Bringing Up Baby

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.

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.

"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...

"Bringing Up Baby" is a film I unconditionally love; it is so utterly sublime a comedy that I was truly sighing, awed, 'it can't get better than this...' at many points. Yet it regularly does; Hawks keeps the momentum going majestically; it is one incredibly surreal, bizarre tangent going off unexpectedly into another, at every juncture. He photographs and presents his actors in the most charming and amusing possible ways, and the film is certainly a more leisurely, perfectly pitched film than "His Girl Friday", which I nonetheless admire. There is a beauty in the photography and simple choice of perspectives and angles that matches the

There is not one actress in the annals of film who I adore more than Katharine Hepburn; she is a compelling performer, of great charm, intelligence and wit; of very real, idiosyncratic looks that to this eye are beautiful, vivacious, impish. In "Bringing Up Baby" her Susan Vance is a very interesting diversion from her more usual type of character - the slightly superior, in-control ice maiden, as shown in say "The Philadelphia Story". She is phenomenal in that film, yet here beguiling in a completely different fashion, playing a slightly scatterbrained, sprightly, charmingly delinquent woman, who seems to have no control over anything; least of all her feelings for Grant. Her giddy, breathless exuberance and anarchic helplessness are really endearing; it's a wonderful film that stretches out the credulity of Grant's wonderfully straight-laced character's resistance to Miss Vance. The ending is a gorgeous, satisfying pay-off, as he finally gives way, as would we all! It's a charming, suitable ending that rectifies the slight fall-off of the preceding jail section of the film. That is very amusing, but in a more predictable, slightly laboured way. In stark contrast to the first 70-80 minutes of the film, which amounts to about the finest sustained American comedy I have seen of that length - "Way Out West" and "Duck Soup" being shorter in total.

Cary Grant, truly an institution of a comedic player, is very different to his more remembered persona of later years. It's remarkable to see this absurd little man, bespectacled, unworldly and cutting an orthodox figure played so perfectly by the suave Grant. This is gleefully played on with the sublime scene where Hepburn and Grant are trying to catch the leopard - Kate butterfly net in hand! She accidentally happens to break his glasses and is even more taken with him without them... The tension between how we usually remember Grant and the character he is playing here does add an extra layer of amusement to the film. Need I really add that the rest of the film's company are note perfect? Charles Ruggles, Barry Fitzgerald and many more really give the perfectly matched stars a fine backdrop.

I shan't spoil too much of this heady, sublimely silly film... just go and watch it and see Howard Hawks, a master craftsman, at his best - there are no pretensions but making a quite wonderful character comedy - and Katharine Hepburn and Cary Grant on insurmountable form. With these delightful stars and anarchic, scintillating comic material, what we have on our hands is an unutterably fine film, one of my very favourites of all time. Where else are you going to get such plot threads running simultaneously as: a hunt for a rare archeological find buried by a dog, an absurd upper-middle-class family dinner and an escaped leopard?

Rating:- *****/*****

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.