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"Music from rocks" via Termite Terrace, the connoisseur's analytical guffaw. The MacGuffin times four, jewels and top-secret documents and igneous specimens and undies in identical bags, integers in a Kandinsky flurry. The stuffed shirt (Ryan O'Neal) is engaged to a neurotic frump (Madeline Kahn) and pursued by a freewheeling kook (Barbra Streisand), San Francisco is just the place for such leaps and dips. "Meet me under the table." You can't make Singin' in the Rain anymore, says Godard in Une femme est une femme, Peter Bogdanovich accepts the challenge and replicates Bringing Up Baby with updated technique and accelerated tempo. Breakneck puns plus elaborate pratfalls, a replete slapstick study with numerous plates always spinning—pompous fraud (Kenneth Mars), pixieish millionaire (Austin Pendleton), government whistleblower (Michael Murphy), hotel detective (Sorrell Booke), absent-minded dowager (Mabel Albertson). "You are the last straw that breaks my camel's back, you are the plague, you bring havoc and chaos to everyone, but why me?" "Because you look cute in your pajamas." The professor gets off the elevator on the wrong floor and finds a piano, he pulls the covers off and there's the madcap heroine with "As Time Goes By" on her lips. (Bogdanovich remembers this is the Vertigo city so his camera circles the singing couple.) Burning curtains in the hotel room and hurled pastry at the art exhibit, set-up for a Keystone-Keaton-Zazie chase that leaves no stone unturned, from glass sheets and fresh cement to Chinatown parade dragon and dunk into the Bay. It all passes through Liam Dunn's superb glance of irritation as the judge who's told there's a music doctor in the courtroom. "Can you fix a hi-fi?" "No, sir." "Then shut up!" Love in the end is an animated interlude, cf. Stone's Hi Diddle Diddle. With Phil Roth, Stefan Gierasch, John Hillerman, Randy Quaid, and M. Emmet Walsh.
--- Fernando F. Croce |