What's Up, Doc?

Back in April, TCM put out a podcast of interviews between Ben Mankiewicz and director Peter Bogdanovich called The Plot Thickens. In conjunction with this, they ran a couple of Saturday night doubleheaders of movies directed by Bogdanovich, backended with short interviews with the director. One of the movies that I haven't blogged about before is What's Up, Doc?, so I recently sat down to watch it again to do a blog post on here.

At the airport in San Francisco, a man named Smith (Michael Murphy) opens up a red plaid overnight bag, revealing a bunch of documents marked "Top Secret". The government is on to Smith, sending a man after him. Meanwhile, elsehwere in the airport, Howard Bannister (Ryan O'Neal) and his fiancée Eunice (Madeline Kahn) have deplaned, on their way to a conference of musicologists. Howard is a professor who has come up with a theory of early man banging on igneous rocks to create the first music, and is hoping to win a grant from Larrabee (Austin Pendleton), whose organization is hosting the conference. Howard has his rocks in an overnight bag that looks suspiciously like Smith's, although neither has ever met the other.

Checking in to the same hotel as Howard and Smith is wealthy Mrs. Van Hoskins (Mabel Albertson). She's traveling with a bunch of jewels that she should probably put in the hotel safe if you think the hotel safe is a safe place for such stuff. But for now, she's got her jewels in an overnight bag that -- you guessed it -- has the same red plaid pattern as the ones Smith and Bannister have.

Rounding out the cast of characters is Judy Maxwell (Barbra Streisand), a young woman who is aimless in life, having been kicked out of one college after another. She's wound up in San Francisco and it seems as though wherever she goes, she has a stream of chaos in her wake much like Mr. Magoo, not realizing what she's doing. And she too has an overnight bag like the other three, only hers is actually filled with stuff for an overnight stay.

Judy runs into Howard in a moment when he's away from Eunice, and immediately begins to make his life a living hell. She falls in love with him, and tells all the people she runs into that Howard is her husband, which is of course a lie. Howard is a bit of a milquetoast, and the absent-minded professor type, so everything he does is completely ineffective in getting people to believe the truth about Judy, or in getting Judy to stop harassing him.

Everybody but Judy (who doesn't have a reservation) is staying on the same floor of the same hotel, which leads to the next complication that you can guess: the overnight bags are going to be mixed up. This too causes all sorts of problems and chaos, as Howard needs his rocks; Smith and the people pursuing him want those government secrets; and Van Hoskins wants her jewels. Eventually all of the subplots come together in a wild chase throughout San Francisco.

There's a lot to recommend about What's Up, Doc?, which for the most part is incredibly funny. Bogdanovich and the screenwriters (including himself and Buck Henry) were clearly channeling Howard Hawks, especially Bringing Up Baby. But there's one thing I disliked about Bringing Up Baby that's also a problem in spades in What's Up, Doc?, and that's the female lead.

Katharine Hepburn is obnoxious in Bringing Up Baby, clearly only caring about herself and frankly being maliciously happy to cause all sorts of chaos for Cary Grant. Surprisingly, where Hepburn's character is bad in that regard, Streisand's might be even worse if that's possible. She deserved on multiple occasions to have Howard and/or Eunice march her right down to hotel security and have her booted out of the hotel, and possible even arrested if that were legally appropriate.

Still, despite the completely irritating character Streisand plays, What's Up, Doc? is an incredibly funny winner on all levels and one that definitely deserves a watch.