BARRY LYNDON 1975

I remember very well all the excitement surrounding the 1975 release of Barry Lyndon; director Stanley Kubrick’s highly anticipated follow-up to A Clockwork Orange. Four years had elapsed since Kubrick’s stylized vision of an all-too-imaginable future opened to controversy and equal parts critical acclaim/antipathy, and Barry Lyndon ‒ shrouded in secrecy, costing $11 million, two-years-in-the-making, 3-hours long, and starring the eyebrow-raising choice of actor Ryan O’Neal in the lead ‒ augured no less.

Arriving on a wave of publicity crested by a lengthy Time magazine cover story declaring it “Kubrick’s Grandest Gamble,” Barry Lyndon was hyped as a painstakingly detailed 18^th-century epic adapted from the little-known 19^th-century novel The Luck of Barry Lyndon by William Makepeace Thackeray (Vanity Fair). Shot in Ireland, England, and Germany over the course of a 300-day shooting schedule, next to nothing was known of the film’s storyline, save for it being a kind of inverse Pilgrim’s Progress chronicling the rise and fall of a handsome Irish rake. What was instead proffered at the forefront of all publicity, eclipsing references to either the actors’ performances or the general dramatic appeal of the story itself, was the fact that it was a Stanley Kubrick film.

Like Hitchcock, Kubrick and his reputation as an innovative perfectionist were the real stars of the film. In fact, the single most-discussed element about Barry Lyndon beyond the cult of worship surrounding Kubrick himself was the film’s sumptuous cinematography. Much was made of how Kubrick & Co. eschewed the traditional use of artificial lighting to create a period-perfect look through the near-exclusive application of candles and natural light. Advance word was that it was Kubrick’s masterpiece; an epic historical spectacle with art house aesthetics.

Ryan O'Neal as Redmond Barry

Marisa Berenson as Lady Lyndon

Murray Melvin as Reverend Samuel Runt

Patrick Magee as The Chevalier du Balibari

Leon Vitali as Lord Bullingdon 

Barry Lyndon opened on Christmas Day at San Francisco’s Northpoint Theater, advance buzz suggesting an event more than a motion picture. With all this buildup, you’d think I’d be chomping at the bit to see Barry Lyndon when it opened.

Not exactly.

While I loved Barry Lyndon’s Saul Bass-designed poster art (below) and was impressed by what little I’d seen in the way of movie stills, none of that translated into an interest in actually seeing the film itself.

Part of this is attributable to my not being much of a Kubrick enthusiast at the time. As a film buff, I knew I was “supposed” to like him, but being that in 1971 I was too young to see A Clockwork Orange, and only had an edited, commercial-interrupted TV broadcast of Lolita and a scratchy college campus print of 2001: A Space Odyssey to base an opinion on; I can’t say Kubrick was a director who loomed very large for me as a teen.

But the main reason for my disinterest was my (then) overall aversion to epic costume dramas in general. Sure, the Julie Christie factor was enough to entice me into seeing Far From The Madding Crowd and Doctor Zhivago, but for the most part, I was of the opinion that any movie asking me to sit still longer than two and a half hours had better be a musical. Barry Lyndon looked to me like it was either going to be a somber, picturesque snooze like Lawrence of Arabia, or (based on how often the words “scoundrel” and “rascal” popped up in reviews) one of those tediously bawdy romps like Tom Jones or Lock Up Your Daughters. No thanks.

Barry Lyndon's lush spectacle is the deceptively sentimental backdrop for a tale whose events
and characters are themselves a subversive commentary on classic romantic tradition

So I didn’t see Barry Lyndon when it premiered that December, and I’m not sure I’d have seen it at all were not for my older sister who was attending an art school at the time where it was something of an art history mandate for students to check out Barry Lyndon for its cinematography redolent of the paintings of 18th-century artists like John Constable and Thomas Gainsborough. 

