Filling in the Gaps: Bringing Up Baby
Every cinephile has gaps in their resumes. Films they feel they should have seen but have not. The classic movies that inspire many of today’s films and pop culture references are often known only by reputation or by famous snippets. In this feature I will attempt to fill in my own gaps, while keeping in mind the modern viewer and how the films might interest them.
Bringing Up Baby is one in that long legacy of movies that just weren’t appreciated in their time. Notorious for being a complete flop when it was released in 1938, the movie later took on iconic status. Maybe it was the ever rising stars of leads Carry Grant and Katherine Hepburn who are now etched in stone in the Hollywood hall of fame. But part of it is likely due to the fact that movie was well ahead of its time in some ways. A complete screwball comedy that can sometimes be so full of chaos its hard to understand all the jokes being thrown out a mile a minute.
Bringing Up Baby is at its heart a simple story of a man, set in his routine, who finds love on the eve of a wedding to another woman. It’s a trope we’ve all seen a thousand times. But that is where the simplicity ends. After a few brief minutes of exposition where we meet David Huxley (Grant), a museum paleontologist who is just one small bone away from completing a brontosaurus skeleton, and his bride to be Miss Swallow (Virginia Walker). The movie takes a sudden turn into the absurd.
David needs to procure a million dollars from a wealthy investor to complete his dinosaur. So he is sent off to schmooze on the golf course with the lawyer of said investor when he stumbles into Susan Vance (Hepburn) who immediately and irrevocably upends his entire life.
I won’t itemize all that happens next, but from that initial encounter where Susan steals David’s car insisting it her own, through a few more hilarious encounters, Susan inadvertently sabotages David’s efforts at every turn while also turning out to be his only hope when it is revealed that she is the niece to that wealthy investor he was looking for in the first place.
So with that, she takes David and her new pet leopard (yes…a pet leopard) on a whirlwind adventure to Connecticut to convince her aunt to give him the money. As you can imagine, even more crazy hijinks ensue once the pair and the leopard arrive in suburban Connecticut.
Bringing Up Baby is really an interesting watch for a modern viewer. Watching Kelly and Hepburn play such crazy characters is a delight. Their presence and chemistry add so much to the chaos of the film. The movie winds its way around so many locations and set-ups that you find yourself just clinging to these characters as the core of the movie. And, on that level, it works fantastically.
Where one might run into trouble with the movie is in that chaos that brings so many laughs. At times it can turned from a controlled, but fast paced, series of joke after joke and grow into a din of hyper back and forth. The 1930’s sound design can’t always focus the ear to hear every joke when multiple conversations are occurring at once in a way some of the modern comedies that take inspiration from this film might. So some of the movies better jokes can may not even be heard on first viewing.
But the film itself feels very modern in some ways. The character dynamics between Hepburn and Grant never left me squirming in my seat. The battle of the sexes isn’t represented in a way that feels too dated. You can also clearly see this as a forerunner to modern comedies in many ways. Although clearly abiding my the rules of the time, there are a lot of double entendres alluding to jokes that would fit right in today. And the pacing of the film is on par with what you might expect from a comedy today as well.
All in all, Bringing Up Baby is known as one of the greatest classic comedies of early cinema for a reason, and unless you require the polish of modern production will likely be a delightful comic diversion for modern audiences.
Bringing Up Baby
Director: Howard Hawks
Starring: Carry Grant, Katherine Hepburn
Recommended for: Lovers of classic stars, screwball comedies, and leopard enthusiasts.
Tim Levers is a contributor at MNN, a devout worshiper of cinema, and a life-long movie geek. Sci-Fi/Fantasy, Action, Drama, Classics, Horror. Love them all. All genres have the ability to produce a great film.
