In his reviews of "Body Heat", Roger Ebert applauded the director's ability to exude the moods of classic film noirs without making it an exercise in style, referring to Pauline Kael, he objected that Kathleen Turner felt like following "the floor marks left by the actresses who preceded her". I wish I could say the same thing about "What's Up, Doc?" and Peter Bogdanovich' obsession to make a carbon-copy of 30's screwball classics, I wish I could say that Ryan O'Neal didn't walk on Cary Grant's floor marks.
I wanted to buy O'Neal as Howard Bannister, the submissive scientist, with the obligatory horn-rimmed glasses to conceal his good looks. But when the waiter in chief tells him "you're upside down" in reference to the badge he's wearing the wrong way, I was wondering why it was so hard for this man of high intellect to get the message instead of repeating like a mechanical parrot "I'm upside down". Screwball-wise, the gag works to the degree that we'd reject any interference with believability. I don't mind zaniness but never at the expenses of believability, which shouldn't be mixed up with realism.
I'm sure Woody Allen would agree that in comedy, the believability of a gag depends on the constancy of characters' patterns of behavior. As Bannister, O'Neal's either bewildered or so puzzled his IQ drops several points down. There's a problem when the straight man supposed to react to all the nonsense around him makes the least sense of all the characters. Barbra Streisand might be annoying as the street-smart and pushy Judy but at least she's consistently annoying, same with Madeline Kahn as Eunice, Howard's bossy fiancée, who gets a fair share of the mayhem all through the movie. There's also Kenneth Mars as a stuck-up linguist with a dubious accent, Liam Dunn as a depressed judge but "What's Up, Doc?" isn't interested in characters anyway, only situations.
And these situations all take off with four plaid overnights beating the odds by looking exactly the same and coming the same day at the same Bristol hotel, announcing an extravagant switching buckaroo. One bag contains Howard's igneous rocks (he's developing a theory about rocks serving as primitive musical instruments), another contains top secret documents and involves a tailing between two interchangeable secret agents, Judy's bag has her belongings and the most valuable one belongs to a rich lady and is full of jewels, tempting in the process the receptionist and the hotel detective. And for all the elaborate jokes thrown at the audiences, the single funniest moment of the film is a spontaneous outburst of creativity that lasts a few seconds. A man who looks like the then-version of Jon Polito is asked to use his charms with a lady twice his age, what follows is pure genius.
The rest doesn't deserve much superlative compliments, it's the usual cocktail of misunderstandings, comedy of errors and manners with a few romantic reliefs, a fight scene where one gets a cream pie in his face and a chase that makes good use of San Francisco's urbanism. It's one gag after another and we're never left with the impression that anything matters more than gags, so what we get is a great set of screwball gags, but too perfectly manufactured to constitute a screwball classic, it's a farce, it's not meant to be taken seriously, it's a joke. Still, haven't you noticed how many people mix up the "anything can happen" with their philosophy of a joke.
The Zucker-AbrahamZucker were far zanier than "What's Up Doc?" but they worked better and became classic for a reason, they had punchlines but bottom-lines as well. "What's Up Doc?" is so obsessed with the need to copy Capra, Lubitsch of Hawks that it forgot one little thing: to have a relevance whatsoever beyond that heritage. The ZAZ movies had well-written characters and believable romances as well, some with great chemistry. "What's Up Doc?" tends to recreate the charm of old movies treating them like relics to duplicate not spirits to resurrect, Streisand is a good Hepburn, O'Neal a passable Grant, but their chemistry was mediocre.
Peter Bogdanovich had just made the wonderful "The Last Picture Show" a film that was original and personal, "What's Up, Doc?" is neither, and I cringed at O'Neal's impersonation of Grant and Streisand forced to force her funny-girl shtick. I was never a big fan of screwball comedies to begin with and I thought the same premise could have lead to fresher material. Indeed, 1972 was the year of two of my favorite romantic comedies, Woody Allen playing a wannabe Bogart in "Play it Again, Sam" until he learned a lesson about being true to himself and find enough inner strength to outdo his own idol, and "The Heartbreak Kid", Elaine May's underrated study of a heart that puts so much effort to get what it wants that it lacked the strength to commit to it. Those were inventive and warm comedies.
It's hard to believe neither of them made it to the Top 10, "What' Up Doc?" earned its third spot right behind "The Godfather" and a classic upside story named "The Poseidon Adventure", I guess there was a primitive answer to the film, directors' homages to other directors have always been a hit-or-miss, "What's Up, Doc?" is Bogdanovich making his "Bringing Up Baby" like Chazelle channeled Jacques Demy through "La La Land" or Woody Allen Bergman with his "Interiors"... But I think such movies depend on the director's ability to transcend the source, like Mel Brooks did with his hilarious "Silent Movie", for instance.
Bogdanovich was focused in his homage, he knew what he was doing making the line between competence and self-consciousness rather thin, it even gets to the ironic point that its punchline, while both timely and hilarious, is the one thing that makes the film more dated than a Bugs Bunny cartoon.
