Ryan O'Neal is a Harold Lloyd cum Cary Grant stand-in, discombobulated musicologist Howard Bannister ("as in sliding down the.," one of the great lines from late in the film). Streisand is the ultimate kook, albeit one with a strangely savant side (she lists off factoids about everything from musicology to advanced mathematics throughout the film), one Judy Maxwell. However the film ultimately got written and filmed is ultimately irrelevant, because What's Up, Doc? is a rare confluence of talents working together to create a modern masterpiece of mayhem. Bogdanovich, as perhaps is not surprising, is on record saying he got the ball rolling, after getting involved in a contretemps on another, eventually abandoned Warner project ironically starring Streisand's ex, Elliott Gould, the infamous A Glimpse of Tiger. Streisand, as is perhaps her wont, implies in passing in her scene-specific commentary, that it was all her idea and she got director Peter Bogdanovich hired. There's at least a little confusion, if not outright disagreement, about how Doc got its greenlight. While some comedies deflate over time, losing a lot of their sparkle and insouciance, Doc has managed to weather the storms of the intervening decades since its original release, and in fact often seems funnier today than perhaps it did almost 40 years ago (can it really have been that long?).īarbra Streisand as Bugs Bunny.er, Judy Maxwell. Baby is one of several films which obviously influenced screenwriters Buck Henry, David Newman and Robert Benton, as they attempted to resurrect the screwball genre in the early 1970's with What's Up, Doc?, one of the most fondly remembered comedies of its era. Hawks of course contributed at least one bona fide classic to the screwball genre, 1938's Bringing Up Baby, and several of his other comedies bear strong consideration as screwball standouts. The author of that book actually made some cogent arguments about at least the first segment of this Edna Ferber cross-generational drama having classic screwball elements, something that never in a million years would have occurred to me. In fact I was rather amazed several years to find an oversized, coffee table book on screwball which had a long segment devoted to an actress I've spent decades researching, Frances Farmer, and her work in the Howard Hawks co-directed (with William Wyler) Come and Get It. Though screwball usually has some readily identifiable features (the strong willed woman, the harried and easily confused man), the idiom really can be a bit harder to define than you might imagine. By the time we entered the post-World War II era, and the bloated, largely comfortable 1950's (despite the hysteria surrounding anti-Communism and the threat of nuclear annihilation), screwball had passed into the history books. Watching the madcap antics of glamorous movie stars doing patently silly things in completely outrageous situations helped alleviate the stresses and worries of the day, and screwball became one of the lasting cultural contributions of film of the 1930's and, to a somewhat lesser extent, the 1940's. When screwball comedy became an identifiable genre in the 1930's, the United States was still knee-deep in the throes of the Great Depression, and audiences flocked to movie houses in a desperate attempt to escape the grim realities of their everyday lives. Reviewed by Jeffrey Kauffman, August 7, 2010 Still crazy-and absolutely hilarious-after all these years.
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