Bringing Up Baby (1938)

“The director, Howard Hawks, keeps all this trifling nonsense in such artful balance that it never impinges on the real world; it may be the American movies’ closest equivalent to Restoration comedy.” — Pauline Kael

“Though it’s almost impossible, try to sit back sometime and enjoy this 1938 Howard Hawks masterpiece not only for its gags, but for the grace of its construction, the assurance of its style, and the richness of its themes…time has revealed its brilliance, as well as the apparent impossibility of its like ever being seen again.” — Dave Kehr, Chicago Reader

SYNOPSIS

Few comedies sustain the velocity of Howard Hawks’s Bringing Up Baby, a screwball whirlwind in which every attempt to restore normalcy only produces a more spectacular catastrophe. Cary Grant stars as David Huxley, a mild-mannered paleontologist preoccupied with completing a dinosaur skeleton and securing a crucial museum donation when he crosses paths with Susan Vance (Katharine Hepburn), an impulsive heiress who promptly commandeers his attention, his time, and eventually his entire life. A pet leopard, a missing bone, a confused dog, and an increasingly elaborate succession of misunderstandings follow as Hawks pits David’s devotion to decorum against Susan’s complete indifference to it. Beneath the escalating farce lies a slyly subversive romantic logic: the respectable future David has constructed for himself proves far less appealing than the unruly alternative Susan represents. Initially unsuccessful at the box office, Bringing Up Baby has since taken its rightful place among the landmarks of screwball comedy, pairing Grant and Hepburn’s incomparable chemistry with filmmaking of astonishing speed, clarity, and comic invention.