Like everyone else, my sister raved about the film’s visual splendor, but her going back to see Barry Lyndon two more times persuasively backed up her assertion of it being an irresistibly entertaining film, as well; something I’d yet to come across in any of the reviews I’d read. Hailing it as the perfect costume picture for people who didn’t like costume pictures (that would be me), she sold me on the film by alluding to Kubrick’s success - intentional or not - in fashioning an epic heroic romantic drama devoid of either a hero or romance. A film whose lush spectacle is the deceptively sentimental backdrop for a tale whose events and characters are a subversive commentary on classic Romance tradition.

I saw Barry Lyndon the next day.

That was 40 years ago. And since then I’ve seen all but three of Stanley Kubrick’s movies (Fear & Desire, Killer’s Kiss, & Paths of Glory), but my opinion of Barry Lyndon then hasn’t changed: it’s my absolute favorite of all his films.

Nominated for 7 Oscars, Barry Lyndon won 4
Cinematography, Costume, Art Direction, and Musical Score 

WHAT I LOVE ABOUT THIS FILM

Film critic Andrew Sarris once described the stylization in Stanley Kubrick’s films as being a form of emotional evasion. I don’t think that was meant as a compliment, but as it pertains to Barry Lyndon, it defines why this film strikes such a chord with me.

Barry Lyndon begins in 1750 and tells the episodic story of a young, naïve Irish lad (O’Neal) of modest gentry status who aspires to aristocracy. As self-deluding as Flaubert’s Emma Bovary, as social-climbing as Dreiser's Clyde Griffiths; Redmond fancies himself a well-bred man of courage and honor out to claim his rightful position in the world. That his quest calls upon him to summarily assume the roles of gambler, cheat, deserter, spy, and adulterer, proves of little consequence.

Attempting to live his life as though he were the hero of a romantic novel, Redmond’s lack of self-awareness blinds him to the flaws in his character which, while successful in getting him where he wants, unfailingly stand in the way of getting him what he wants. 

The loss of father figures is a recurring motif in Barry Lyndon.
Here, Redmond comforts longtime friend and protector, Captain Grogan (Godfrey Quigley)

The combined effect of Kubrick’s distancing camera and Michael Hordern’s subjective, coolly disdainful narration is that the chronicling of Redmond Barry’s ascendancy and decline becomes a doleful implosion of romantic myth. Dramatic irony replaces clichéd sentimentality, and the result is a film both moving and reflective. What looks at first glance like emotional evasion might well be a director not finding it necessary to tell the viewer what they should be feeling.

Marie Kean as Barry's headstrong mother

PERFORMANCES

I think Ryan O’Neal gives his best comedy performance in Peter Bogdanovich’s Paper Moon (1973) and the best dramatic performance of his career in Barry Lyndon. To my mind, he’s really quite marvelous and I can’t imagine anyone else in the role. (Robert Redford was considered and turned it down. Sparing us from having to put up with a Barry Lyndon sporting the same layered Malibu beach boy shag haircut he’s had in every film he’s ever made.) 

Barry Lyndon rests on our being able to see both the good and bad in Redmond, never being sure from scene to scene if he’s truly as dishonorable or as virtuous as he appears. I'm not sure how he pulled it off, but O’Neal captures Redmond’s idealism, cowardice, cruelty, heart, with a depth that brings home the ultimate tragedy of the story. 

Marisa Berenson, cast once again as a woman pursued by a fortune-hunter (Cabaret), has a role that's largely silent, yet her performance I find to be the film's most poignant. A former model, Berenson benefits from precisely the same subtle projection that makes models in fashion magazines appear to convey exactly what the observer seeks to find in their sphinxlike countenances. Certainly, I'm moved by the "corruption of beauty" nuances at the core of her character arc, but I think there's a great deal more to Berenson's performance than being heart-stoppingly beautiful in her period finery.

THE STUFF OF FANTASY

Certain critical buzzwords and phrases always raise red flags for me. Whenever I read that a stage performer “puts on a good show,” I take that to mean a meager talent is attempting to mask their shortcomings behind the bells and whistles of production values. Any fashion trend signified as “fun!” is sure to be ghastly. So, similarly, whenever movie critics go on and on about how beautifully a film is shot, I can’t help but assume there’s precious little else about it to recommend.

