BRINGING UP BABY (1938) B/W 102m dir: Howard Hawks

w/Katharine Hepburn, Cary Grant, Charles Ruggles, Walter Catlett, Barry Fitzgerald, May Robson, Fritz Feld, Leona Roberts, George Irving, Tala Birell, Virginia Walker, John Kelly

This classic is perhaps the screwiest of the screwball comedies. Grant is an absent-minded paleontologist beleaguered by persistently kooky heiress Hepburn and her pet leopard, Baby.

From Georges Sadoul's Dictionary of Films : "One of the best American screwball comedies of the Thirties, in which Hawks used his typical comic theme of dignity destroyed: a scientist falls in the mud and down stairs, is garbed in a lady's dressing gown, blinded by feathers, and finally collapses on top of a dinosaur's skeleton."

From The Movie Guide: "A delightful piece of utter absurdity and one of director Hawks' most inspired lampoons of the battle between the sexes. Hepburn and Grant are superb in this breathlessly funny screwball comedy with a plot that could have been hatched in a mental institution. ... Memorable moments abound throughout: Susan [Hepburn] insistently playing David's [Grant] ball at a golf game, which leads him further and further from his playing companion ('I'll be with you in a minute, Mr. Peabody!'); Susan's tricks with olives; Baby's encounter with a chicken coop; David facing Susan's elderly aunt (Robson) while wearing a frilly negligee ('I just decided to go gay all of a sudden!'); David caught in Susan's butterfly net (surely not the best way to catch a runaway leopard); Susan's aunt and cowardly big game hunter Maj. Applegate (Ruggles) deciding they need some exercise ('Shall we run?' 'Yes, let's!'); Susan's imitation of a gangster's moll ('Hey flatfoot!') --- the list could go on and on. Though Hepburn fans might not be used to seeing her essay such an atypically scatterbrained role, her marvelous timing and zany comic elan are wonderfully engaging. Grant, meanwhile, manages the near-impossible feat of being goofy, suave, dimwitted and sexy all at once. Among a brilliant supporting cast, Robson, Ruggles, Catlett, Feld and Fitzgerald are standouts, and the pace never flags for an instant. A barbed satire of masculinity, romance, wealth, psychiatry and authority, BRINGING UP BABY was, not too surprisingly, a box-office flop in its day, probably because it poked fun at the very conventions it employed. Enormously influential on later comedy writing, it is a milestone of film merriment."

From the Criterion website (www.criterion.com), "Bringing Up Baby: Bones, Balls and Butterflies" by Sheila O'Malley:

"'This is probably the silliest thing that ever happened to me,' tut-tuts stuffy paleontologist David Huxley (Cary Grant), in Howard Hawks’s 1938 classic Bringing Up Baby. As. A. O. Scott has observed, Bringing Up Baby is the'“screwiest screwball of them all.' It is so divorced from normal society that its scenes taking place in the civilized daylight can be counted on one hand, while night scenes dominate. All hell breaks loose at night in the form of a couple of leopards terrorizing the countryside, wreaking physical, emotional, and societal havoc. Bringing Up Baby is the silliest thing to happen to American comedy, too, and has been a reminder for eighty-three years (and counting) of how necessary and sneakily profound silliness can be.

"The film opens with an exchange the Production Code censors missed. David --- sitting on a scaffold above a brontosaurus skeleton, holding an enormous bone --- calls to his fiancee, the humorless Alice Swallow (Virginia Walker), 'Alice, I think this one must belong in the tail.' Alice, probably unaware of the double entendre of her last name, says, 'Nonsense. You tried it in the tail yesterday.' Alice sends him off to golf with Mr. Peabody (George Irving), who is considering securing a million-dollar donation to David’s museum. But David gets sidetracked by a breezy whirlwind named Susan Vance (Katharine Hepburn), who first steals his golf ball and then steals his car (it won’t be her last car theft), causing David to abandon Mr. Peabody on the golf course and chase her down. In one of the funniest visual gags in the movie, David stands on the car’s running board, hanging on for dear life as this crazy woman careens out of the lot. The next day --- after Susan and David cause multiple scenes at a supper club that result in the two literally, if unintentionally, ripping off each other’s clothes --- they both receive packages: for David, it’s the 'intercostal clavicle,' the bone needed to complete his dinosaur, and for Susan, it’s Baby, a leopard with a yen for the song 'I Can’t Give You Anything but Love, Baby.' With all those bones, balls, and cats running around, it’s obvious the censors were sleeping on the job.

