Bringing Up Baby (1938)

A poor script quickly establishes the main characters as unsympathetic, and "Baby" just never works with any normal audience. People who have been brainwashed to believe it is a great film are simply afraid not to like it. Cary Grant and Kate Hepburn both do their best under the adverse circumstances, and the slapstick with the leopard towards the end of the film is genuinely funny. This is one of a series of films that contributed to Kate Hepburn's reputation as "box office poison". After boy friend Howard Hughes bought her the rights to Phillip Barry's play, she then rescued her career with her big hit "The Philadelphia Story" (1940).

During the 1950s Cahiers du Cinema hailed director Howard Hawks as an "auteur", and resurrected all of his lesser films as would be masterpieces. This film was the main beneficiary, changing from a 1938 box office flop to a supposedly classic comedy. It is perhaps the most striking example in film history of critics parroting received opinion to turn a flop into a masterpiece. In my opinion the 1938 audience got it right. There were many great screwball comedies made during the 1930s, such as "It Happened One Night", "My Man Godfrey", and "The Awful Truth". Unfortunately, "Bringing Up Baby" was not one of them.

Fmovies: Animals play a significant role in Bringing Up Baby, adding absurdity to the comic situations and its theme of

crazed infatuation. When we first meet him, palaeontologist David Huxley (Grant) is preparing to marry his co-worker Alice Swallow (Walker). Alice, we learn, is a rational, no-nonsense woman who sees marriage as a convenient and rational transaction rather than as an expression of love. As the film opens, David and Alice are putting the final touches on a brontosaurus skeleton that he has been working on for five years. The skeleton seems to be a symbol of the couple's relationship - dry, brittle, tenuous, old and, most importantly, dead.

Enter Susan Vance (Hepburn), whose wild anarchic nature is just what the doctor ordered. She seems, on the surface, hair-brained - and this may be true - but her ditziness is the result of being absolutely, utterly, ridiculously head-over-heals in love (at first sight, as is the case with most l'amour fou scenarios) with David and doing whatever she can to sabotage his plans to marry Alice. Susan's leopard, named Baby, is the symbol of her love for David, for the moment the leopard lays its eyes on him, it is instantly affectionate and follows him around, just as Susan does. Jittery David is, of course, terrified of the beast and all that it represents.

The leopard becomes an increasingly useful symbol as the film continues. At her aunt's estate in Connecticut, Susan releases another leopard its cage, thinking it is Baby captured by zoo officials when in fact it is a rogue leopard from the circus on its way to be gassed after attacking someone. With two leopards on the loose, the analogy becomes unmistakable - the wild leopard that Susan releases is David's libido, free at last after being repressed for so long in a loveless relationship. Indeed, towards the end of the film, when the wild leopard traps the host of characters in the local jail, it is nervous, terrified David who steps up and boldly saves the day.

This I suppose is just one way of reading and enjoying a film like Bringing Up Baby. i think it's interesting that the film announces its interested in exploring psychoanalysis with the inclusion of a character who is a Freudian therapist (Dr Lehman played by Fritz Feld). Psychoanalysis was, of course, very popular among Hollywood screenwriters between the 30s and 50s who adopted all manner of coded symbols for sex after Joseph Breen's Production Code so tightly reasserted control over what could and couldn't be represented on screen. But the fact that Dr Lehman's diagnoses are so far off tells us that the science of the mind is no match for the power of l'amour fou, which turns men and women into wild, irrational carnal beasts.

Maybe the prototypical example of the breed, in fact. Zoologist Grant (we'd call him a paleontologist nowadays) goes to a golf course to try to wrangle money out of a potential donor: along the way he meets up with Katherine Hepburn, and they have all sorts of wacky misadventures.

Grant's great, though it's not a typical role for him -- he's uptight, buttoned down, smothered. He's clearly the superego character, straitlaced and repressed and anti-life (it's no accident he works with bones). Hepburn was never lovelier than she was here -- she's the id character, all action and movement. There's a dedicated minority of people who hate this movie, mostly I think because they see the things Hepburn's character does as cruel. That's the point. Hepburn's not supposed to be nice -- she's id. We laugh partly because Grant needs to be loosened up, but partly because some of Hepburn's actions are shocking. Ideally, we should be in the same position as Grant in the movie: half-attracted, half-afraid.

Great "rat-a-tat" dialog in the classic Hollywood tradition. I can't think of many screenwriters today who could deliver such dialog. Highly recommended, one of the great Hollywood comedies.

