What’s Up, Doc? ***** (1972, Barbra Streisand, Ryan O’Neal, Madeline Kahn) – Classic Movie Review 1,232

Peter Bogdanovich’s hilarious 1972 What’s Up, Doc? reworks the 1938 screwball comedy classic Bringing Up Baby for delightful stars Barbra Streisand and Ryan O’Neal.

The delightful 1972 comedy film What’s Up, Doc? sees its stars Barbra Streisand, Ryan O’Neal and Madeline Kahn, and its creator Peter Bogdanovich on their best, most exuberant form.

Story-writer/director Peter Bogdanovich’s hilarious 1972 reworking of and homage to the 1938 screwball comedy classic Bringing Up Baby stars Barbra Streisand as zany Judy Maxwell and Ryan O’Neal as the bespectacled professor Howard Bannister she endlessly pesters.

The San Francisco-set story centres on four identical plaid overnight bags and the people who own them, as an accidental mix-up leads to a series of increasingly wild and wacky situations. One of the bags belongs to Bannister, a musicologist from the Iowa Conservatory of Music, and is filled with igneous ‘tambula’ rocks that have certain musical properties. The second bag belongs to Judy and is filled with her clothes and a large dictionary. Everywhere she goes, trouble happens.

Old movie buff Bogdanovich catches the Thirties screwball style perfectly, the delicious stars are at their best and play the farcical comedy to the max, and there is a slam-dunk finish with a nail-bitingly hilarious Bullitt-style chase up and down the streets of San Francisco.

There is also stupendous comedy playing throughout the cast – especially Madeline Kahn in her début as O’Neal’s mousy fiancée, Eunice Burns, and Austin Pendleton as the equally mousy Frederic Larabee.  The movie features a number of actors who have appeared in Mel Brooks films, including Kahn (Blazing Saddles, Young Frankenstein, High Anxiety), Kenneth Mars (The Producers, Young Frankenstein), Liam Dunn (Blazing Saddles, Young Frankenstein, Silent Movie) and John Hillerman (Blazing Saddles).

The best measure of What’s Up, Doc?’s success is how effortless it all looks. It doesn’t erase memories of Katharine Hepburn and Cary Grant in Bringing Up Baby but it does respect and complement the old movie beautifully. As an homage, it has contributed to Bringing Up Baby‘s lasting high reputation and has established a lasting reputation of its own too.

The third-highest grossing film of 1972, it won the Writers Guild of America 1973 Best Comedy Written Directly for the Screen award for writers Buck Henry, David Newman and Robert Benton.

O’Neal’s mannerisms are modelled on Harold Lloyd, whom Cary Grant studied as his inspiration for his performance in Bringing Up Baby at the suggestion of its director Howard Hawks. At the end, O’Neal’s Howard looks for Streisand’s Judy and says ‘Judy?….Judy?….Judy?’, often used by impressionists taking off Cary Grant, though Grant never actually said the line.

When Judy (Streisand) says, ‘Love means never having to say you’re sorry’ (a famous line from O’Neal’s hit Love Story), Howard (O’Neal) replies ‘That’s the dumbest thing I’ve ever heard.’

‘I want the whole ridiculous story told by one person. Is there anybody here who thinks they can handle it?’: The Judge (Liam Dunn).

Also in the cast are Mabel Albertson, Randy Quaid, John Hillerman, Sorrell Booke, Michael Murphy, M Emmet Walsh, Philip Roth, Stefan Gierasch, Liam Dunn, George Morfogen, Kevin O’Neal, Eleanor Zee, Paul Condyllis, Gill Perkins, Christa Lang and Sean Ross.

Streisand and O’Neal reconvened for The Main Event (1979).

Bogdanovich and O’Neal reconvened for Paper Moon (1973).

Ryan O’Neal (April 20, 1941 – December 8, 2023) was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Actor and the Golden Globe Award for Best Actor – Motion Picture Drama for the 1970 romantic drama film Love Story. He also found acclaim in Peter Bogdanovich’s What’s Up, Doc? (1972) and Paper Moon (1973), which earned him a nomination for the Golden Globe Award for Best Actor – Motion Picture Musical or Comedy, Stanley Kubrick’s Barry Lyndon (1975), Richard Attenborough’s A Bridge Too Far (1977), and Walter Hill’s The Driver (1978).

© Derek Winnert 2014 Classic Movie Review 1,232

Link to Derek Winnert’s home page for more film reviews: http://derekwinnert.com

A member of the London Critics Circle, Derek Winnert is the author of The Virgin Encyclopedia of the Movies, Kino Die Groge Welt der Filme und Stars, The Film & Video Guide and a biography of Barbra Streisand under various titles – Barbra Streisand: Quote, Unquote, Barbra Streisand: Superstar or Barbra Streisand: Les étoiles.