RIP, Peter Bogdanovich

 In memory of the director (and psychiatrist to the psychiatrist on "The Sopranos"), who died last month at 82, we catch up with two of his films.

WHAT'S UP, DOC? (1972) (B+) - We travel back nearly 50 years to catch up with a farce that itself turns back time by about 40 years to the golden era of screwball comedies. Insulated from criticism over the movie's broad humor and silly gags, Bogdanovich has a lot of fun, mostly riding the charisma of his star, Barbra Streisand. Unfortunately, he also is saddled with Ryan O'Neal who has no ear for the goofy nerd he is supposed to play against type.

This is the director's follow-up to his breakthrough, "The Last Picture Show," and "What's Up, Doc," so bright and delirious, can't be further afield from that previous downer. Bogdanovich was in the middle of a fantastic three-picture run, culminating the following year in "Paper Moon," which would meld elements of "Last Picture" and "Doc."

The plot here is not much more sophisticated than an episode of "Get Smart." Four identical-looking pieces of luggage in the hands of four people get scrambled up in a hunt for top-secret documents and precious jewels. Streisand shows up as Judy in a meet-cute with Howard, O'Neal's dorky music anthropologist who is on a trip to San Francisco with his hen-pecking fiance, Eunice, played by Madeline Kahn in her feature debut. 

Streisand, in just her fifth film, bursts forth with a glow and confidence that carries the production via her feline physicality and her energetic line readings, often borrowing from broad Borscht Belt deliveries. She is tan and mischievous and fearless. O'Neal, however, is adrift, desperately trying but failing to wring true comedic juice out his flat character. Turns out, it takes a lot of talent to play a straight man, and O'Neal is merely a dud. 

But there are plenty of supporting characters who rise to the occasion and take up Bognanovich's challenge to let the silliness ring out in this goofy game of musical bags. Kenneth Mars ("The Producers") is giddy as Howard's academic rival; Austin Pendleton mugs cleverly as the holder of a coveted research grant; John Hillerman shines in a cameo as a hotel manager; and Liam Dunn is giddy as a harried judge trying to sort everything out in the end.

THEY ALL LAUGHED (1981) (D+/incomplete) - It is difficult to figure out the point of this film 30 minutes in, besides Bogdanovich's burning need to announce to the world that he -- and the male avatars he creates for his movies -- are not nerds but in fact are irresistible to young beautiful women. So there, critics!

It's not the passage of years that makes this movie seem like an anachronism. You get the sense that it was curdled before it first hit the screen. We gave it the ol' college try, lasting about an hour, waiting in vain for any of this to make sense. For some reason (it was never clear to me), Ben Gazzara and John Ritter are private eyes (glorified stalkers) each following a married woman that they presumable eventually (not quite in the first hour) will fall head over heels in love with -- Ritter literally, as he was known to do, at a roller disco, in pursuit of Dorothy Stratten (the tragic Playmate girlfriend of Bogdanovich's who would be brutally killed by her ex before the movie was released). 

Not only is Stratten propped up as a goddess to be ogled, but we also get a curly-haired middle-aged Audrey Hepburn, who doesn't speak until the second half of the film, and yet another slice of cheesecake, Patti Hansen, as a wise-cracking cabbie named Sam -- a character you would only find in a bad movie -- before she high-tailed it out of Hollywood to marry Keith Richards and breed more models. 

Gazzara's character is irresistible to every woman he passes (in this alternate universe), and Ritter dons Bognanovich's signature eyeglass frames in case it wouldn't be clear to the viewer than he is the writer-director's stand-in (and thus irresistible to not only Stratten but others). Colleen Camp plays a country singer (the soundtrack is a cacophony of the Frank Sinatra style and the Johnny Cash school, and all of it sticks out like a sore thumb), and her portrayal is an insufferable slog of line-readings. It's the kind of movie where her character uses Ritter's character's name (Charles) in literally every sentence she utters to him, in some sort of homage to those old screwball comedies -- or perhaps just a result of Bogdanovich's sloppiness that no one was bold enough to point out or correct. It was at that point I gave up.

BONUS TRACK

See also our review of "Paper Moon," here.