WHAT'S UP, DOC?
Directed by PETER BOGDANOVICH Screenplay by BUCK HENRY, DAVID NEWMAN and ROBERT BENTON
Director Bogdanovich's intention here was to do a pastiche of '30s screw ball comedy, particularly of Howard Hawks' Bringing Up Baby, whose plot he lifted and whose blisteringly fast pace he attempted to emulate. He also borrowed from other sources as varied as Buster Keaton and Animator Chuck (Roadrunner) Jones. The result is a comedy made by a man who has seen a lot of movies, knows all the mechanics, and has absolutely no sense of humor. Seeing What's Up, Doc? is like shaking hands with a joker holding a Joy Buzzer. The effect is both presumptuous and unpleasant.
The action rebounds off a totally deranged romance between a muddled musicologist (Ryan O'Neal) and a dizzy perennial student (Barbra Streisand).
There are also a couple of casual sub plots involving hotel jewel thieves and a crew of especially clumsy secret agents on the track of some top-secret documents. It all ends with everyone pursuing everyone else up and down the hills of San Francisco in a chase scene that is loaded with spectacular stunts but notably short on laughs.
There is a lot of furious movement throughout the film, but no real zest or fun. Since O'Neal's character is in volved with a noodle-headed research project about the musical qualities of stones, there are more jokes than any one would care to hear along the lines of "Get your hands off my rocks."
The cast is singularly strident. As a pompous Middle European intellectual, Kenneth Mars mugs and drools in a manner that Jerry Lewis might find excessive. Madeline Kahn, who plays O'Neal's officious fianceé, rolls over her part like one of Patton's tanks. Liam Dunn is fitfully funny as a demented judge, but he too finally succumbs to the prevailing hysteria.
O'Neal is so stiff and clumsy an actor that he cannot even manage a part requiring him to be stiff and clumsy.
As for Barbra Streisand, her macaw manner and self-congratulatory cuteness are displayed here to the usual excess.