Bringing Up Baby

Bringing Up Baby, a 1938 film directed by Howard Hawks, is today regarded as one of the quintessential films in the genre of "screwball comedy," right up there with My Man Godfrey, Nothing Sacred, and The Lady Eve. It is a marvel of perpetual motion, a film that proceeds like a ball rolling down a hill, without stop, picking up speed along the way. However, when it was released, it was a huge flop, and perpetuated Katharine Hepburn's status as "box office poison."

The story is pure zaniness, the kind that would appear to have been written in crayon. A scientist, played by Cary Grant, is assembling the skeleton of a brontosaurus, and the last bone he needs has just been found at a dig in Utah (the "intercostal clavicle," to be specific). He's about to be married to his prim colleague, Virginia Walker. He's going to play golf with a lawyer who represents a philanthropist who's looking to give away a million dollars, and Grant's museum is one of the candidates.

While on the golf course, though, he meets Hepburn, who is the kind of dizzy debutante that was her specialty. Hepburn shows off a bit of her golfing skill (she sinks a long putt--but with Grant's ball) and once Grant has met her his life goes on a dizzying whirl that will see his beloved dinosaur bone snatched by Hepburn's dog and buried somewhere on her Connecticut estate (it's the same dog, an Airedale, that played Asta in The Thin Man) and more importantly, Grant finds himself looking for Baby, Hepburn's pet, who is also missing. Baby, it turns out, is a leopard.

Screwball comedies have been written about extensively. They've been called "sex comedies without the sex," by Andrew Sarris, and sure enough, there is no physical passion going on here, but Hepburn has decided that she will marry Grant, even though he wants nothing to do with her (at first, of course). Hawks, in interviews he gave years later, talks about how his comedies (he also made the screwball comedies Twentieth Century and His Girl Friday) have characters moving while they are talking, and there was a lot of overlapping dialogue, years before Robert Altman was on the scene. In Bringing Up Baby, all of the characters are a bit askew--there is no real voice of sanity amidst the hurlyburly. One can see how audiences who liked their comedies to have some moments to catch their breaths may have been put off, but for purists like me this film is undiluted brilliance.

The performers are all a delight. Hepburn, as stated, was in a bad time in her career, and wouldn't come out of it until 1940, when she made The Philadelphia Story and her initial team-up with Spencer Tracy, Woman of the Year. She's a flittering moth in this film (interestingly Walker, when breaking it off with Grant at the end of the film, calls him a butterfly) and many of her familiar tics are there, but they're all charming. She's especially good in a scene when all the principles are locked up in jail, and she's quizzed by the constable, Walter Catlett. Their duet is like a priceless vaudeville routine, particularly when she decides to have him on and pretends to be a gun moll, affecting a streetwise accent and taking credit for a series of bank robberies.

There's a few interesting subtexts. One is the replacement of children by other things--the leopard is called Baby, and Walker, telling Grant she doesn't want to have children, refers to the brontosaurus skeleton as their "baby" (this skeleton, introduced in the opening scenes, isn't seen again until the close--it's a house of cards waiting throughout the whole film for its eventual toppling by Hepburn). And in a tidbit of cultural history, this film may have the first use of the word "gay" to refer to homosexuality in mainstream entertainment, although audiences didn't know it at the time. Homosexuals had referred to themselves as gay as early as the 1920s, but only within their community (the rest of society didn't hear about the meaning of that word until the Stonewall riot of 1969). There's a scene in Bringing Up Baby in which Grant, wearing Hepburn's marabou-trimmed robe, is asked by her aunt why he's wearing such a ridiculous outfit. He responds (in an ad-lib), "Because I just went gay all of a sudden!" Audiences would have thought he was referring to the use of the word as it meant to them--excessively happy and carefree, but homosexual audiences knew better.

Hawks is one of the unsung giants of American film. As Leonard Maltin said, he's probably the greatest director who isn't a household name. He had an astonishing breadth of genres throughout his career--not only did he make these great comedies, but he also directed Scarface, The Big Sleep, and Red River, all among the handful of best films in each of those genres.