Bringing Up BabyDid you ever have one of those days? Y'know, the kind where you end up carting around a pet leopard with a crazy woman, get driven off to Connecticut only to have your clothes stolen, then spend all night chasing a terrier through the woods searching for your buried brontosaurus intercostal clavicle? No? Well, that's exactly what happens to a hapless paleontologist named Dr. David Huxley (Cary Grant) after he crosses paths with a scatterbrained proto-manic pixie girl named Susan Vance (Katharine Hepburn), who--intentionally or not--constantly beleaguers the poor David, on his wedding day no less!
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Bringing Up Baby was made in 1938 and directed by Howard Hawks; it is the definitive "screwball comedy". From the start, everything seems a little odd, and only goes weirder from there. To begin, take David; he hardly fits the bill as a paleontologist, staring into space at the museum, almost completing the skeleton of a brontosaurus. (I actually thought he was pretending to be one at first.) He hardly comes across as scientific at all, even if he he does manage to check the socially awkward box of nerdy stereotypes. (But, c'mon, Cary Grant as a nerdy scientist? Really?) That's the point, though. This isn't a movie about verisimilitude; it's about zany hijinks galore. David is supposed to get married to an Alice Swallow (Virginia Walker) for reasons that are never made clear, except that (somehow) it is for his "career". It's like he has no choice in the matter. David is desperately trying to get financing for his museum--a million dollar grant being offered by the wealthy Elizabeth Random (May Robson). To that end, David pleads with her legal advisor, Alexander Peabody (George Irving), during a round of golf. And when he goes to retrieve his ball from the fairway during their game, he finds that it has been mistaken by Susan for her ball, and she won't hear any different, thus beginning their chaotic relationship. When I say that she "won't hear", it's as though she can't even listen to anyone else. She talks over David at every turn, not out of hostility, but because she seems to think that she has a complete grasp on her world, when it couldn't be anything but. Now David seems so straight-laced as to be stiff, but Susan is a whirlwind made manifest, constantly causing moments of embarrassment for David. She mistakes his car for hers, and drives off with it--I'm sure Susan was an inspiration for Maude in Harold and Maude--and when they meet later at a social gathering, she drops an olive, leading to a classic pratfall in which he crushes his top hat by landing on it; and Bringing Up Baby is only getting warmed up.
Despite a clunky start, which relies exclusively on Cary Grant's comedic chops to sustain it, Bringing Up Baby succeeds because it is an utterly hysterical laugh riot once it gets going. Really, once Katharine Hepburn enters the stage (golf course?), the comedy is unrelenting. There's plenty of physical comedy--story goes that this was Hepburn's first comic role--but it is at its most charming during the hysteric kind of "courtship" and dialogue between Susan and David. (They actually sing "I Can't Give You Anything But Love" to a leopard on the roof at night, with a dog named George on backup.) Their earlier conversations (if they can be called that) move lightning quick, leaving no room for even David to get a word in edgewise, and he's part of it. The screenplay is by Dudley Nichols and Hagar Wilde, the latter of whom wrote the short story first published in Colliers which inspired this movie. There is such fantastic speed and interplay that the movie feels a bit like it is being played on fast forward. But the dialogue never drags; it constantly pops with humor and vivacity. It's almost incidental that the eponymous Baby, the "domesticated" leopard, is a part of the story at all. Introduced almost a third of the way through the film, Susan tries to convince David to help her deliver Baby to her aunt. Failing that, she feigns that she is being mauled by the leopard over the phone, and because David is a decent human being, he rushes over to help her, only to find that he was tricked...and far from for the last time. Sure, a good deal of the plot of Bringing Up Baby can be predicted. We can surmise that this leopard will get loose in an inconvenient time, and it does. We can guess that after David learns that Susan's aunt is in fact the very same Elizabeth Random who he has been trying to solicit a grant from, that he will fumble in his attempts to make nice. (He ends up being mistaken for a big game hunter named "Mr. Bone", and it's delightfully ridiculous how we get to this point at all.) Sure, the story meanders, and many characters are present just for cheap yuks, like Aunt Elizabeth's friend, Major Horace Applegate (Charles Ruggles), who actually is a big game hunter, or the drunk Irish stereotype and gardener, Aloysius Gogarty (Barry Fitzgerald), but the characters and plot are just a means to an end in Bringing Up Baby. The real fun of this movie is in the concentrated kernel of comedy that permeates almost every corner of the film. Even if the movie is eighty-five years old, it is as fresh and fun from beginning to end as anything today...even more so.
Recommended for: Fans of an uproarious (leopard pun?) comedy classic that defined the "screwball comedy" forevermore. Bringing Up Baby isn't about story or plausibility; check your reality at the door! It's a joyous and clever movie which if you aren't laughing during it, check your pulse.
Despite a clunky start, which relies exclusively on Cary Grant's comedic chops to sustain it, Bringing Up Baby succeeds because it is an utterly hysterical laugh riot once it gets going. Really, once Katharine Hepburn enters the stage (golf course?), the comedy is unrelenting. There's plenty of physical comedy--story goes that this was Hepburn's first comic role--but it is at its most charming during the hysteric kind of "courtship" and dialogue between Susan and David. (They actually sing "I Can't Give You Anything But Love" to a leopard on the roof at night, with a dog named George on backup.) Their earlier conversations (if they can be called that) move lightning quick, leaving no room for even David to get a word in edgewise, and he's part of it. The screenplay is by Dudley Nichols and Hagar Wilde, the latter of whom wrote the short story first published in Colliers which inspired this movie. There is such fantastic speed and interplay that the movie feels a bit like it is being played on fast forward. But the dialogue never drags; it constantly pops with humor and vivacity. It's almost incidental that the eponymous Baby, the "domesticated" leopard, is a part of the story at all. Introduced almost a third of the way through the film, Susan tries to convince David to help her deliver Baby to her aunt. Failing that, she feigns that she is being mauled by the leopard over the phone, and because David is a decent human being, he rushes over to help her, only to find that he was tricked...and far from for the last time. Sure, a good deal of the plot of Bringing Up Baby can be predicted. We can surmise that this leopard will get loose in an inconvenient time, and it does. We can guess that after David learns that Susan's aunt is in fact the very same Elizabeth Random who he has been trying to solicit a grant from, that he will fumble in his attempts to make nice. (He ends up being mistaken for a big game hunter named "Mr. Bone", and it's delightfully ridiculous how we get to this point at all.) Sure, the story meanders, and many characters are present just for cheap yuks, like Aunt Elizabeth's friend, Major Horace Applegate (Charles Ruggles), who actually is a big game hunter, or the drunk Irish stereotype and gardener, Aloysius Gogarty (Barry Fitzgerald), but the characters and plot are just a means to an end in Bringing Up Baby. The real fun of this movie is in the concentrated kernel of comedy that permeates almost every corner of the film. Even if the movie is eighty-five years old, it is as fresh and fun from beginning to end as anything today...even more so.
Recommended for: Fans of an uproarious (leopard pun?) comedy classic that defined the "screwball comedy" forevermore. Bringing Up Baby isn't about story or plausibility; check your reality at the door! It's a joyous and clever movie which if you aren't laughing during it, check your pulse.