Filmmakers often go into a production with their fingers crossed that everything will somehow come together, but most acknowledge that it seldom does. The 1972 comedy What's Up, Doc? was a glorious exception to that rule. A handsome homage to classic screwball comedies - with an obvious nod to the broad characterizations of Looney Tunes - What's Up, Doc? is blessed with a wit to which every film comedy aspires and a buoyancy that precious few achieve.

The film offers a simple farcical premise: four identical travel bags owned by very different people are mixed up at a San Francisco hotel. One is full of igneous rocks; it belongs to Howard Bannister (Ryan O'Neal), a socially awkward musicologist who is pursuing an important research grant. Another bag is full of clothes; it belongs to Judy Maxwell (Barbra Streisand), an enterprising young woman who takes the term "college dropout" to a whole new level. Another is full of classified government documents; it belongs to an unnamed man (Michael Murphy) who is tailed from the airport to the hotel by a very poorly disguised government agent. The fourth bag is full of jewels; it belongs to a wealthy hotel guest (Mabel Albertson), but that won't be true for long if the hotel staff has its way. The bags are swiped and switched repeatedly, and when they finally all end up in the same room, the ensuing struggle leads to a peerless chase through the streets of San Francisco that interrupts a wedding, a parade, a plate-glass window installation and numerous construction projects before ending in San Francisco Bay - literally.

In his audio commentary on Warner Bros.' new DVD of the film, director Peter Bogdanovich recalls that the production, which was his first studio picture with major stars, was an exceedingly good time. "I thought they would all be this much fun," he muses somewhat ruefully. The picture was his second collaboration with young cinematographer Laszlo Kovacs, ASC, who at the time was known for smaller films such as Targets, Easy Rider and Five Easy Pieces. Reflecting on the experience in 2001, when he was honored with the ASC Lifetime Achievement Award, Kovacs said the What's Up, Doc? production team took an economical approach: "It was a mainstream picture, but we had the attitude that we were making a Roger Corman movie." He recalled that Bogdanovich, with editor Verna Fields at his side, determined in advance how every sequence would be edited, and he proceeded to film only the shots he needed. "That approach had advantages, but it was also dangerous because it meant the film couldn't be recut," said Kovacs.

Much of the rapid-fire dialogue plays in long, uninterrupted takes, with the camera starting at one end of the set and gracefully tracking with the characters to the other. The fluid visuals represent some of the best work of Kovacs' career, and the film's vivid primary colors benefited considerably from Technicolor's patented dye-transfer printing process, which was discontinued just a few years later.

Warner Bros. released a beautiful transfer of What's Up, Doc? on home video several years ago, and this transfer looks identical to that presentation. The film's many and varied fans might be underwhelmed by the disc's supplements, which consist of Bogdanovich's feature-length commentary, scene-specific remarks by Streisand, a short tribute called "Screwball Comedies... Remember Them?" and the film's imaginative theatrical trailer. But the fact is, this great comedy inspires such obsessive devotion that no amount of bonus material would be enough. (Just ask Kovacs, who is prodded for anecdotes about the shoot whenever certain AC staffers spot him on the premises. Fortunately, he hasn't run out of them yet.)

On one occasion, Kovacs detailed how the distinctive look of two sequences came about: after filming a day exterior that showed Streisand crossing a street and entering the hotel as two cars collided behind her, Kovacs' assistant reported that he'd neglected to set the stop, and that the lens had been wide open. "Barbra had insisted on doing her own stunt work, so I knew we couldn't shoot it again," Kovacs recalled. "After calculating the effect of the NDs, we determined that we'd overexposed the [Kodak 50 ASA 5254] stock by

3 1/2 stops. I immediately called our dailies timer at Technicolor, Skip Nicholson, to ask for advice. He asked us to shoot 400 feet of film from that setup at the same stop and send it to him. He proceeded to underdevelop it in stages, first by one stop, then two, then three. He settled on underdeveloping by three stops, but when I asked him how it looked, he just said, 'It's printable!' But when we finally saw the footage, I loved the very soft pastel look it had, and I decided that would suit another sequence, the party at Larrabee's, which featured an entirely black-and-white set. [Gaffer] Aggie Aguilar poured light into that set to get the right amount of overexposure - that stock proved to be very tough to overexpose deliberately! But it all worked out. And on this movie in particular, we enjoyed our work."

- Rachael Bosleyy