be imparted only if it were revealed quickly—almost offhandedly.
Having returned from a jaunt in Mexico, Sonny and Duane are looking for Sam when they accost an old-timer snoozing in a car. “Hey, where is everybody?” Sonny asks. “Why’d Sam close the café?” Then the news comes—like a bolt of lightning. “Oh, yeah—y’all been gone, ain’t ya?” the old guy says. “Been gone to Mexico. You don’t know about it. Sam died yesterday morning.” Sonny parks himself on the edge of the sidewalk as the talk moves on to the contents of Sam’s will (“Craziest thing you ever heard. He left you the pool hall, Sonny. What do you think about that?”). The camera moves in closer as Sonny looks to the theater and then to the blinking streetlight; the breathtakingly subtle editing conveys a mind driven to distraction by grief.
Peter Bogdanovich often speaks about his preference for long takes, but when he decides he must make a cut, few directors are better at carving a scene into pieces. For example, in The Last Picture Show he hopscotches among the mourners at Sam’s funeral—one person’s reaction is shown, then another’s. We see the waitress from Sam’s café, Genevieve (Eileen Brennan), standing beside Sonny and Billy. While the three are grouped together in the same shot, each is inhabiting his or her own little world. The disparate nature of sorrow is the point of the image. Genevieve, clutching a handkerchief, cries openly; Sonny looks forlorn but keeps his emotions in check; and Billy is, as ever, uncomprehending.
Directly across from Sonny is Ruth Popper, who strains to make eye contact with her young lover. A spate of shots and reaction shots show Ruth smiling at Sonny and Sonny declining to smile back. Overcome with anguish over the loss of Sam, Sonny can’t bring himself to be reminded of his dalliance with his middle-aged inamorata.
Finally, we see the Farrow family: Jacy and her parents, Gene (Robert Glenn) and Lois (Ellen Burstyn). Later, we learn that Lois and Sam were lovers, and the scene ends with Lois’s point of view. From her perspective, we see Sam’s casket being lowered creakingly into the earth. Then in a tender, lingering close-up, Lois punctuates her tears with a heavy sigh and shake of the head. She walks off in a wide shot—the first in the scene—as the others slowly scatter.
It is tempting to look at Bogdanovich’s next film—What’s Up, Doc?—as a peace offering to his rapidly growing audience: after putting them through the wringer with Targets and especially The Last Picture Show, he seemed determined to give them some belly laughs. A wild screwball comedy starring Ryan O’Neal as a dullsville musicologist and Barbra Streisand as wacky gal pal fit the bill.
Having traveled all the way from Iowa to San Francisco to attend a conference with his fellow musicologists, Howard Bannister (O’Neal), wearing a seersucker suit and a scowl and toting a plaid overnight case stuffed with igneous rocks, looks glumly bewildered as he waits for a cab. The rocks’ ancient music-making properties are the subject of Howard’s research, but their real purpose in the screenplay by Buck Henry, Robert Benton, and David Newman (taking off from a story by Bogdanovich) is as a metaphor for an academician weighed down by unwanted obligations. Foremost among these obligations is Howard’s demanding, completely unlovable fiancée, Eunice Burns (Madeline Kahn), who when she is not scolding her intended is babying him in her high-pitched shriek of a voice. For example, even as Eunice counsels Howard to project manly virility when he meets Dr. Frederick Larrabee (Austin Pendleton)—the head honcho of a foundation that will award a $20,000 grant to a winning musicologist—she is tying his bowtie for him.
Howard first encounters wily, winsome Judy Maxwell (Streisand) at the drugstore inside the hotel where Howard and Eunice are staying. Emerging from behind some shelving, she asks, “What’s up, Doc?”—but the question sounds more like a pass than a Bugs Bunny line. We already know that she is a one-woman wrecking crew: in an earlier scene, two motorcycles collide with each other as she innocently trots across the street. Yet we feel that Howard could benefit from a dose of character-building chaos. Tellingly, he wanders into the drugstore in search of aspirin to soothe a headache, but—in a good omen—he exits pain free, as if Judy’s presence, while destructive, functions as a kind of elixir.
Judy has already started presenting herself as Howard’s wife—a bit of wish fulfillment and a reminder that it is often the girls, not the guys, who do the romantic pursuing in Bogdanovich’s films. Later that evening at Dr. Larrabee’s dinner party, having rechristened herself Eunice Burns, or “Burnsy,” Judy charms the pants off of the good doctor, in the process elevating Howard from dark horse to shoo-in to get the $20,000. The real Eunice has been delayed, and although Howard has grown increasingly petrified of her imminent arrival, at a key moment he elects to keep the charade going. At last, Eunice puts in an appearance—kicking, screaming, and insisting on the veracity of her identity—and the camera moves in on Howard: “I never saw her before in my life.” Is it really a choice? Good times with Judy and big bucks from Dr. Larrabee or … what? Eunice? (“That’s a person called Eunice?” Judy says earlier, as though the name itself is unpalatable.)
Of course, the deck is stacked. With brick-red hair and a wardrobe of housedresses, Kahn arguably makes one of the least-alluring screen debuts in history—not that the screenplay gives her much to work with in the sexiness department. At one point, we find her reading a book with the title The Sensuous Woman (for pointers?) before disgustedly putting it down.
The simple truth is that Eunice does not stand a chance next to Judy, and Streisand—covered up in a trench coat and cap at first—grows ever more sultry as the film goes on. The morning after inciting a disastrous chain of mishaps that culminates in the fire brigade being summoned to the hotel, Judy reveals herself to Howard—like a genie springing from a bottle—from underneath a sheet covering a piano. In the film’s most romantic scene, Howard plays as Judy sings a slow rendition of “As Time Goes By.” They end up on the floor together, the result of Judy trying to lay a kiss on Howard and Howard backing off, but for once it does not seem like another Bogdanovich pratfall. Really, it’s almost as romantic as anything in Casablanca.
Of course, affaire de Howard and Judy is set against a serpentine backstory involving three other plaid overnight cases, each one of which gets confused with the other and all of which are being sought by a gallery of rogues, including an investigative reporter (Michael Murphy), a jewel thief (Sorrell Booke), and a government agent (Phil Roth). Everyone is tailing everyone else before the threads converge in a breakneck chase snaking through San Francisco. Near the end, a benevolent judge (Liam Dunn) is tasked with making sense of it all, but he would have saved himself a lot of aggravation had he bothered to ask if his own daughter—naturally, soon revealed to be Judy—was involved. By this point, however, Howard has realized that the unequivocal love she offers, even with its attendant danger, is just what the doctor—the doc?—ordered.
In some ways, What’s Up, Doc? was even more old-fashioned than The Last Picture Show; it concerned itself with nothing but good clean fun. “This would have been heresy a few years ago, and it still may be,” noted Variety, “but Peter Bogdanovich describes his latest (and third) feature, ‘What’s Up, Doc?,’ as a ‘G-rated screwball comedy without any socially redeeming values.’”18 Heresy maybe, but a hit definitely. Save The Godfather and The Poseidon Adventure, no film made more money in 1972 than What’s Up, Doc?. Even more significantly, it was beloved by the audiences who came to see it in droves.
New York Times critic Vincent Canby sarcastically observed that “the real mean age” of the audience he saw the film with at Radio City Music Hall was “about fifty-two and three months,”19 but that is surely an exaggeration. After all, a few weeks after the film opened, Warner Bros. took out an ad in Variety announcing the attainment of a record that could have been achieved only with the help of an audience consisting of all age groups: a “new single-day all-time record” of $65,398 for the Music Hall.20
But what would be wrong if the film did speak to an