In promoting Barry Lyndon stateside, Warner Bros, hamstrung both by the film’s largely unknown (at least in the U.S.) cast of British character actors, and perhaps an inability to extol the acting virtues of Ryan O’Neal and Marisa Berenson convincingly built its entire marketing around the beauty of film's cinematography and the technical artistry in its recreation of a bygone era.  

Like many, I took this to suggest Barry Lyndon had nothing to offer beyond its visual grandeur, when in fact it's merely an indication of the limitations inherent in marketing a film that fails to fit into a set genre category.

Barry Lyndon is without a doubt one of the most beautiful films ever made, and in 1975 on the big screen, it fairly took my breath away. But over the years I’ve come to better appreciate the film's visual magnificence as something more than just ornamental show. Its images have a poetic quality about them that has taken on a melancholy richness in this day of CGI fabrication. 

When I watch Barry Lyndon today, I’m aware of witnessing the recreation of a time and era that couldn’t be achieved today without digital manipulation. I actually respond emotionally to the fact that what I’m seeing has been painstakingly rendered in the real world. People, not computer-generated clones, occupy the crowded battle scenes; the stately landscapes vistas are actual locations; the immense interiors are authentic.

Even Barry Lyndon’s deliberate pacing and long-held static shots, once a source of much criticism, feel positively rapturous in today’s climate of I-don’t know-what-the-hell-I’m-looking-at rapid-fire editing.

Better still, Barry Lyndon's beautiful facade masks many somber truths. There is nothing heroic in death; war is absurd; pain endures, and what happens to us can't help but change us. And not always for the better.

THE STUFF OF DREAMS
Barry Lyndon didn't do very well during its initial release, but as so often happens when a talented director passes on and film fans are left to contemplate the meager talents still drawing breath; Barry Lyndon has been reappraised, reassessed, and hailed by many as an overlooked masterpiece.
When those who once dismissed it as boring and sluggish now sing its praises, I try not to look too smug while suppressing a desire to jog their memories with a well-timed, "I told you so!".

I won't say it's a romp, a crowd-pleaser, or a movie that'll tug at your heartstrings, but for those open to an epic scaled to human dimensions, Barry Lyndon contains a great deal of humor (mostly ironic), action, and compelling drama. I particularly like the cast of supporting players, some familiar, many more, less so, but even the briefest roles are brought to vivid, dimensional life. In many ways Barry Lyndon is like Ken Russell with self-control: a feast for the eyes, heaven to listen to (the classical music score is gorgeous), and a roster of brilliant supporting actors with fascinating faces.

I'd be reluctant to label Stanley Kubrick a genius, but there's no doubt in my mind he was a true artist.


BONUS MATERIAL

Stanley Kubrick's long out of circulation first film, Fear & Desire (1953) is 

available in its entirety on YouTube HERE 

"Borey Lyndon"
Kubrick's masterpiece gets the Mad Magazine treatment

Copyright © Ken Anderson   2009 - 2015

PAPER MOON 1973

When most people think of cinema in the '70s, they think of a time of innovation, upheaval, and experimentation. And indeed, it was. But the '70s was also the decade that introduced the first generation of film-weaned filmmakers. The directors, producers, and writers who grew up watching movies.

Wholly uninterested in the experimental exploration of film's potential as an art form or means of creative expression, this new breed of nostalgia-prone, rear-view-fixated filmmakers—many of them former movie critics or film scholars—not only seemed to have spent the entirety of their formative years in front of movie screens (suggesting, perhaps, a lack of actual, real-life-acquired insights to impart in their work beyond those gleaned, secondhand, from movies); but when granted the opportunity to make films of their own, strove for no ambition loftier than to remake, revisit, and re-imagine the movies that meant so much to them while growing up.

The legacy of such willfully arrested artistic development in today's Hollywood can most certainly be seen in the industry's worrisome over-reliance on remakes and reboots and the almost-surreal global dominance of mega-budget, adolescence-coddling comic book superhero movies. But back in the day of the Auteur Theory, Nouvelle Vague, and the New Hollywood, the regressive filmmaker was primarily dismissed by so-called serious cineastes. Luckily for these filmmakers, they were taken to the bosom of a moviegoing public growing weary of avant-garde filmmaking techniques, artsy pretensions, and non-linear storytelling. Indeed, in the wake of the '70s oil crisis, inflation, Vietnam, and Watergate, many audiences found the notion of escaping into the romanticized idealization of the past to be a very appealing proposition.

