Word: doc
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What's Up, Doc--Park Sq. Cinema...
What's Up, Doc? Bogdanovich again, this time directing Ryan O'Neal and Barbara Streisand. Sack 57, 10:15, 12, 1:45, 3:30, 5:15, 7, 8:45, 10:15. Sundays...
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...
...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...
...Doc's modesty in performing is as unusual as his playing. He confessed during the concert to some nervousness and at least half a dozen times responded "Bless your heart" to the applause for his and Merle's exceptional riffs and to the two standing ovations which succeeded in bringing Doc back for encores. His modesty comes not from a lack of confidence in his skill, but simply from his appreciation for people who like to hear...