Entertaining Movies

What's Up, Doc?

Peter Bogdanovich threw everything but the kitchen sink into What's Up, Doc?, an affectionate homage to the screwball comedies of the '30s that mixed the Marx Brothers with romantic comedy, added some Keystone Kops-style shenanigans and topped it all off with a huge pie-throwing melee and out-of-control car chase. All the action centers around four plaid suitcases: one contains secret government documents, one holds priceless jewels, one harbors lacy underthings, and one has... rocks? Said rocks belong to Howard Bannister (Ryan O'Neal), a musicologist who's traveled to San Francisco in hopes of winning a prestigious grant. What he winds up with instead is Judy Maxwell (Barbra Streisand), a wacky college drop-out who takes a shine to him and, unfortunately for Howard, wreaks havoc everywhere she goes. She also, in a nod to Bringing Up Baby, frees Howard from his repressed life and unsheathes him from his shrill fiancÈe (Madeline Kahn, in an uproarious film debut). A winning mix of crazy-goofy dialogue and riotous physical comedy, the movie provided the perfect vehicle for Streisand to show off her exquisite comic talents, though at the time the actress didn't think so. Expecting the comedy to be an expensive flop, she took the money and ran, forsaking a potential cut of the film's profits. It proved to be her loss, as What's Up, Doc? became one of 1972's biggest hits, earning a then-phenomenal $28 million in theatrical rentals -- the portion of a film's box office gross returned to the studio, and by extension the film's profit participants.

Rancho deLuxe

Rancho Deluxe is a rare delight. It's a Western with a modern twist. The `good guys' are the ranchers. The `bad guys' are rustlers, down and out young men who poach cattle just to get by, pay their rent, and eat. Naturally, your sympathies lie with the rustlers, because they're the underdogs. We also sympathize with the rustlers because the ranchers are wealthy, socially prominent and dominant ‚ everything the rustler's aren't. They have everything they could want, so they're bored. And when the rustling problem appears, they treat it as sport ‚ like hunting a predatory animal. But their boredom takes other amusing forms as well. In one scene, the lady of the house tries to light a fire with the ranch hands. She's one of many cowgirls in the movie, women who like to be in the saddle, and to be the saddle. `Come on, goddamit,' she yells at the cowboys, Burt and Kurt. `I want some Gothic ranch action around here! I want some desire under the elms! I want to see some smoldering blazes down at the old corral!' It's hilarious. These guys are worthless. So it's a sad irony that her husband, who boasts that the B-Bar-Lazy-T has `the best matrons and the best sires,' must confine his boast to the non-human mammals on the ranch. When he takes his prize stud-bull to the county fair, the announcer describes it as having `tremendous thickness and lengthä This bull has it all: size, bone, trim and color. It just brings tears to my eyes.' One can almost see the tears of unsatisfied desire in his wife's eyes as well ‚ that all the virile sires are bovine. Slim Pickens, a former horse-thief turned cattle detective, is brilliant, funnier than ever. And then there are the scenes that provide a little social satire. Speaking of the Western love of pickup trucks, for example, one character denounces them as `a sickness here worse than alcohol or dope. It's the pickup truck death. And there's no cure for it.' I wonder sometimes if I don't recognize the disease right here in Flagstaff. All in all, Rancho Deluxe is a very entertaining hour and a half.