What’s Up, Doc?

What’s Up, Doc?
Directed by Peter Bogdanovich
Written by Buck Henry, David Newman and Robert Benton; story by Peter
Bogdanovich
1972/US
IMDb page
Repeat viewing/Amazon Prime rental

Judy: Love means never having to say you’re sorry.
Howard: That’s the dumbest thing I ever heard.

Peter Bogdanovich’s homage to screwball comedy and Loony Tunes has some funny bits. Your reaction may depend on your feelings about Barbra Streisand’s character.

Howard Bannister (Ryan O’Neal) is a musicologist who wants to pursue a theory that primitive man made music with igneous rocks.  He and his perfectly awful fiancee Eunice (Madeline Kahn) go to San Francisco for festivities surrounding the award of the Larabee Grant, for which Bannister is one of the two finalists.  The other is the underhanded dolt Hugh Simon (Kenneth Mars).

Judy Maxwell (Streisand) is a wise-guy college drop-out.  She runs into Howard and becomes determined to make him hers, fiancee or no fiancee.   She also creates destruction and chaos everywhere she goes.

The set up involves four identical red plaid overnight cases.  One is Judy’s; one carries Howard’s rocks; one holds a rich old woman’s diamonds; and the last contains top secret papers being stolen by a reporter.  Thieves are after the diamonds and government agents are after the papers.  For one reason or another, in the frenetic melee which is this movie the bags are continuously mixed up.

Judy manages to trick her way into the award banquet and charms the pants off Frederick Larrabee telling him she is Eunice, which makes it almost impossible for Howard to get rid of her.  I’m going to stop here.  The film ends with a pretty amazing comedy car chase through the hills of San Francisco.

Bogdanovich conceived this as kind of a remake of Bringing Up Baby (1938) with O’Neal in the Cary Grant part and Streisand in the Katharine Hepburn part.  The film is even more frenetic than Bringing Up Baby, containing many elements from slapstick comedies and the Streisand character repeatedly references Bugs Bunny.  The Hepburn character’s bossiness has always been somewhat off-putting to me and Streisand’s character only takes it up a notch.  The film was a tad too much for me.  Not as hilarious as I remembered but highly-rated and worth seeing if you are looking for something truly wacky.

Madeline Kahn made her film debut in this movie.