Bringing Up Baby – Classic Film Review 682

Director Howard Hawks’s 1938 classic is the quintessential 30s screwball comedy, providing a perfect showcase for the ultimate in polished zany performances from its all-time great stars Katharine Hepburn and Cary Grant.

In the engagingly bizarre story, soppy socialite Susan Vance (Hepburn) and absent-minded palaentology professor David Huxley (Grant) hunt for her missing pet leopard (that’s Baby of the title) and a fossil (the latter stolen by the heroine’s dog played by Asta from The Thin Man) while Major Horace Applegate (Charles Ruggles) makes loon calls (don’t ask!). All the increasingly befuddled Huxley wants to do is to try to secure a $1 million donation for his museum.

Hawks’s priceless farce is high on the list of the all-time great American film comedies. It’s distinguished by a truly witty screenplay (by Dudley Nichols and Hagar Wilde, based on the latter’s story) that’s packed with endless funny situations and hilarious lines. Hawks takes all the nonsense, as you must with farce, at a breathless gallop, frantically picking up the pace into a frenzy.

But Bringing Up Baby is most fondly remembered for the delightful, delirious slapstick playing from perfectly matched Hepburn and Grant. And it helps enormously not one in the magnificent support cast puts a foot out of place – Ruggles is hilarious, May Robson is excellently bewildered as Aunt Elizabeth and Fritz Feld has a field day as the psychiatrist.

An admired classic today, it surprisingly flopped commercially originally, perhaps because Hepburn was then labelled as ‘box-office poison’. Now it’s valued especially because of the impeccable star pairing, its great good-humour and its genius in turning nonsense into an art form. Hawks blamed the film’s box-office failure on its characters being too madcap, with no straight men or women to ground it. This, of course, is its actual appeal.

The scenes with the leopard are pretty convincingly done generally in its pre-digital age, but when Hepburn is dragging the wild leopard into the jailhouse, just after she says ‘Hey David’ an obviously mechanical stand-in for Baby (seated on top of the table) is seen turning its head.

It was reworked by old movie buff Peter Bogdanovich as What’s Up Doc? in 1972 with Barbra Streisand.

(C) Derek Winnert 2014 Classic Film Review 682 derekwinnert.com