Why What’s Up, Doc? remains a perfect screwball… | Little White Lies

In Praise Of

Why What’s Up, Doc? remains a per­fect screw­ball comedy

07 Jan 2022

Words by Meg Walters

Man and woman in vintage car, wearing elaborate costumes.
Man and woman in vintage car, wearing elaborate costumes.
Peter Bogdanovich’s 1972 homage to the Hol­ly­wood roman­tic come­dies of old is chaot­ic, sil­ly, and utter­ly joyful.

At an ear­ly screen­ing of Peter Bogdanovich’s 1972 com­e­dy What’s Up, Doc?, the audi­ence of Hol­ly­wood heavy­weights were ini­tial­ly skep­ti­cal. Then, after sev­er­al min­utes of strained silence bro­ken by awk­ward tit­ters, the actor John Cas­savetes sud­den­ly leapt to his feet, shout­ing, I can’t believe he’s doing this!” As Bog­danovich lat­er recalled, The place broke up and from then on they loved it.”

What’s Up Doc is a breath­less flur­ry of a film, pro­pelled by an increas­ing­ly non­sen­si­cal plot, and under­scored by an unend­ing stream of mile-a-minute dia­logue, thrown back and forth between a daffy cast of car­toon­ish char­ac­ters. It’s fast-talk­ing, sharp-wit­ted, and, quite frankly, com­plete­ly wacky – it’s not hard to see why indus­try hot­shots of the time didn’t know what to make of it.

For Bog­danovich, What’s Up Doc was decid­ed­ly new ter­ri­to­ry. In 1971, he had amassed eight Oscar nom­i­na­tions for his com­ing-of-age dra­ma The Last Pic­ture Show. He was in high demand. Warn­er Bros. approached him with a script intend­ed for Bar­bra Streisand, but he turned it down, explain­ing that he instead want­ed to make a screw­ball com­e­dy, like Bring­ing Up Baby, with Bar­bra. A square pro­fes­sor and a daffy dame who breaks him down live hap­pi­ly ever after.” Three weeks lat­er, he and a team of writ­ers – Buck Hen­ry, Robert Ben­ton and David New­man – had whipped up what would become one of the last true screw­ball comedies.

Screw­ball com­e­dy first sprung up in The Great Depres­sion era of the 30s and con­tin­ued into the 40s. Think Bring­ing Up Baby,” It Hap­pened One Night,” My Man God­frey,” The Awful Truth,” and so on. The essence of a screw­ball? It’s romance by way of bit­ing remarks and whiplash-induc­ing retorts. It’s the slap­stick stum­bles and bumps of a Char­lie Chap­lin movie. It’s zany schemes, mad­cap heiress­es and mis­tak­en iden­ti­ties, all spin­ning faster and faster out of con­trol until the sat­is­fy­ing, roman­tic resolution.

It’s also the rever­sal of the clas­sic gen­der dynam­ic, with, as Bog­danovich put it, a daffy dame” spar­ring with a square pro­fes­sor.” Doris Mil­berg writes in The Art of Screw­ball, In screw­ball com­e­dy, all’s fair in love and war, with love ever tri­umphant.” In a screw­ball, the boy gets the girl – or, more often, the girl gets the boy – after a tur­bu­lent meet-cute.

With What’s Up, Doc?, Bog­danovich stuck to this tried and trust­ed for­mu­la. The film fol­lows the mis­ad­ven­tures of four match­ing bags con­tain­ing a girl’s cloth­ing, an academic’s rocks, a millionaire’s dia­monds, and a gov­ern­ment agent’s top secret doc­u­ments. Chaos – always of the slap­stick vari­ety – inevitably ensues when the own­ers of these four bags wind up at the same hotel and the bags get acci­den­tal­ly mud­dled up.

A fire breaks out in a hotel room, a gun fight erupts at a cock­tail par­ty. Ulti­mate­ly, a messy car chase takes over the streets of San Fran­cis­co, involv­ing some unfor­get­table moments of psy­chi­cal com­e­dy – a large pane of glass is saved (then shat­tered), a bike ends up inside a Chi­nese drag­on send­ing it stream­ing down the street, and a stolen Just Mar­ried” car winds up bob­bing in San Fran­cis­co Bay.

Of course, the whole bag fias­co isn’t real­ly sup­posed to make sense. As Streisand once not­ed, I can’t fol­low the sto­ry myself.” Rather, it’s intend­ed to cre­ate a top­sy-turvy back­drop against which the real sto­ry can unfold.

Image shows a man with glasses and a woman embracing on a bed.

At the cen­tre of the bag-relat­ed may­hem are a daffy dame” and a square pro­fes­sor”. Judy Maxwell (Bar­bra Streisand) is a fast-talk­ing, chron­ic col­lege drop-out. Howard Ban­nis­ter (Ryan O’Neal) is an absent-mind­ed pro­fes­sor in town for a musi­col­o­gy con­ven­tion with his prud­ish and ear-pierc­ing­ly shrill fiancée Eunice Burns (played by the icon­ic Made­line Khan).

After spot­ting Howard in the lob­by of the hotel, Judy latch­es onto him like a whim­si­cal leech (that is, if a leech said things like, Lis­ten, kid­do, you can’t fight a tidal wave,” or, How would you like to swal­low one sand­wich d’knuckles?”) Judy and Howard hit it off as only a screw­ball cou­ple can – she fol­lows him around a drug­store test­ing his patience, inex­plic­a­bly call­ing him Steve, tear­ing the back seam of his jack­et in two (in an ode to Howard Hugh­es’ 1938 screw­ball Bring­ing Up Baby), and blurt­ing out things like, What do you think I am, a piece of ripe fruit you can squeeze the juice out of and cast aside?” Howard main­tains an air of mea­sured if increas­ing­ly strained calm.

This dynam­ic car­ries them through the rest of the film, with Judy con­sis­tent­ly turn­ing up where she doesn’t belong and even­tu­al­ly shak­ing Howard out of his absent-mind­ed Yes, Eunice” stu­por. After find­ing Judy in his bath­tub, Howard exas­per­at­ed­ly says, You are the last straw that breaks my camel’s back, you are the plague, you bring hav­oc and chaos to every­one, but why to me? Why, why, why?” She smiles demure­ly. Because you look cute in your paja­mas, Steve.”

What ever hap­pened to the sharp-wit­ted, girl-pesters-absent-mind­ed-boy-into-state-of-indig­na­tion rom-coms of old? While some con­tem­po­rary film­mak­ers have attempt­ed to update the screw­ball genre, few have come as close as Bog­danovich, the flawed and much-dis­put­ed excep­tions being films like Mis­tress Amer­i­ca and Down With Love.

Watch­ing What’s Up, Doc? today, it’s hard not to be struck with a dou­ble dose of nos­tal­gia for a kind of movie romance that has large­ly dis­ap­peared from our screens. The par­tic­u­lar brand of slap­stick com­e­dy and barbed romance in What’s Up, Doc? is an homage to a bygone era of Hol­ly­wood cin­e­ma that in 1972 was con­sid­ered out­dat­ed. But Bog­danovich embraced it with­out irony.

After all, why not give Streisand the fear­less one-lin­ers of a daffy dame extra­or­di­naire? Why not lace the script with 1930s slang? Why not fill the sound­track with the jazzy sounds of Cole Porter? Why not cre­ate a plot so far­ci­cal that even the film’s own stars couldn’t be both­ered to fol­low it? Mod­ern attempts at the screw­ball are not so brave. Fifty years on, the cor­rect response to What’s Up, Doc? remains: I can’t believe he’s doing this!”

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