The Last Screwball Comedy Show

I BET Peter Bogdanovich lies in bed nights, dreaming of limousines and sunglasses and breasty starlets with thighs in their eyes. I bet he didn't wash his hand for a month after he met John Ford. And I bet he had a space on the mantle all picked out for his Oscar that through some error in the script ended up in the arms of Bill Friedkin, director of The French Connection.

Bogdanovich, you understand, is the movie buff's movie buff turned hot young director. After passionate years spent red-eyed and sore-backed in theatres, screening rooms, in front of late-night television, he was let loose with a camera, and no one could relish the role more. Now that The Last Picture Show is behind him and Bogdanovich suddenly finds himself furnished with big budgets, big stars and a respectable measure of critical success, he is hard at work staking out a Name for Himself among the demigods of his hero-worshipping youth. Peter Bogdanovich is 34 years old; he wants to be Orson Welles when he grows up, or Howard Hawks or John Ford--or, better still, all three rolled into some penultimate titan of the still-silver screen.

Thus What's Up Doc? It is Bogdanovich's homage to Hollywood, imitation screwball comedy that tries to distill forty years of American farce into ninety minutes. The acknowledged model is Hawks's Bringing Up Baby, but influence, allusion and satire run infinitely wider--from D.W. Griffith to Bugs Bunny. Eisenstein to Erich Segal to Bogart. It is a movie made out of movies, and right from the opening credits presented as pages in a storybook. Bogdanovich wrings every cliche to its uttermost. Every gag, every twist of plot, has been aged in a thousand earlier uses.

AGGRESSIVE FAST-TALKING would-be seductress Judy Maxwell (Barbra Streisand) sets out to steal absent-minded, mild-mannered musicologist Howard Bannister (Ryan O'Neal) from hysterical rotund fiancee Eunice Burns (Madeleine Kahn). Bannister is in San Francisco in hopes of winning a $20,000 grant to study the role of igneous rocks in primitive man's music. The rival for the grant, one Hugh Simon, is the villain of the piece, plagiarist and foreigner, with an accent as unequivocally Yugoslavian as Streisand's is New Yorkese. Complications breed complications, and descent into farce takes about all of five minutes.

It's all here--confusion of identities, the four identical travelling cases exchanged, lost and found, the heroine dangling from a ledge, pies in the face, a chase through the streets, cars that drive into the bay. The classic lines: "I think I'm having a nightmare" and "Why me?" and "Ohhhhh. I think they're gaining on us." The whole bit. There is a tantalizing five minutes when it seems the inevitable men with the inevitable plate glass window will negotiate the chase sequence unscathed. But Bogdanovich leaves no stock response untriggered, and the glass is finally shattered as satisfyingly as the cement-layer's sidewalk is ruined. It all ends as predictably as it began. Chaos sifts down to order, boy gets girl, villain gets lost.

The better the dinner you've had, the less discriminating the people you sit between, the better you will like it--more or less according to temperament. Given the least susceptibility to the momentum of laughter and a crowded theatre filled with children, it should work as intended, as farce: plain, simple and mindless. It is all second and third and twelfth-hand material but Bogdanovich has developed a certain sense of timing from all those movies he's watched, and old jokes are the best jokes, anyway. Bogdanovich is reaching way back to film's age of innocence, and if you don't look too closely you can almost believe it.

So the problem is not that Bogdanovich has failed--the farce is about as good as any recently. The problem is that he has succeeded, and so what? Bogdanovich has tried to parley moviemania into a style of direction, and that can only go so far. As imitation the film is admirable--but give us the original. What's Up Doc? comes dangerously close to being more an exercise in film history than film. The nostalgia in The Last Picture Show worked because the fifties are where we come from, but here Bogdanovich invokes the whole Great Tradition of American cinema and any critical connection to social reality, if it was there with Hawks in the thirties, has long since disappeared. What's Up Doc? ends up as waspish a comedy as they come. Heroes are clean and Iowan, the villains are the fat, the sexually repressed, the foreign. Barbra Streisand doesn't even get to play a nice Jewish girl.

I suspect that the Peter Bogdanovich phenomenon will finally prove more interesting than any film he is likely to make. More than a mere maker of movies, he has resolved to be a director-cum- personality and so has entered the front line of media in-fighting. At its most harmless this includes the kind of toothless satire of such cultural balloons as The Sensuous Woman and Love Story. At its most petty it is a bitter parody of New York critic John Simon, who made the grievous error of disliking The Last Picture Show. (Simon has retaliated by calling Barbra Streisand "a cross between an aardvark and an albino rat surmounted by a horse bun.")

In any case, Bogdanovich is off and running toward his glorious re-run of the Golden Age. He is the industry's newest hot property, scrubbed and eager. He has taken to appearances on talk shows, nattily dressed, well equipped with wit and anecdote and has never been known to pass up a chance to call Orson Welles by his first name. He has started a blood-feud with a critic and has left his wife for an actress. All very Hollywood. If none of this will make his films any better, it will at least make the spaces between them more interesting. Almost like the days when Movies were Movies.