Cinema Dreams
In the background of this shot, Bogdanovich pays tribute to one of his favorite directors, John Ford, by featuring a theater marquee advertising Ford's 1935 feature, Steamboat Round the Bend

Some directors, like François Truffaut, paid homage to the filmmakers they admired (Hitchcock, in his case) by reinterpreting that director's style through a modern prism. Others, like Francis Ford Coppola, found fame by applying auteurist theories to classicist filmmaking. Only Peter Bogdanovich—actor, film scholar, and critic—drew the ire of Hollywood Renaissance movie cultists (while gaining success as the Golden Boy of the nostalgia craze) by making new "old" movies.

Ryan O'Neal as Moses (Moze) Pray

Tatum O'Neal as Addie Loggins

Madeline Kahn as Miss Trixie Delight (alias, Mademoiselle)

P.J. Johnson as Imogene

Burton Gilliam as Floyd

John Hillerman as Deputy Hardin / Jess Hardin 

Randy Quaid as Leroy

Although Peter Bogdanovich is technically credited with being its director, Paper Moon, like its predecessors The Last Picture Show (1971) and What's Up, Doc? (1972), is a film so heavily influenced by Howard Hawks, John Ford, and Orson Welles, each gentleman, by rights, could share co-director billing. A point Bogdanovich himself would likely make no bones about, for on the DVD commentary, he states, "The movie was very 1935 with '70s actors." And to be sure, what with the film's salty language, racy humor, and a pint-sized, cigarette-smoking heroine so cheeky she'd take the curl out of Shirley Temple's hair; Paper Moon feels very much like some kind of pre-Code Preston Sturges movie shot through with a dose of '70s self-awareness.

Paper Moon, a Depression-era road comedy skillfully and hilariously adapted by Alvin Sargent (The Sterile Cuckoo) from Joe David Brown's 1971 novel Addie Pray, is the story of small-time con man Moses Pray (Ryan O'Neal), who meets his match in little Addie Loggins (Ryan's real-life daughter, Tatum O'Neal), an old-beyond-her-8-years, recently-orphaned waif who may or may not be his illegitimate daughter. Entrusted with escorting the child from Kansas to Missouri to stay with relatives, Moze's attempt to first swindle, then unburden himself of the cagey tyke results in the tables being turned on him in a manner ultimately binding the two as reluctant partners in cross-country flim-flams. The quarrelsome duo's misadventures swindling widows, bilking shopkeepers, and taking up with buxom carnival dancer Trixie Delight (Kahn) and her beleaguered maid, Imogene (Johnson), are played out against a bleak Midwestern landscape of barren skies and vast Kansas plains redolent of The Grapes of Wrath.

Paper Moon's grim depiction of the Midwest during The Great  Depression not only served as dark subtext to the film's comedy, but  resonated with '70s audiences contending with gas-rationing and rising inflation

Gloriously shot, cleverly conceived, superbly acted, and consistently laugh-out-loud funny, Paper Moon is a feast of period detail and sharp comedy writing that manages to be sweetly sentimental without veering into the saccharine. And while I find the film to be a little draggy in its third act (perhaps because things take a darker turn), the first two-thirds of Paper Moon is very nearly perfect.

Following a tight, 3-act structure, Paper Moon, with the introduction of Trixie and Imogene to the narrative in the second act, reaches such a giddy height of comedy incandescence that the film never fully regains its footing once they depart. These characters bring so much variance to the interplay of Moze and Addie that when nothing is there to take its place but a sinister bootlegger and a fistfighting hillbilly, one can almost feel the air leaving the movie. Almost. The O'Neal chemistry is too strong to let the film flounder completely.

The Only Time We See Addie's Mother
(and we understand why Addie is so attached to that cloche hat)

From a storytelling viewpoint, it makes perfect sense for things to take a darker turn once Addie & Moze's overconfidence in their con leads to greed. But both the bootleg swindle and hillbilly car swap sequences play out with the appropriate tension but not much wit, leaving the rest of the film—excluding the marvelous denouement—feeling somewhat anticlimactic.

