Word: bogdanovich
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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...
...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...
...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...
...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...
...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...