"Over the next twenty-four hours, Susan loses David’s bone, breaks up his engagement, and destroys his brontosaurus. David, pulled along in her wake, wrestles with a leopard in a pond, sings at the top of his lungs underneath a psychiatrist’s window --- showing pride in his harmony line --- and races around in a negligee, all while trying to maintain what Molly Haskell has called 'the ossified shell of his dignity.' The duo collect a cast of eccentrics along the way, including Susan’s judgmental battle-ax of an aunt (May Robson), perpetually horrified by her niece’s shenanigans, and big-game hunter Horace Applegate (Charles Ruggles), who blunders through life in a welter of confusion mixed with a misguided superiority complex. The gardener (Barry Fitzgerald) is a drunk, and the constable (Walter Catlett) gets so befuddled he throws the entire lot of them in jail, threatening to put everyone 'on bread and water for thirty days.' In an interview with Peter Bogdanovich, Hawks theorized about the film’s 'great fault': 'There were no normal people in it. Everyone you met was a screwball ... I think it would have done better at the box office if there had been a few sane folks in it.' Perhaps, but the issue could run deeper: surrendering to chaos without the reassurance of a rebuilt world at the end may not have been what audiences wanted in 1938, exhausted by a decade of financial ruin and looking with anxiety at the clouds of war darkening over Europe yet again.

"Hawks, Grant, and Hepburn were all at professional and creative crossroads when they made Bringing Up Baby. Hepburn's career was in a nosedive after her initial triumphs gave way to a series of flops. She had made her film debut as a full-blown lead, in 1932's A Bill of Divorcement, then won a best actress Oscar for her third film, the following year's Morning Glory, and was nominated in the same category two years later. Being embraced by the industry that quickly is almost unprecedented, and perhaps her early success made her a bigger target for backlash. By the midthirties, her stylized high-class persona was wearing thin with audiences, and her forays into different types of material fell flat.

"If all you saw of Hepburn’s work was Bringing Up Baby, you would think screwball was her forte, but the film is an anomaly in her career. She went on to give funny performances, including in her next two films, the adaptations from Philip Barry plays Holiday (1938) and The Philadelphia Story (1940) --- the latter being the picture that really turned her run of bad luck around --- and then in her witty collaborations with Spencer Tracy; even the way she lands her cutting quips in a historical drama like The Lion in Winter (1968) shows her tuning-fork ear for comedy. Screwball shenanigans did not come naturally to her, though, and after Bringing Up Baby she never played such an agent of chaos again. In the first days of rehearsal for the film, she struggled with the slapstick material, and Hawks saw that she was 'trying to be funny.' He asked Catlett, a vaudeville veteran, to give her some tips. To Hepburn’s credit, she did not balk at this interference but took Catlett’s coaching and ran with it, as though she were born to the genre. Hepburn often played very uptight, high-strung characters. Here, she is an irresistible engine of fun. To watch her sitting at the bar, giggling as she tries to pop an olive into her mouth, a glittering ribbon spiraling around her face in unruly corkscrews, is to enter Susan’s reality-distortion field.

"She got mostly positive reviews. Otis Ferguson wrote in the New Republic that she was 'triumphant in illogic and serene in the bounding brassy nerve possible only to the very, very well-bred.' Variety called her 'invigorating.' However, audience response was erratic: the film did well in some cities, flopped in others. It was pulled from Radio City after just a week. The shoot ran long and went over budget, so RKO lost money on the unpredictable ticket sales. Hepburn took much of the blame, and ended up on the infamous 'box office poison' list compiled by Harry Brandt, president of the Independent Theater Owners Association. Hepburn was in good company on the list: Joan Crawford, Greta Garbo, Marlene Dietrich, and Kay Francis were also labeled 'poison.'

"While Hepburn was going through a rough patch, Grant, having just become a big star with 1937's The Awful Truth, was on the ascent. It had taken him a while to find his way, experimenting with different styles, gestures, accents. He was calculated about remaking himself, saying, 'I invented an accent ... The rest I stole from Noel Coward.' He made his screen debut the same year Hepburn did, but despite appearing in eight films in 1932 alone, he didn’t make much of an impression, as hard as that is to believe now. Mae West used him twice, in She Done Him Wrong and I'm No Angel (both 1933), as pretty-boy eye candy, but in those films he is almost amorphous and indistinct, lacking the sharp boundaries necessary for his eventual sui generis movie magic. That would finally arrive in 1935's Sylvia Scarlett, directed by George Cukor. Playing opposite Hepburn, Grant is not the lead, but he steals the movie. Cukor himself said, 'Sylvia Scarlett was the first time Cary felt the ground under his feet as an actor. He suddenly seemed liberated.'

"David Huxley was a radical shift for Grant: he had never before played a workaholic, sexless nerd. Hawks told Grant to think of everyman silent film star Harold Lloyd, who often played a resourceful boy next door eager to do well, and Grant understood instantly, even adopting Lloyd’s signature thick glasses for the role. In David, Grant almost single-handedly created the prototype of the absentminded professor. His posture is ramrod-straight, arms hanging like inert logs as he runs after Hepburn in an anxious little trot, his steps tiny and filled with fear. The dam bursts when, clad in Susan’s negligee (three feathery poufs on each arm, like rings around a rogue planet), he bumps into her aunt, who demands to know why he is wearing those clothes. Grant explodes, 'Because I just went gay all of a sudden,' leaping into the air on 'gay,' his tall frame bent at the waist, arms outstretched. It is difficult to imagine another actor playing the moment the way Grant plays it, with that much freedom and a willingness to acknowledge the elephant of fluid sexuality in the room. There have been reams of commentary on that line, particularly because of the long-standing, well-founded speculation that Grant himself was on the gay side of the sexuality spectrum, rumors he was well aware of at the time. Whatever the truth may be about his personal life, the result is electrifying. Even in screwball, leading men didn’t, in general, go that crazy.