If it can be said of Bogdanovich that he is a director who has spent his life forever at the feet of The Masters, then at least he's a student who learned his lessons well. For as with all of his early films, Paper Moon reveals Bogdanovich to be a deft and sensitive storyteller, versatile and fluent in the language of cinema. He understands what he's doing, knows what he's going for, and, despite a film-geek tendency toward stylistic imitation-as-flattery, has an inspired touch when it comes to comedy. Rare among nostalgists, Bogdanovich has a talent for making the familiar feel engagingly fresh.

WHAT I LOVE ABOUT THIS FILM

Paper Moon is one of my favorite comedies, one I've always regretted never having seen at a theater in the presence of an audience. But as I recount in an earlier post on this blog about The Last Picture Show, as a young man, I was less than enthralled by the whole '70s nostalgia craze:

"As an African-American teen inspired by the emerging prominence of Black actors on the screen and excited about the upsurge in positive depictions of African-American life in movies of the 70s; these retro films, with their all-white casts and dreamy idealization of a time in America's past which was, in all probability, a living nightmare for my parents and grandparents, felt like a step in the wrong direction. The antennae of my adolescent cynicism told me that all this rear-view fetishism was just Hollywood's way of maintaining the status quo. A way of reverting back to traditional gender and racial roles, and avoiding the unwieldy game-change presented by the demand for more ethnic diversity onscreen, the evolving role of women in society, and the increased visibility of gays." 

And while I still feel this to be true and witness the same thing happening today in Hollywood's focus on fantasy films populated with mythical creatures, elves, gnomes, wizards, and superbeings of all stripes (anything but those pesky, problematic people of color); the passage of time has literally transformed Paper Moon into what it was always designed to be: an old movie. And old movies I can watch through a prism of the past I'd otherwise find unacceptable, if not reprehensible, in a contemporary film.

If there's a method to Bogdanovich's retro madness, it's that Paper Moon is often at its funniest when it uses our familiarity with '30s movie tropes as the setup for contemporary, very '70s comic reversals. Tatum O'Neal's tough-talking Addie amuses in part because she's so very unlike the kind of little girl every parent wanted their daughter to be in the '30s: Shirley Temple. Trixie's maid, Imogene, may recall the sassy Black maids of '30s comedies, but it's her uproariously open and blatant hostility toward her employer that lays to rest the comforting stereotype of the childlike devoted domestic.

I think it was Bogdanovich who once made the observation that people of a certain age visualize the 1930s in their mind's eye as a black-and-white era because that's the only way they know it; through black-and-white-photos, black-and-white movies. When Paper Moon, with its meticulous recreation of the look and feel of a 1935 movie (which is, importantly, not the same thing as recreating real life in 1935), has its very period-specific characters using language unthinkable in films of the day, the visual and behavioral incongruity is riotously funny.

Ryan's Daughter

PERFORMANCES

As everyone knows, 10-year-old Tatum O'Neal made history by being the youngest person to ever win a competitive Oscar when she won Best Supporting Actress for Paper Moon in 1974. And on that score, you'll get no argument from me. I'm really not very fond of kids (either on or off-screen), a predisposition compounded by Hollywood's fascination with precocious kids whose mature behavior I'm supposed to find adorable. But Bogdanovich works a minor miracle with Tatum O'Neal. She actually IS an adorable, precocious child…sweet of face, husky of voice, and inhabited, apparently, by the soul of a 50-year-old grifter.

Paper Moon's great, unsung asset is Ryan O'Neal. Looser and funnier than you're likely to see him in any other film, he is a real charmer with an impressive range of exasperated reactions

Tatum O'Neal is nothing short of a marvel in a role in which she's required to play a range of emotions a seasoned professional would find challenging. And even if the rumors are true that Bogdanovich shaped every gesture, nuance, and line reading (easy enough to believe given the flatness of her subsequent performances in The Bad News Bears and International Velvet), hers is still an amazingly assured and natural performance for one so young (O'Neal was eight when filming began).

