La adorable revoltosa

It's not just a classic - It's a timeless one! Katharine Hepburn (by her own accounts) was in two minds about playing screwball comedy. But she pulls off the characterization of the mad-cappest heroin/heiress ever portrayed on film. It's NOT Kate. It's Kate brilliantly breaking out of her 1930s typecast. The pace is fast, Cary Grant is brilliant as the professor Kate harasses/helps/falls in love with throughout. And what about Susan's aunt and the major? Priceless! Kudos to Baby, as well. I think maybe a few reviewers have been taking their humor from watching 1930s European comedies. Unless it's all out and out vaudeville or cabaret transpositions you're watching, I wouldn't recommend making those your standards for judging "Bringing Up Baby". Worse still if you're judging by American/European standards of the 21st Century. I'm not saying you're wrong, I'm just saying since you can't compare this to virtually anything of those, just enjoy the ride. The Acting you CAN compare, though. And I put my money & soul on Hepburn, Grant & Baby every time.

10/10

You might be curious as to why some people watch those creaky, boring, old black and white movies which you've purposely avoided all your life. If that's you, watch this and you'll understand.

If in the first ten seconds you're not already hooked then turn this off. You'll not do that though because straight away you are now in a happier mood. You're now best friends with Cary Grant's befuddled palaeontologist. You're instantly there in that absurd world of 1938. You're enjoying yourself.

If every 1930s film were a Led Zeppelin song, this would be STAIRWAY TO HEAVEN. This is the 1930s comedy which isn't just for fans of 1930s movies - it's as funny now as it was when it was written. Although it's clearly in a late 1930s setting with 30s stereotypes and 30s attitudes, it's also timeless inasmuch that you can so easily relate to the characters and their predicaments. As crazy as the situations get, everyone is also weirdly believable and real.

Everything is just right in this: Cary Grant has never been funnier Miss Hepburn's over-entitled Susan, someone constantly bemused by the concept of life having consequences is adorable. She's the perfect strong, eccentric 'Hawksian' woman so under Howard Hawks' direction she gives possibly the best performance of her career. Hawks, master of the gangster film and king of the Western emphatically proves he can do anything at all by also making the funniest film of the decade.

Maybe the prototypical example of the breed, in fact. Zoologist Grant (we'd call him a paleontologist nowadays) goes to a golf course to try to wrangle money out of a potential donor: along the way he meets up with Katherine Hepburn, and they have all sorts of wacky misadventures.

Grant's great, though it's not a typical role for him -- he's uptight, buttoned down, smothered. He's clearly the superego character, straitlaced and repressed and anti-life (it's no accident he works with bones). Hepburn was never lovelier than she was here -- she's the id character, all action and movement. There's a dedicated minority of people who hate this movie, mostly I think because they see the things Hepburn's character does as cruel. That's the point. Hepburn's not supposed to be nice -- she's id. We laugh partly because Grant needs to be loosened up, but partly because some of Hepburn's actions are shocking. Ideally, we should be in the same position as Grant in the movie: half-attracted, half-afraid.

Great "rat-a-tat" dialog in the classic Hollywood tradition. I can't think of many screenwriters today who could deliver such dialog. Highly recommended, one of the great Hollywood comedies.

An excellent and wacky rom com inspired by the movies of Laurel and Hardy, during which we follow the adventures of Susan and David from a golf driving range until the destruction of a dinosaur skeleton, not to mention the songs needed to calm down a leopard. Certainly, the scenario is far-fetched but that's exactly the global idea! Indeed, we regularly flirt with the absurd through dialogues of the deaf, misunderstandings and tutti quanti. The manifold gags reinforce the endearing side of Susan and David. Katharine Hepburn and Cary Grant excel in these atypical roles, and Walter Catlett is so hilarious. This black and white film of another era, between the Great Depression of 1929 and the Second World War, is a delight to be enjoyed with your sweetheart or with family.

"Bringing Up Baby" is the standard for timeless screwball comedy, clever, charming, with tons of heart. It's also probably the most satisfying comedy in both Katharine Hepburn and Cary Grant's careers, together and apart, which is really saying something.

Grant plays David Huxley, a nebbishy dinosaur expert who plans to get a million dollars for his museum and marry his icy fiancée Alice. Hepburn plays ditzy but determined Susan Vance, who sets her sights on upsetting Huxley's plans so she can have him to herself.

What could be a protracted exercise in frustration comedy, or else a humorless excursion into the stalking habits of the rich and nutty, is made joyous instead by the way Hepburn pulls us into her zany character and makes us root for her to reel Huxley in. After telling David, who wants nothing to do with her, that she has a leopard in her apartment, Susan trips in mid-call and then gets the bright idea of pretending she's being mauled by the beast.

"Oh, David, the leopard!" she screams, rubbing the phone's mouthpiece against a fireplace grate for added terror.

David takes the bait. "Be brave, Susan. I'll be there!" he shouts as he trips for the door. Kate's merry smirk is the perfect scene-capper.

Susan is brave, in her convention- and logic-defying way, and one can trace the line from Jo March to Grace Quigley right through her in the panoply of strong, feminist-icon Kate Hepburn roles. But while Hepburn was amusing in other parts, she was never as much so as she was here, taking pratfalls and throwing off non-sequiturs like a Vaudeville clown. Warm, too: I think one of the film's secret strengths is the notion a nebbishy guy could end up with a beautiful, self-assured woman despite his best and worst efforts. The hell with macho: This is one romantic comedy where the guy winds up fainting in the gal's arms.

Of course it helps if the nebbish looks like Cary Grant in glasses. Grant did play fusty characters in other films, but there's something about him with the pretty but frigid Alice (Virginia Walker, director Howard Hawks' sister-in-law but a good performance anyway from someone not much seen again), who tells him there will be no honeymoon or "domestic entanglements of any kind." "This," she says, gesturing at the brontosaurus skeleton he has been painfully assembling over the past few years, "will be our child." "Oh, it's nice," David replies, sadly and submissively. He is in definite need of screwball intervention.

The film is one of those classics that could only be made in the 1930s, when everything could be played in a light and airy fashion without any pretense of reality. 1972's "What's Up, Doc" is a classy replay of "Baby" in spirit if not script, but while I enjoy that film nearly as much, it's not hard to see the problem director Peter Bogdanovich had on his hands trying to make us accept such nutty behavior in living color.

Bogdanovich's commentary on the "Baby" DVD is insightful and worthwhile, and I agree with him that the subplot involving Barry Fitzgerald's drunken gardener is the weak link in this otherwise fine film. I also worry about poor George playing with Baby; does anyone else notice that nasty gash on the poor dog's side? I wonder how many "Georges" Hawks went through before he got the scene as filmed.

The other secondary characters are terrific all the way through, especially May Robson as Aunt Elizabeth (the one apparently sane character until she complains about waiting for her new pet) and Walter Catlett as the constable, which I have a soft spot for beyond his beetle brows and his way of slapping his hands together like a mad auctioneer. Anyone else notice he shares a last name with Harvey Keitel's lawman in "Thelma & Louise"? Given Kate's lawbreaking performance here, I wonder if that was intentional...