryan O'Neal.

Coming up on the blog...

Yesterday, comic book legend George Perez passed away at the age of 67. I will have a post about Perez on Wednesday.