Now, with all that being said, I do have to lodge my one complaint: there is no way in hell Addie Pray is a supporting role. It's a lead. The entire film rests on her shoulders, and she appears in more scenes than anyone else in the film. It's patently absurd that Tatum O'Neal was entered in the Best Supporting Actress category.

Of course, my rant is based on my ironclad certainty that, taking absolutely nothing from O'Neal's great performance, it was Madeline Kahn who deserved that award. As good as Paper Moon is, my A+ rating would drop to a B-minus without Kahn's Trixie Delight. She's that good.

I'm sure someone somewhere must have tallied the length of Madeline Kahn's screen time in Paper Moon. She's not onscreen all that long, but every moment—from her memorably jiggly entrance, past her umpteenth speech extolling the virtues of bone structure, all the way to her magnificent scene on that hilltop—is sheer brilliance. That hilltop scene is one of the finest onscreen moments in Kahn's entire career. I love when an actor can make you laugh while at the same time touching upon something vulnerable and sad behind the facade.

THE STUFF OF FANTASY

The off-kilter charm of Paper Moon is in it essentially being a romantic comedy. An uneasy love story between a father and daughter who may or may not be biologically related ("It's pothible!"). That Addie doesn't really see herself as a little girl and Moze not seeing himself as anything closely resembling a father, makes for several amusingly awkward scenes where the querulous duo is forced to play-act the roles of loving father and daughter in order to perpetrate a swindle. Scenes made all the more touching by all the other times we see them reluctant to yield to even the slightest display of affection for one another. 

Waitress - "How we doin', Angel Pie? We gonna have a little dessert after we finish up our hot dog?"
Addie - (never taking her eyes off Moze) "I dunno."
Waitress - "What d'ya say, Daddy? Whyn'y we get precious here a little dessert if she eats her dog?"
Moze - (slowly and through gritted teeth) "Her name ain't precious."

Two days and 36 takes (!) produced this exceptional continuous shot sequence

THE STUFF OF DREAMS
Over the years, Peter Bogdanovich's unrealized potential as a director and the dysfunctional family circus that has become the O'Neals has lent a bittersweet air of nostalgia to Paper Moon that's wholly unintentional and unrelated to the film's roots in 1930s wistfulness. For years it had been hinted that Bogdanovich's success was significantly reliant upon his wife, production, and costume designer, Polly Platt. Paper Moon marks their last collaboration (they divorced after Peter fell in love with Cybill Shepherd during the making of The Last Picture Show) and, perhaps tellingly, the end of Bogdanovich's success streak. As a longtime admirer (if not idolater) of Orson Welles, it couldn't have been lost on Bogdanovich the degree to which his drop in popularity mirrored Welles' own tarnished Golden Boy career decline.

By way of talk shows, memoirs, and tabloid headlines, Ryan and Tatum O'Neal have practically built a cottage industry around airing the dirty laundry of their familial discord. Watching Paper Moon these days, one can't help but respond to the almost documentary aspects of Moze and Addie's push-pull relationship. This is especially true of scenes depicting Addie's possessiveness toward Moze and jealousy of any female attention directed towards him (Addie's relationship with Trixie is like being given front-row seats to how the whole Tatum O'Neal/Farrah Fawcett thing played out).

When I watch the classic TV show, I Love Lucy, it often crosses my mind that I'm watching a wish-fulfillment version of the real-life marriage of Lucille Ball & Desi Arnaz. In light of the painful reality we've come to know about the relationship of the O'Neals, Moze and Addie have become, for me, the idealized image of Ryan and Tatum.

As I do with Orson Welles, I always associate Peter Bogdanovich with the genius work of his early career and largely overlook his latter contributions. And while I know it to be a departure from the sad reality, I like to imagine Tatum and Ryan O'Neal driving off to an uncertain but happy future together, devoted father and loving daughter, down that long and winding road into the horizon.
Isn't nostalgia all about remembering the past as we would have liked it to be?