"The screwball-comedy era had dawned in 1934 with the one-two punch of Frank Capra's It Happened One Night and Hawks's own madcap Twentieth Century, a film that broadened the scope of his talent. Though Hawks worked in all genres --- his second film had been a sex comedy about Adam and Eve, with cameos by dinosaurs, in a little foreshadowing --- his main interest was the world of men. Many of his films show men working together to solve mechanical problems, bonding through camaraderie and cooperation. But his sense of humor was silly and cynical, and screwball would prove to be the perfect landscape in which to play out his fantasies of the battle of the sexes.

"It would take a few years for Hawks to make a proper screwball follow-up to Twentieth Century. He worked a lot in the midthirties, but in retrospect, one senses that he was spinning his wheels. Samuel Goldwyn fired him in the middle of shooting Come and Get It (William Wyler stepped in to finish the film), and he spent a good deal of time developing Rudyard Kipling's Gunga Din for the screen (George Stevens ended up directing the project). It was during this aimless time that Hawks came across a short story by Hagar Wilde in the RKO story department, with a note attached: 'Hilariously funny, and the possibilities further comedy complications are limitless.' Hawks agreed.

"Wilde had some experience in show business, with a previous stint in Hollywood writing dialogue for The Age of Love for Howard Hughes in the early thirties. Hawks brought her back to adapt her story for the screen, with help from Dudley Nichols --- an interesting choice, since he was known for dramas (he had recently won the Oscar for John Ford's The Informer). Some of the dialogue is taken word for word from the source, but major changes were made. In the story, there is no brontosaurus and David is not a paleontologist. He and Susan are engaged, and Susan’s aunt is coded as a lesbian, living for years with an ex-opera singer named Drusilla. Nichols removed Drusilla and added the complications of Alice and the intercostal clavicle, all while maintaining Wilde’s dizzy tone.

"In the many interviews Hawks gave later in life, he said he didn’t care about funny dialogue. Humor came from the situation. More specifically, the characters in his comedies don’t know they’re in a comedy. They think they’re in a tragedy. To David Huxley, losing the intercostal clavicle is a devastating disaster. To Susan, the thought of losing David throws her into a panic. 'He’s the only man I’ve ever loved!' she sobs to her aunt. When David keeps getting up from the dinner table to follow the dog around, it’s hilarious not thanks to any verbal jokes but because of the logic underneath the absurd behavior.

"Bogdanovich asked Hawks if David 'abandoned his scientific life' at the end. Hawks replied, 'Well, let’s say he mixed it ... He becomes more normal as the picture goes along, just by his association with the girl.' (It’s illuminating that, in Hawks’s view, Susan is the normal one.) Marriage barely exists in Hawks’s films, and when it does show up, it’s not exactly a blessing. Children are also nearly nonexistent, and the proverbial white picket fence is nowhere to be found in his capacious dreamspace. When David realizes Susan is the one for him, he exclaims, 'I love you, I think!' The 'I think' is classic Hawks. Bringing Up Baby may end in an embrace, but it is impossible to imagine David and Susan in a conventional domestic relationship.

"When compared with other screwballs of the era --- even with the ones Hawks went on to direct --- Bringing Up Baby seems almost like the genre’s feral stepchild. The film doesn’t just go off leash; it questions the concept of leashes altogether. The law of the jungle reigns. Bringing Up Baby has much in common with Shakespeare comedies such as A Midsummer Night's Dream and As You Like It, in which the characters leave the rule-bound court and enter the forest. In the forest, love, lust, gender-bending, and magic all flourish. At the end, the characters return to the court, ready to rejoin society. Order is restored. In Bringing Up Baby, though, order is not restored: the brontosaurus collapses, and so does civilization. Maybe it deserves to go down.

"Bringing Up Baby was rediscovered in the fifties and sixties with the advent of television and the Cahiers du cinema crowd, who adored Hawks, lifting him into the pantheon. The film quickly shot to the top of everyone’s list as one of the funniest comedies of all time. Its initial reputation as a flop continues to puzzle, and points to the pitfalls of deciding what is or is not a classic in real time. Sometimes you just have to wait. Hawks lived to see his film vindicated.

"A cautionary tale embeds itself in Bringing Up Baby in the form of Horace Applegate. If Susan hadn’t barged into David’s life, David might have become a pedantic, celibate bore like Horace. This is romantic and hopeful, yes, but a little disturbing too. What a close call! We like to think of our identities as solid, that we are in charge of our destinies and can course-correct on our own if necessary. Hawks chuckles and says, 'Wanna bet?'

"Through the pandemonium, David becomes a real person. Alice dumps him, saying, 'You showed yourself up in your true colors. You’re just a butterfly.' Alice, of course, misses the point, as the Alices of the world always do. A butterfly doesn’t symbolize irresponsibility. A butterfly symbolizes transformation. Susan forces David out of his chrysalis, and he emerges into the limitless night air, where a man can breathe, where a woman not only loves him but returns his bone to him, at last."