BRINGING UP BABY

Bringing Up Baby

Screened in 2002 (Friday, July 26th 2002 at the Mill Valley Community Center)

1938 102 min RKO
A delightful piece of utter absurdity and one of director Hawks' most inspired lampoons of the battle between the sexes. Hepburn and Grant are superb in this breathlessly funny screwball comedy with a plot that could have been hatched in a mental institution. She plays Susan Vance, an eccentric heiress whose dog (Asta of the "Thin Man" series) steals a bone from absentminded paleontologist David Huxley (Grant), the last he needs to complete his reconstruction of a dinosaur. David follows Susan to her Connecticut farm in search of the relic and runs smack into the authorities, the possible donor of $1 million to his museum, and a leopard named Baby who enjoys being serenaded with "I Can't Give You Anything but Love". Memorable moments abound throughout: Susan insistently playing David's ball at a golf game, which leads him further and further from his playing companion ("I'll be with you in a minute, Mr. Peabody!"); Susan's tricks with olives; Baby's encounter with a chicken coop; David facing Susan's elderly aunt (Robson) while wearing a frilly negligee ("I just decided to go gay all of a sudden!"); David caught in Susan's butterfly net (surely not the best way to catch a runaway leopard); Susan's aunt and cowardly big game hunter Maj. Applegate (Ruggles) deciding they need some exercise ("Shall we run?" "Yes, let's!"); Susan's imitation of a gangster's moll ("Hey flatfoot!")--the list could go on and on. Though Hepburn fans might not be used to seeing her essay such an atypically scatterbrained role, her marvelous timing and zany comic elan are wonderfully engaging. Grant, meanwhile, manages the near-impossible feat of being goofy, suave, dimwitted and sexy all at once. Among a brilliant supporting cast, Robson, Ruggles, Catlett, Feld and Fitzgerald are standouts, and the pace never flags for an instant. A barbed satire of masculinity, romance, wealth, psychiatry and authority, BRINGING UP BABY was, not too surprisingly, a box-office flop in its day, probably because it poked fun at the very conventions it employed. Enormously influential on later comedy writing, it is a milestone of film merriment.