And They Lived Happily Ever After

BONUS MATERIAL

On the DVD commentary, Bogdanovich reveals that it was his friend Orson Welles who came up with the idea to title the film "Paper Moon." Before the property fell into Bogdanovich's hands, the film was still known as "Addie Pray" (the title of the Joe David Brown novel) and conceived as a project for Paul Newman and his daughter Nell, working under the direction of John Huston. 

YouTube clip of Tatum O'Neal winning her Oscar for Paper Moon - HERE

In 1974, Paper Moon was turned into a short-lived TV series starring Jodie Foster (just two years away from her own Oscar nomination in Taxi Driver) and Christopher Connelly, the actor who played Ryan O'Neal's brother in 1964's popular TV soap opera Peyton Place (itself a spin-off of a motion picture). 
 YouTube Clip of the series' opening sequence.

Newspaper ad - Paper Moon had its World Premiere at
the Coronet Theater in New York on Wednesday, May 16, 1973

Copyright © Ken Anderson   2009 - 2014

WHAT'S UP, DOC? 1972

Getting two people to agree on what is, or is not, funny, is as difficult as finding even one person who actually laughed at any of Bob Hope's jokes.

I've never been much of a fan of the kind of 1930's screwball comedy Peter Bogdanovich pays homage to in What's Up Doc? (I find them exhausting), so it surprises me that this film ranks so high on my list of all-time favorite movies. Well, it's not that much of a surprise. For no matter how you categorize it, What's Up Doc? is one of the most consistently funny movies I've ever seen. And it remains so after multiple viewings. Mercifully, What's Up Doc? owes merely a polite nod to the screwball romantic comedy genre and is stylistically closer in tone to the absurdist, anarchic slapstick of The Marx Brothers and Bugs Bunny. 

Comedy is Serious Business

In fact, in attempting to recapture the comedy style of a bygone era, What's Up Doc? should be credited with, if not exactly originating, at least spearheading that unique brand of comedy that found great popularity in the '70s: the zany, self-referential, genre spoof.  Mel Brooks and Gene Wilder mastered in this sort of thing throughout the '70s, and come the '80s, Jim Abrahams and the Zucker Brothers took it to a whole new level with Airplane.

What is so hilariously off-kilter about What's Up, Doc?, and what ultimately works so well to its advantage, is the incongruity of seeing the hip, laid-back stars of the '70s (whose stylistic conceit was a lack of any discernible style at all) shoehorned into the rigidly stylized, almost vaudevillian conventions of '30s anarchic comedy. Though it is clearly set in the here and now, the characters all behave as though they'd never seen a Three Stooges or Laurel & Hardy movie before. We in the audience anticipate the familiar comedy set-ups and farcical comings and goings, but the people onscreen are so comically caught-off-guard and put out by the absurdity of the circumstances they find themselves in, an unexpected layer of funny takes over.

Even the film's location (San Francisco, a city so full of vertical angles and winding roads that it looks like it was designed by a Warner Bros. cartoonist) adds to the feel of the contemporary clashing with the old-fashioned. Whether intentional or not, What's Up, Doc? works so well because the destruction of order - the raison d'etre of anarchic comedy - occurs not only within the plot (which revolves around identical suitcases and a non-identical case of mistaken identity) but in the basic construct of the film itself: The tightly-wound wackiness of studio-bound 1930s comedy wreaks havoc on Hollywood's most relaxed film era in America's most notoriously laid-back city. 

I think this is one of the (many) reasons why Bogdanovich's At Long Last Love failed so miserably for me. Setting that 1930s screwball musical comedy actually in the 1930s only served to emphasize how poorly our contemporary stars (in this case, Burt Reynolds & Cybill Shepherd) withstood comparison to their '30s counterparts. The fun of What's Up Doc? is seeing the very contemporary Barbra Streisand (at her least grating here. She's really quite charming when her co-stars are allowed to be funny, too) and Ryan O'Neal thrust into a riotously retro comedy and rising to the occasion with nary a wink to the audience (whereas At Long Last Love was one long, protracted "Aren't we clever?" wink).

