I must be on to something. Less than a week after I published my piece on screwball comedies on May 10, Manohla Dargis and A.O.[Tony] Scott of the NY Times published an article about the Barbra Streisand and Ryan O’Neal “modern” screwball, What’s Up Doc?, proposing it to their readers for their “Weekend Watch Party”. Then on May 19, they wrote an article commenting in some depth about their respective reactions to and admiration for that movie. Referring to its “plentiful jokes, precision timing, memorable oddballs, kooky situations and beautifully executed comedy”, Dargis and Scott said they both laughed their way through the film, calling it “good for what ails us.”
Which was my point about screwball comedies generally.
Or maybe I’m just late to the party? I say this because, despite being a big fan of screwball, as you well know, I had never seen What’s Up Doc? before reading about it from Dargis and Scott. The picture was released in 1972, more than a quarter century after the heyday of the genre, but just a year after I graduated from college. The third most popular movie of the year, it was directed by Peter Bogdanovich, fresh off his The Last Picture Show (1971), which I had seen, and written by Buck Henry, who had written The Graduate (1967) which everyone had seen and Catch 22 (1970)(ditto). Bogdanovich is a cineaste and a big fan of classic comedies – check out The Great Buster (2018) his wonderful and funny biography of Buster Keaton [reviewed HERE].
So why did I skip What’s Up Doc? The main thing, I suspect, is that I was something of a Streisand-phobe at the time. In my world view she was very un-cool musically, and therefor culturally. And I was immature enough to equate uncool with bad. Plus, to be fair to my younger self, I wasn’t yet a big movie-goer at that stage of my life.
Still, having been informed by solid sources that this was a funny, madcap, screwball film modelled after some of the great Howard Hawks classics of the 1930s, the spouse and I had to see it, and we did so ipso prompto.
The verdict: Yes, What’s Up Doc? is a brilliant homage to the great comedies of yesteryear – especially the 1930s screwballs but also the silent classics from folks like Buster Keaton and Harold Lloyd. At the same time it is, simply put, a stitch - a ridiculously funny movie on its own terms. I mean tears-rolling-down-your-face, fall-off-your-chair hilarious.
Streisand and O’Neal are both great. She plays an assertive, outlandish, overly perky, yet somehow adorable young woman, “Judy”, who takes an early interest in Ryan O’Neal’s character. Think Katherine Hepburn’s immediate attachment to Cary Grant in Bringing Up Baby as the best classic example. O’Neal’s character is Howard, a remarkably clueless egghead a la Cary Grant’s “David” in Bringing Up Baby or Henry Fonda’s “Charles” in The Lady Eve (or even Gary Cooper’s “Bertram Potts” in Ball of Fire) hopelessly outmatched by the lady pursuer. The romance part of the story is utterly predictable – from the moment Judy lays eyes on Howard, but the fun of this farce has nothing to do with any mystery about whether these two will get together, any more than whether we sympathize with the girl he came in with (we don’t). That would be Howard’s fiancée Eunice (Madeline Kahn, in her feature film debut). 
The picture of necessity starts a little slowly, with multiple unrelated characters arriving at San Francisco airport with identical red plaid bags, one of which contains Howard’s collection of musical igneous rocks(!); another includes, we later learn, a posh lady’s extravagant, garish jewelry; and a third is stuffed full of stolen top secret documents - which sets up everything else, of course. Of course, all these people and their bags arrive at the same hotel. Thereafter, the pace becomes ever more brisk, developing into a hilarious compendium of increasingly outlandish funny bits culled from sixty years of movie history - combining madcap romantic comedy (witty repartee and ludicrous misunderstandings) with farce (characters surreptitiously, goofily popping in and out of doors in a long hotel hallway), slapstick (mistaken identity, tripping, falling, hiding under tables, general melees, cream pies, etc.), and even an amazing, extended (and wacky) multivehicle chase scene (to parody the hit Steve McQueen film Bullitt (1968), also shot in San Francisco). 
O’Neal, as the unwitting object of zany (but clever) Judy’s schemes, who’s trying to placate his increasingly alarmed fiancée, wears a dumbfounded expression as he tries and fails to keep things together – in short, the perfect straight man. Streisand is, somewhat to my surprise, pretty brilliant as the ditz who’s not a ditz, every bit the equal of Hepburn in Bringing Up Baby. As a pair, they have great chemistry and terrific comic timing, as if they’d been doing this sort of thing for years. The rest of the ensemble does fine as well, especially Kenneth Mars [whom I remember as Franz Liebkind, the nazi-loving “Springtime For Hitler” author in The Producers (1967)], here playing an ego-maniacal competitor to Howard for an esteemed research grant.
It’s the perfect movie to tickle your funny bone and lift you, for a couple hours at least, out of the limited, humdrum covid-19 era lifestyle. (Did I just refer to our current circumstance as “the covid-19 era”? God help us!) As with most comedies, this one is likely better to watch with another or several others – laughter being contagious and all.
1 hour 34 minutes MPAA rating: G
Grade: A
Available to rent on most streaming services not named Netflix, including Amazon, GooglePlay, iTunes and Vudu [$1.99 - $2.99]
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