Movie Review - Bringing Up Baby

Bringing Up Baby - (1938) - A quiet archaeologist (Cary Grant) runs into a flighty heiress (Katherine Hepburn) who upsets his life in general and brings a leopard named "Baby" into his life.  Along the way he discovers that the young woman is also the niece of a woman that is considering donating a million dollars to the museum where he works.  Then an important bone gets lost followed quickly by the leopard.  After that things just start getting silly.

Howard Hawks leads the way on this screwball script with Hepburn in her first ever comedy.  She struggled with it at first until Hawks brought in several veteran comic actors to help.  The result is truly wonderful.  Grant was already an establish comic actor who had a lot more trouble working with his feline co-star than his female one (he and Hepburn would do several more movies together).  While they made good use of split screens and other effects to limit the interaction between Baby and his co-stars there were times when they had to be in the same shot.

While the movie is considered a classic today it was considered a flop at the time.   It performed so badly that Hawks's contract at RKO was cancelled, Hepburn bought out her contract to avoid making more like it and Grant was afraid that it was a sign that he'd never be a star.  Hawks felt that the movie suffered because the madcap action of the leads didn't have a straight person(s) to work against in the story.  The movie would probably have been better anchored if there were but in the end it's still a classic screwball comedy.

The truly funny thing is that if a female character like Susan Vance appeared in a contemporary movie she would almost certainly be the star of a horror film.  She is self centered, manipulative, perfectly willing to say anything to get what she wants and not entirely in touch with reality. She feels perfectly entitled to make off with other people's possessions.   By our standards she is quite simply nuts (that's the technical term)

In the end, you can't argue with success.

Rating = **** Recommended