Bringing Up Baby

Those without a sense of humor in 1938, must have been insane, panning this film.

Since I was a little kid this was my favorite movie, seeing it when it first came on TV. I loved other Cary Grant screwball comedies, like "Monkey Business" but this this one tops my list, not only a list of comedies, but of all motion pictures entirely.

Move over Stanley Kubrick, David Lean or William Wyler. This film is at the top of cultural significance and hilarity. This makes me wonder about those in 1938 who hated this film. Why? How? It has to be broken, defective humans that would pan this film. What a shame that some have no concept of funny,

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.

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.

"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:- *****/*****

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.