By Howard Hawks, 1938.
Starring Cary Grant, Katharine Hepburn.
Rating: 10/10, 10/10.
Bringing Up Baby is one of those movies that I don’t just love, but that leaves me in absolute awe every time I see it. The virtuosity of the cast and writers is, well, just that: virtuosity. Mastery. I’m sure no one needs me to rave about what great actors Cary Grant and Katharine Hepburn are, so I’ll just remind you: they are great.
Lesser comedies tend to suffer on repeat viewings. The funny bits get old, and it’s usually more the surprise of the "jokes" that makes them funny. Not so with Bringing Up Baby. There is so much here, and such a wide range from broad to subtle comedy, that watching it again will only bring more of it out for you. Also, when you’re not distracted too much by laughing out loud for the whole movie, you’ll notice all the skillful twists of language that the writers used to create the comedy. Most of the humor here comes from misunderstanding; one character will speak, and the other characters’ understanding of what’s going on or even their mental world is so different that their interpretation of the first character’s words is worlds apart from what was intended. Take this exchange, when David (Grant) comes to Susan’s (Hepburn) apartment to rescue her from what he believes to be a dangerous, wild leopard. The leopard is in fact completely safe, and what he doesn’t know is that Susan is using the leopard as part of her complicated scheme to win his love.
David: Susan, you have got to get out of this apartment!
Susan: Oh, David, I can’t, I have a lease.
The structure of the romantic plot here is also quite interesting. Most similar comedies from the first half of the 20th century tend to feature a strong, independent woman opposed to marriage who are eventually won over by stronger, sometimes more moralistic, men, often former husbands or lovers. Consider some of Cary Grant’s other roles: in Philadelphia Story, or His Girl Friday, or one of his first movies, She Done Him Wrong, in which he even succeeds in taming Mae West. Here, though, that standard is turned around: the strong, independent Susan wants nothing more than to marry the cowed David, and in the end she succeeds, even though the film has already provided a fiancée for him. I’m not exactly sure what or how much to make of this, but it is certainly an interesting departure from formula.
This movie, essentially, is packed. Thinking back to everything that happens in it, I have trouble believing it fit into 102 minutes. The museum scenes. The golfing sequence. The restaurant. The apartment. The car trip. The scenes at Susan’s aunt’s house. The dinner. The extended outdoor search scene. The prison. While the film runs through all this with the necessary manic qualities of screwball comedy, it still seems to take its time, pace itself almost, running but never rushing. Or maybe rushing but never running is more accurate. It’s hard to say. Whatever it is, it feels like a very extended moment of inspiration, as if the writer had a sudden epiphany that wouldn’t stop happening.