When I was little, at home we had a small projector for Super-8 films. We didn’t have many reels to watch: aside from my parents’ wedding ‘video’, we owned a Looney Tunes Road Runner cartoon and a Pink Panther one.
In the latter, the Pink Panther is gifted a pair of roller skates by her fairy godmother, but the skates are cursed and they lead a powerless Panther through a series of classic misadventures: she crashes into a sheet of glass that two workers are carrying across the road, she steals a ladder on which another worker is standing, she skates through a puddle of paint, thus triggering a car chase.
I had not thought about this cartoon at all in the last forty years, until I watched What’s Up, Doc?, the topic for this month’s IndieWeb Movie Club.
That’s because in this film most of these same things happen.
It is all intentional, of course: Peter Bogdanovich quotes all these comedy tropes, and more (a person hangs from a ledge; a pie-throwing battle), to remind us of the good old comedy of the past, ranging from slapstick to screwball.
Really, anything goes, as we have been warned since the beginning by the Cole Porter song that plays soon after the opening credits.

Nothing is subtle in this film: it’s clear from the title itself - quoting Bugs Bunny’s catchphrase years before The Shining did 1 - that it is designed to be a live-action cartoon for grown-ups who don’t want to give up being silly once in a while.
So Bogdanovich assembled a movie by using a human embodiment of the Looney Tunes hare (Barbra Streisand in manic pixie nightmare girl mode), a variation on the setting of classic screwball comedy Bringing Up Baby (nerdy researcher with an uptight fiancée is looking for funding), and another trope as the inciting incident (four identical suitcases.. sorry, overnight bags are swapped between characters).
For some reason, the (incontestably charming) woman takes a fancy to the bespectacled (and, admittingly, incredibly fit) researcher (Ryan O’Neal), who in turn is happy to betray his girlfriend’s trust when he realises that this new person may help securing the financing he needs.

Allow me a digression: in this kind of story, I can’t avoid identifying and feeling for the uptight character, ridiculed and abandoned for the sparkly newcomer. Why were the initial couple together in the first place? Doesn’t she deserve to be happy?
Won’t the living cartoon girl get bored very soon of a guy who’s also very rigid in his way?

As you might have picked up, this is not my favourite type of comedy; if we apply Mark Kermode’s ‘six-laugh test’ (just for the sake of it… I’m not saying it’s a scientific argument), I smiled three times:

  • when several people lazily try to put out a fire by throwing stuff at it;
  • on the following exchanges (probably misremembered):
    • ‘Do you need to stay so close to me?’ ‘I’m very nearsighted’
    • ‘Don’t shoot me, I’m part Italian!’ 2
      And I laughed once, when, at a Chinatown parade, the Chinese-style music being played is actually La Cucaracha. This is the kind of ‘wait a second…’ joke that is guaranteed to have an effect on me, rather than the piling up of heightened comedy that fills the rest of the film.

But I’m sure that someone with a different sense of humour would absolutely enjoy this movie.
And I would like to thank the host of this month’s IndieWeb Movie Club, Joe, for proposing this film as the theme (and for indirectly reminding me of my childhood). I totally agree: the world needs a laugh.

  1. Now, both this film and The Shining were distributed by Warner Bros: were they the first instances of the WB ServerVerse, decades before Space Jam: a New Legacy? ↩︎

  2. Although this random exclamation has a pay-off later in the movie, when the character walks away mumbling some supposedly Italian-sounding gibberish. Now I’d like to propose the extremely unlikely theory that Adriano Celentano’s Prisencolinensinainciusol, released later on the same year, was a reaction to this film ↩︎