  Barbra Streisand as Judy Maxwell

  Ryan O'Neal   as Howard Bannister

  Madeline Kahn as Eunice Burns

  Kenneth Mars as Hugh Simon

  Austin Pendleton as Frederick Larrabee 

WHAT I LOVE ABOUT THIS FILM

I don't pretend to understand comedy. I have no idea why some things are only funny once (like most SNL skits), while others (episodes of I Love Lucy, for instance) can make me laugh even after they've grown so familiar I know every punchline by heart. One thing I do know is that the dissection of comedy is seldom effective except by example, so here are a few screencaps of scenes that never fail to crack me up:

"Use your charm."

The destroyed hotel room

"Don't you dare strike that brave, unbalanced woman!"

"Thieves! Robbers!"

PERFORMANCES

I like Barbra Streisand a great deal, but a little of her can go a long way. Her screen persona is so strong that it can easily (and often does) overwhelm a film. The toned-down Streisand of What's Up, Doc? is my favorite. Bogdanovich somehow gets her to actually interact with her co-stars, and she and the film are all the better for it. Ryan O'Neal is fine, but you sort of wish that Bogdanovich could have eased up on his Cary Grant fixation enough to give the actor an opportunity to find a comedy rhythm of his own. After all, Ryan O'Neal is already pretty stiff and prone to underplaying, so why hem him in further by having him imitate (badly) a star as inimitable as Grant?  Happily, Paper Moon, released the following year, would show O'Neal off to better comic advantage. Of course, the real comedy prizes of What's Up, Doc? go to the late-great Madeline Kahn and the riotously eccentric Kenneth Mars. Both are such idiosyncratically inventive comic actors that you keep discovering new, brilliant bits of genius in their performances on each viewing.

O'Neal affecting the "Cary Grant Lean"

THE STUFF OF FANTASY

My predilection for movies with actors turned into unearthly gods and goddesses by gifted cinematographers (in this instance,  Lazlo Kovacs of Shampoo and New York, New York) rears its head once again. Streisand and O'Neal look positively gorgeous in this movie and are burnished to a high movie star gloss thanks to their super-dark 70s tans. Really, both are photographed so lovingly that they look airbrushed.

THE STUFF OF DREAMS

The escalating laughs of What's Up, Doc? reach something of a deafening crescendo during the film's final third, which is comprised wholly of a pull-out-all-the-stops, cross-town, entire-cast, slapstick chase scene to end all chase scenes. The sheer number of stunts and gags that follow one after another in quick succession begs a repeat viewing just to take it all in. Ingenious, breathtaking, and refreshingly free of CGI, it's one of those rapidly vanishing movie thrills: the live-action action scene. And if you don't think this kind of thing is easy to pull off, dig up a copy of  Steven Spielberg's woefully unfunny chaotic comedy 1941. Talk about a lot of sound and fury signifying nothing.

Surprisingly (at least to me, anyway), What's Up, Doc? was the first Barbra Streisand film I ever saw. When I was a kid, I had this image of her as a contemporary of Judy Garland and Peggy Lee; a possibly middle-aged entertainer who wore gowns, piled-up hair, and sang slow songs while standing stock still on those boring (to me then) TV specials and variety shows. She didn't dance like Joey Heatherton or wear mini skirts like Nancy Sinatra, so I got it in my mind that she was an entertainer for "old people" (more Hollywood Palace than American Bandstand). It wasn't until 1971 when her single "Stoney End" started to be played on the radio that I even realized she was a young woman. I've since seen all of Streisand's films (not really recommended), but this movie still stands out as my favorite.

In "What's Up, Doc? Superstar Streisand is a Team Player

In the intervening years since What's Up, Doc? it seems as if a sense of desperation has crept into contemporary comedies. Filmmakers clueless to the intricacies of the genre invariably resort to the easy-out of the gross and scatological, or they lazily attempt to pad out a one-joke TV skit to feature film length.  

Because it's so deliriously silly and effortlessly funny, it's easy to overlook the fact that What's Up, Doc? is the result of a razor-sharp screenplay; precise editing; a meticulous, painstaking director; and a great deal of talent both in front of and behind the camera. Comedy rarely gets its due when assessed alongside dramatic films, but it's about time for What's Up, Doc? to be recognized for the comedy classic it is.

That's All, Folks!

Copyright © Ken Anderson   2009 - 2011