L'impossible Monsieur Bébé

"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...

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.

Those people who don't like this movie seem to miss the point; IT'S SUPPOSED TO BE RIDICULOUS AND MAKE NO SENSE AT ALL! THAT'S WHAT MAKES IT FUNNY! Now that I've gotten that off my chest, I want to say that I really did have a laugh a minute. Both Cary Grant and Katherine Hepburn are very adapt at this kind of comedy, in top form here, and work very well together. They have a great, very funny supporting cast, as well; though most are long dead and forgotten, many were well-known character actors in the 30's. They knew their craft, and are great at it here. Howard Hawks must have been some director to be able to fashion such a great movie out of a madcap pace and a script in which everyone talks at the same time and is always ad-libbing. (I've heard those were his trademarks, though.) One scene after another at breakneck pace, but never a dull moment. As soon as one laugh stops, another one begins. In case you haven't gotten the point, I highly suggest you see this movie. It may be 60 years old, but it's still hilarious.

It's such a joy to watch these two consummate film actors playing against type and having so much fun doing it, Hepburn as the dizzy whirlwind who talks a mile a minute (she reminds me a bit of Carole Lombard in "My Man Godfrey"), Grant as the absent-minded scientist who, bemused, always seems to be following two steps behind her. Hepburn's line readings are hilarious. I laugh out loud just remembering the look on her face and the way she says, "Wait a minute! There's nothing up there. There's NOTHING up there." Real life is just as absurd as the plot of this movie, but never as much fun. Thank God for the movies!

Animals play a significant role in Bringing Up Baby, adding absurdity to the comic situations and its theme of

crazed infatuation. When we first meet him, palaeontologist David Huxley (Grant) is preparing to marry his co-worker Alice Swallow (Walker). Alice, we learn, is a rational, no-nonsense woman who sees marriage as a convenient and rational transaction rather than as an expression of love. As the film opens, David and Alice are putting the final touches on a brontosaurus skeleton that he has been working on for five years. The skeleton seems to be a symbol of the couple's relationship - dry, brittle, tenuous, old and, most importantly, dead.

Enter Susan Vance (Hepburn), whose wild anarchic nature is just what the doctor ordered. She seems, on the surface, hair-brained - and this may be true - but her ditziness is the result of being absolutely, utterly, ridiculously head-over-heals in love (at first sight, as is the case with most l'amour fou scenarios) with David and doing whatever she can to sabotage his plans to marry Alice. Susan's leopard, named Baby, is the symbol of her love for David, for the moment the leopard lays its eyes on him, it is instantly affectionate and follows him around, just as Susan does. Jittery David is, of course, terrified of the beast and all that it represents.

The leopard becomes an increasingly useful symbol as the film continues. At her aunt's estate in Connecticut, Susan releases another leopard its cage, thinking it is Baby captured by zoo officials when in fact it is a rogue leopard from the circus on its way to be gassed after attacking someone. With two leopards on the loose, the analogy becomes unmistakable - the wild leopard that Susan releases is David's libido, free at last after being repressed for so long in a loveless relationship. Indeed, towards the end of the film, when the wild leopard traps the host of characters in the local jail, it is nervous, terrified David who steps up and boldly saves the day.

This I suppose is just one way of reading and enjoying a film like Bringing Up Baby. i think it's interesting that the film announces its interested in exploring psychoanalysis with the inclusion of a character who is a Freudian therapist (Dr Lehman played by Fritz Feld). Psychoanalysis was, of course, very popular among Hollywood screenwriters between the 30s and 50s who adopted all manner of coded symbols for sex after Joseph Breen's Production Code so tightly reasserted control over what could and couldn't be represented on screen. But the fact that Dr Lehman's diagnoses are so far off tells us that the science of the mind is no match for the power of l'amour fou, which turns men and women into wild, irrational carnal beasts.