NFR Project: 'Bringing Up Baby' (1938)

 

NFR Project: ‘Bringing Up Baby’

Dir: Howard Hawks

Scr: Dudley Nichols, Hagar Wilde

Pho: Russell Metty

Ed: George Hively

Premiere: Feb. 16, 1938

102 min.

“This is probably the silliest thing that ever happened to me.”

This, one of the great screwball comedies, was not a hit when it debuted. In fact, studio executives thought it would bomb, and tried to micromanage its director, to no avail. Now, as the years passed, its reputation grew and it became as highly regarded as you can get, setting a template for further comedies of the same kind.

The great and versatile director Howard Hawks read the story the film is based on in a magazine, and bought the rights. He saw it as a vehicle for Katharine Hepburn, and the script was written with her in mind. The only problem: Hephurn had never done comedy and was not very good at it. Hawks got vaudeville comedy veterans, including Walter Catlett who appears in the film, as coaches for her. Cary Grant, who had just been taught improvisation onscreen by comedy legend Leo McCarey on the set of The Awful Truth, was somewhat more confident about his ability to bring off a comic performance.

Grant is David Huxley, a mild-mannered and clumsy paleontologist who’s about to be married to a repressed female colleague. He’s wooing a potential donor of $1,000,000, which will allow him to complete a Brontosaurus skeleton, among other things – a skeleton missing but one bone, an “intercoastal clavicle.” Enter Susan Vance (Hepburn), a free spirit who takes a fancy to David and begins bedeviling his life, doing anything to think of to keep him from getting married.

She inveigles him into accompanying her to Connecticut with a pet leopard named Baby. There, her aunt’s dog George steals the intercoastal clavicle and buries it, God knows where. Susan steals David’s clothes, leaving him with nothing but a negligee to wear. He then confronts Susan’s aunt, who turns out to be the donor from whom he’s seeking the donation. He lies about who he is.

The hunt for the missing bone, the confusion over everyone’s identity, and the capture of Baby (mixed up with another leopard, this one feral) create a perfect comic storm. Every character is at least slightly off, including a big-game hunter (Charlie Ruggles) and an aggrieved psychiatrist (Fritz Feld). Susan leads David on a merry chase, getting him jailed, ultimately, before the film’s whirlwind conclusion.

By film’s end, she has caused David to give up his cautious ways and embrace her – and chaos. The screwball comedy always prizes eccentricity over sober judgement, and freedom over constraint. Hepburn plays here for the first time in film what has now been termed the archetype of the Manic Pixie Dream Girl – a feather-headed, taboo-busting female who liberates a male protagonist from his stodgy ways.

Bringing Up Baby also introduces a new word into the American vocabulary. When asked why he’s wearing a negligee, he cries, “Because I just went GAY all of a sudden!”

The NFR is one writer’s attempt to review all the films listed in the National Film Registry in chronological order. Next time: Jezebel.