Bringing Up Baby fmovies. They certainly don't come any funnier than this film. The hilarious golf course scene at the beginning is followed immediately by the equally riotous nightclub scene. This is followed by more memorable set pieces & quotable stick-in-your-mind-forever lines than any movie I can think of, including Bank Dick & Night at the Opera.

Grant & Hepburn are brilliant & innovative. I read some place that when Cary Grant was having trouble finding the David character, Howard Hawks gave him the horn rims & told him to do Harold Lloyd. Which he does. Brilliantly.

I can watch this repeatedly with no more flagging interest than listening to a Beethoven symphony or sonata.

Hard to believe it was a big flop when it first came out.

Casting Katharine Hepburn in the role she plays her would have been unthinkable years later when her image as a feminist icon was cast in bronze. But she's doing some serious poaching on a young version of the kind of roles Mary Boland or Billie Burke would play. Think of the parts these two women played and you can definitely see Hepburn in Bringing Up Baby if you imagine Boland and Burke years younger.

Bringing Up Baby is one of those beautiful films that really doesn't have a plot. Try to tell someone verbally the plot of this, it cannot be done. From the moment airheaded Kate gets into uptight Cary's car in that parking lot with him chasing her, it's just one madcap situation after another. Howard Hawks directs this film with the appropriate light touch the material requires.

Cary Grant is not the usual suave sophisticate you normally find him cast as either. He's an uptight paleontologist who's biggest thrill up to that point is the arrival of a brontosaurus vertebrae so that he can complete a skeleton. He's also getting married, but the woman he's engaged gives him hints that married life will not be any bed of roses for him. Whether he knows it or not he's ready for the romp Kate has in store for him.

Thirties audiences definitely loved seeing the rich at play. Bringing Up Baby is the definition of escapist entertainment. But one who hasn't the means shouldn't indulge it what Hepburn is doing. They've got a padded cell waiting for anyone who's not rich who indulges in this kind of behavior. Only the rich can afford to be eccentric.

Baby by the way is a tame leopard who Kate's brother sends up from South America. That would be a jaguar by the way, but that's just mere details. Anyway Baby escapes at the same time another leopard from the circus escapes and he's dangerous. I won't go into the confusion there, I couldn't describe it in any event.

May Robson and Charlie Ruggles lend good support. Ruggles who was normally cast against Mary Boland teams up well with May Robson. And my favorite in the supporting cast is Walter Catlett as the small town constable who doesn't know quite what he has on his hands, but is determined to bluff the situation through.

In his glorious Bringing Up Baby, Howard Hawks ratchets screwball comedy up to its tautest and springiest level. In clumsier hands, screwball all too often gallops into the frenetic, fraying the nerves; Hawks maintains a presto pace, but never lets the mixups and misunderstandings grow implausible – he just glides serenely to something else. (And he makes it look easy, which it isn't: Peter Bogdanovich fumbled in his loose remake What's Up, Doc, making it labored and literal-minded.)

Hawks could barely go wrong with Katharine Hepburn and Cary Grant as his leads, but the rest of the cast he assembles, human as well as animal, can't be faulted either (with the redoubtable May Robson earning extra credit). And while he draws on stock characters and stereotypes that probably date back to commedia dell'arte – the stuffy professor, the blithe rich girl, her crusty dowager aunt, the bumbling sheriff – he freshens each one up, making them distinctive, memorable and endearing.

Behind a pair of repressive spectacles, Grant plays the single-minded paleontologist whose path crosses with that of madcap Hepburn, never again to uncross. The plot revolves around a leopard named Baby, a million dollars, an intercostal clavicle bone, a dog named George who buries it....well, it all makes perfect sense while you're watching.

Underneath all the antics, Hawks never loses sight of the pastoral romance that Bringing Up Baby at its core really is (at its most magical in the woods under a full moon, and captured by Russell Metty's lovely photography). Grant's been rooting around in the dirt for so long looking for dinosaur bones that it takes him forever to 'get' Hepburn – an airborne sprite who never comes down to earth. (Their alchemy here is rarefied, not the commoner sort of reaction they kindled in the stage-bound The Philadelphia Story.)

Last but not least, the movie features the canine talents of Asta (né Skippy), who appeared as himself in the Thin Man series – Nick and Nora Charles' lovable cur. Here he plays George, who, barking his stubby tail off, has no qualms about tangling with Baby the leopard. Is there any question that this high-strung wire-haired terrier is and will forever be (pace Rin-Tin-Tin and Lassie) Hollywood's top dog? How fitting that he should lend his considerable talents to Bringing Up Baby, the most exquisite comedy of the sound era.