Search - What's Up Doc? on DVD

MPAA Rating: G Content Advisory: Adult Situations, Questionable for Children Movie Release: 1972 DVD Release: 07/01/2003 Format: DVD - Enhanced Wide Screen Letterbox for 16x9 TV Edition: Dual Layered Audio Tracks: English, French Subtitles: English, French, Spanish SwapaDVD Credits: 1 Number of Discs: 1 Run Time: 1 hrs 34 mins Studio: Warner Home Video Members Wishing: 42 Genres: Comedy, Romantic Comedy, Comedy of Errors, Screwball Comedy

With Howard Hawks's Bringing Up Baby (1938) as his blueprint, Peter Bogdanovich resurrected and payed homage to 1930s screwball comedy in What's Up, Doc? (1972). When wacky co-ed Judy Maxwell (Barbra Streisand, in the Katharine Hepburn part) spies nebbishy musicologist Howard Bannister (Ryan O'Neal in bespectacled Cary Grant mode) in a San Francisco hotel lobby, she decides that Howard and his precious igneous rocks are right up her alley. Too bad Howard already has a fiancée, the propriety-fixated Eunice (Madeline Kahn in her film debut). Using all her arcane knowledge from brief stays at numerous colleges, Judy tries to charm her way to a $20,000 grant for Howard, and Howard himself, at a banquet with grantor Frederick Larrabee (Austin Pendleton). Things get even more complicated the next day when Judy's underwear-filled overnight bag gets mixed up with Howard's rock bag, which gets mixed up with Mrs. Van Hoskins' bag of jewels, which gets mixed up with Mr. Smith's bag of top secret government papers. All sides converge at Larrabee's mod townhouse and the chase begins. Retaining Hawks' machine-gun pace (as well as the sly pop culture referentiality of Billy Wilder), Bogdanovich and writers Buck Henry, David Newman, and Robert Benton updated the opposites-attract screwball convention for contemporary times. O'Neal gently parodied not only Grant but also his own Love Story (1970) preppy, while Kahn represents stiff-wigged 1950s manners as opposed to Streisand's long-haired, pants-wearing free spirit. The happy ending, in which Cole Porter-belting youth wins out over old manners, found favor with audiences, as What's Up, Doc? became one of the most popular films of 1972, and the second hit in a row for Bogdanovich after 1971's The Last Picture Show. ~ Lucia Bozzola, All Movie Guide

Barbra Streisand - Judy Maxwell
Ryan O'Neal - Howard Bannister
Kenneth Mars - Hugh Simon
Austin Pendleton - Frederick Larrabee
Sorrell Booke - Harry

Peter Bogdanovich's loving tribute to the screwball comedies of Hollywood's Golden Age gets a serviceable treatment on DVD. What's Up Doc? has been given a widescreen transfer at its original aspect ratio of 1.85:1, which is letterboxed on conventional televisions and enhanced for 16 x 9 playback on widescreen monitors. The film's original English-language mono soundtrack has been preserved, mastered in Dolby Digital, as is an alternate soundtrack dubbed in French. The disc also includes optional subtitles in English, French, and Spanish. ~ Mark Deming, All Movie Guide