4/1/2023 0 Comments Whats up doc![]() ![]() The chemistry between Ryan O’Neal and Barbra Streisand is smokin’ hot (she’s never been sexier) - and I’m pretty sure that Ryan O’Neal’s shirtless underwear scene was the first moment that I realized “Yep, I’m gay.” THANK YOU, Peter Bogdanovich for one of my all-time favorite films. ![]() ![]() And “What’s Up, Doc?” is all about desire: for rocks, for pizza, for a cute guy who studies rocks and for the life you really want. It’s not for nothing, as one sharp-eyed reader, MrsDohler, pointed out, that Eunice is seen engrossed in the self-help book “The Sensuous Woman.” Eunice has desires and it’s unclear that Howard is meeting them or ever could. One of the movie’s delights is that she also gets a happy ending, one perhaps better than she might have without Judy’s anarchic interference. Instead, Kahn and Bogdanovich make Eunice into a fully rounded woman who thinks she knows what she wants, a.k.a. Her Eunice - who has to vie with Judy and, by proxy, Streisand, poor thing - could have been a mirthless disaster, yet another sexist cliché, the woman scorned, blah blah blah. ![]() It’s hard to think of “Doc” working without her performance, which is perfection from the flip in her steel-helmet wig on down. Or, as one reader, Gina Reichardt, put it: “Love, music, higher education, plaid overnight bags? What’s not to love?”īut what I really want to talk about is Madeline Kahn, who is peerless. To judge from our readers’ voluminous and very enthusiastic response, “What’s Up, Doc?” is good for what ails us. What Judy wants, Judy gets, and she’s soon chasing Howard amid escalating complications, slam-bam slapstick and some of the greatest second bananas ever bunched together. He plays Howard Bannister, a fusty music professor who, on a trip to San Francisco with his fiancée, Eunice Burns (Madeline Kahn), meets Streisand’s Judy Maxwell, a zany, seemingly rootless sexpot. Plentiful jokes, precision timing, memorable oddballs, kooky situations and beautifully executed physical comedy - “What’s Up, Doc?” has it all and more, including the blissful, counterintuitive pairing of Ryan O’Neal and Streisand. In Bogdanovich’s analytical twist on the genre, even joyous liberation leaves a huge mess.In 1971, while watching a rough cut of Peter Bogdanovich’s “The Last Picture Show,” Barbra Streisand turned to a studio executive and said: “I want him.” What Babs wants, Babs apparently gets, which is how Bogdanovich ended up directing “What’s Up, Doc?” and we ended up laughing through it for our latest Weekend Watch Party. She’s accident-prone-for others-but comes off unscathed, leaving destruction in her wake she’s the calm eye of her own storm, and her typhonic character gives rise to a series of grand-scale calamities that destabilize Howard’s formerly tranquil existence and rearrange matters of work and love. Bogdanovich pays tribute to Howard Hawks’s “Bringing Up Baby” and to the freewheeling catastrophe comedy of silent films, with their elaborate and terrifying stunts-most of which here are set in motion by Judy. At their hotel, Howard meets Judy Maxwell (Barbra Streisand), a flyaway force of nature, albeit a very well-educated one, who falls in love with him at first sight and plugs herself instantly into his life, endangering his engagement as well as his career. Peter Bogdanovich’s 1972 screwball comedy stars Ryan O’Neal as Howard Bannister, an absent-minded musicologist who travels to San Francisco with his hyper-organized fiancée, Eunice Burns (Madeline Kahn). ![]()
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