Bringing Up Baby

Bringing Up Baby is a 1938 American screwball comedy film directed by Howard Hawks, and starring Katharine Hepburn and Cary Grant. It was released by RKO Radio Pictures. The film tells the story of a paleontologist in a number of predicaments involving a scatterbrained heiress and a leopard named Baby.

Why It Rocks

 * 1) Howard Hawks was approaching screwball comedy fairly late in the game, and he was determined to push the envelope for what was permissible, resulting in what's considered one of the most iconic screwball comedies ever created.
 * 2) A lot of the film's characters are hilarious and memorable, especially the central duo. Susan Vance and David Huxley are so repressed, they're almost psychotic.
 * 3) Cary Grant's character (Dr. David Huxley) plays against type as a timid zoologist with an iceberg fiancée and a brontosaurus skeleton one bone shy of completion. First seen wrapped in a lab coat and being denied sex by his future wife, he's unsure of his masculinity.
 * 4) Katharine Hepburn's character (Susan Vance) is also against her usual roles as a crazy heiress who crosses Huxley's path and turns his life into a symphony of catastrophes. She's an immature liar who likes to start fights, and the 1930s equivalent of a stalker.
 * 5) Considering this is Grant and Hepburn's second film, the two central stars still play off each other surprising superbly, and share great chemistry with each other.
 * 6) *The film's first half is like eavesdropping on a relationship. While the world portrayed is familiar from other films about the wealthy, it's a weirdly depopulated one where only Hepburn and Grant make any difference.
 * 7) *After the introductory scenes, nearly ten minutes pass where the main duo are the only characters in the film. It was amazing that Howard Hawks could sustain their, breezy, bantering tone so long.
 * 8) Susan's titular leopard "Baby" is both a funny character, and an important plot device for the story.
 * 9) The film has a perfect sense of comedic timing, with its screwball cast, series of lunatic and hare-brained misadventures, disasters, light-hearted surprises and romantic comedy.
 * 10) It may be the first American film to use the term "gay" as a reference to homosexuality. Plus the line was unscripted and Grant came up with it on the spot.
 * 11) Howard Hawks and an uncredited Linwood Dunn's wide variety of special effects and various tricks on the leopards to minimize their exposure was surprising pretty realistic.

The Only Bad Quality

 * 1) While the film's first half does an amazing job in terms of handling the humorous bantering, the second half turns out to be extremely hammy.
 * 2) * Large chunks of screen time are given to old-timers performing dialect humor or retrieving stage routines from earlier in their careers.
 * 3) * There are tons of surprisingly weak plot twists (not one but two leopards, not one but two emasculating Amazons, not two but three tiny blowhards) which eventually become so ridiculous that nothing in the story matters anymore.
 * 4) * The dirty jokes become extremely blunt

Trivia

 * Director Howard Hawks helped Cary Grant with his part by having him recall images of one of his favorite comics, silent star Harold Lloyd. He also directed Grant to contemplate a man imitating a whinnying horse when extreme nervousness was needed for a scene.
 * One of the few actors in the production who wasn't afraid of Nissa - the leopard who played the titular "Baby" - Katharine Hepburn was advised by the on-set trainer to wear a certain perfume favored by the big cat and to apply resin to the bottoms of her shoes to avoid slipping in front of the excitable animal.
 * Many of the leopard's scenes were filmed in two separate takes - one with the animal alone, and another with the human actors. The takes were then combined during post-production to create the impression that the leopard and the actors were in the scene at the same time.
 * Sometimes credited as "Asta" after his iconic role in The Thin Man, Skippy the wire fox terrier stars as "George" in Bringing Up Baby - his second role opposite Cary Grant, having appeared with him previously in The Awful Truth.

The Film
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