1938: Bringing Up Baby

Bringing Up Baby (Hawks, 1938) 8/10

For modern audiences, it is difficult to separate Cary Grant from his later suave debonair persona or Katharine Hepburn from her legendary status. Yet when Bringing Up Baby was released by RKO in 1938, Grant was better known for his comedic timing in films such as Topper and The Awful Truth than the tanned charm he would later perfect in films such as Charade or North By Northwest.

Similarly, while Hepburn is today viewed as a pioneering feminist, in the 1930's she was box-office poison. Resented for her considerable family fortune and her tendency to overact, Hepburn was seemingly destined to wither away from Hollywood by the end of the Thirties. Fortunately, 1940's Philadelphia Story to which she had the rights to resurrected her career, but not after she was forced to buy out her contract following 1938's expensive box-office disaster Bringing Up Baby.

A textbook example of a great screwball comedy, Bringing Up Baby supplies the sub-genre's recognized traits of eccentric characters, absurd situations and verbal wit. Films such as His Girl Friday, My Man Godfrey and The Palm Beach Story all share the erratic sub-genre's focus on class deconstruction and the battle of the sexes within sophisticated settings.

Bringing Up Baby was the second film featuring Grant and Hepburn together- the first being in George Cukor's Sylvia Scarlett in which the New England-born actress appears in drag. Like the former, Bringing Up Baby was a film that did poorly at the box-office and with critics of the period, but was revived in the 1950's by the critics at Cahiers du Cinema and in the 1960's by the New York Theatre; eventually being remade by Peter Bogdanovich in 1972 as What's Up Doc? starring Barbara Streisand and Ryan O'Neal.

The film concentrates on socially reserved paleontology professor David Huxley (Cary Grant). After four years of work assembling a Brontosaurus, Huxley finally receives the missing piece (an intercostal clavicle) and is set to wed to his workaholic associate. But in order to finish the Brontosaurus, Huxley must garner financial backing from an elderly philanthropist Mrs. Random, through her lawyer Mr. Peabody. Yet, along the way Huxley meets free-spirited socialite Susan Vance (Katharine Hepburn) who along with pet leopard Baby appears to thwart Huxley's quest to finalize his jurassic creation and wed his dour finacée.

Revelling in typical Hawksian situations and problems, Bringing Up Baby utilizes the famed director's emphasis on speed to accelerate the tensions and turmoil between his two oddball lead characters. The Hawksian thematic approach to the intertwining turmoil between the sexes is prevalent throughout Bringing Up Baby. In the film, this concept is illustrated through the combative love/hate relationship Vance and Huxley share.

Desperate to engage in his own pursuits, Grant's inhibited Huxley is unable to shake off his open and flirtatious acquaintance in Hepburn's Susan Vance. No matter how hard he tries, she always "coincidentally" happens to be following him: stalking him with a curled romantic crush, often illustrated in her suggestive remarks regarding Grant's appearance sans his horn-rimmed glasses or her tactic that results in Grant leaving a shower with no available clothes.

Through her kleptomania and hyperactive, unfocused approach to life, Susan Vance is viewed as the necessary tonic to loosen Huxley's nice-mannered, but dull demeanour. Conversely, his straight-laced mannerisms offer her direction and purpose to her spasmodic lifestyle. Yet, this relationship is crucially built not necessarily on love, but on frustration and loneliness. Huxley often wants to strangle Vance, rather than hug her; yet as she remarks when Huxley tries to ward him home, she needs him as she is extremely lonely.

One can even find similarities in thier primal relationship with George, the dog of Vance's aunt. When George steals and buries David's intercostal clavicle, the maligned professor embarks on an amusing quest around a vast Connecticut property. To others, David's search on all fours is embarassingly neurotic; even though Susan is evidently following David in a similar manner.

By maneuvering David back to her home after tearing their clothes at a fancy restaurant, Susan is laying down a template for her sexual conquest of David and his assimilation into her family. Therefore, one of the great, often unmentioned delights of Hawks' film is the manner in which Susan's romantic neurosis is deemed acceptable by her family and others, while through her antics David becomes portrayed as a loon. By pursuing George and the leopard, the intellectualized David demeans himself. While the animalistic qualities of Hepburn's Vance erupt in her enhanced sexual desire, they result in the esteemed professor turning into a beastlike creature: stalking his prey with little care for anything but the prize.

Due to the film's budgeting issues and subsequent financial failure, both Hawks and Hepburn almost had their careers destroyed. While the former was fired from his next RKO production, Hepburn was pushed toward buying out her contract, or be subsequently placed in humilating roles as punishment for the film's failure. Ironically in the end, the critical and commercial fortunes of both parties vastly improved in the years after the film's release. Hepburn would become a noted actress and famed co-star alongside her lover Spencer Tracy, while Hawks would create another legendary screwball comedy with Grant ( His Girl Friday) before dipping into other genres.

While revisionist critics have argued the film's failure was down to its sophistication and focus on East Coast intellectuals, Hawks later asserted that perhaps his characters were not "normal" enough. Yet, evidenced by the success of madcap characters in film's such as Preston Sturges' Sullivan's Travels, Gregory La Cava's My Man Godfrey and Frank Capra's Arsenic and Old Lace, one has to believe that the perhaps the normality of the film's characters was not the problem, but perhaps the lack of analysis given toward dissecting (any of) the class differences between David and Susan.

With its settings in lavish apartments, country clubs and rural estates, Bringing Up Baby was a rarity in screwball comedy for its lack of topical social commentary. By detaching and isolating itself from the events of the Depression, Hawks flooded the film with a timeless quality, yet avoided offering any sly socio-economic insights. Other than a off-the-cuff remark regarding the shabby nature of Grant's car, there is little mentioned that demonstrates a class distinction between David and Susan. Arguably, its most interesting cultural element, is the film's famous ad-libbed line in which dressed in a woman's robe, David signficantly exclaims that he "just went gay all of a sudden:" a rare early instance of the term being used in a homosexual context.

Filled with pratfalls and visual gags, Bringing Up Baby is the rare screwball comedy to hybridize sophisticated humour with the calculated inventive comedy of Lloyd, Keaton or Chaplin. To its champions, it is a film that delights audiences, because of the rapidity and propensity of its comic timing. Each new viewing of Bringing Up Baby offers new humourous points as comedic layers are peeled back to reveal further anecdotes, quips and queries.

Utilizing a fantastic tandem in Katharine Hepburn and Cary Grant, director Howard Hawks fashioned one of the great American comedies: a frenzied fusion of comedic styles blended into an eccentric, screwy setting. Although the film arguably lacks a counterbalance to its an array of off-kilter individuals, this is not necessarily problematic. Rather through the film, Hawks is able to exasperate the primal nature of lust in its crazy and irrational forms. By taking this to this extreme, Hawks creates a film lined with memorable quotes and great performances. Along with his later Gentleman Prefers Blondes, this is one of his most outstanding comedic achievements.

* Bringing Up Baby is available in Warner Home Video's Classic Comedies Collection

Copyright 2007 8½ Cinematheque