Its purpose is only to delight, and it succeeds.
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There are some folks who consider 1938's "Bringing Up Baby" one of the best comedies ever made. I have no objection. It is a funny movie. Funny enough to have made Entertainment Weekly's "100 Greatest Movies of All Time" at number 24; the American Film Institute's "Top 100 Films" at number 97; the AFI's "100 Years...100 Laughs" at number 14; the Internet Movie Database's reader poll of "Top 250 Movies" at number 137; and a 100% positive rating among national reviewers at Rotten Tomatoes. As I say, I have no objection.
The movie's current high esteem is a little surprising when you consider that the public's initial response to it was lukewarm at best. Directed by Howard Hawks and starring Katharine Hepburn, Cary Grant, and a leopard named Baby, the movie did more poorly than expected at the box office. As David Thomson writes in his history of Hollywood, "The Whole Equation" (Alfred A. Knopf, 2005), the movie "did disappointing business from the start. Hawks guessed that it was because there was no one normal in the film (although the leopard is like most leopards you meet). Today that is regarded as the brilliance of the film. Still, it did only $715,000 domestically, with another $390,000 from foreign. The studio lost money (after the marketing costs), and it was a principal reason why Katharine Hepburn was labeled 'box office poison.'" Nevertheless, Hawks quickly recovered with successes like "His Girl Friday" (1940), "Sergeant York" (1941), "The Big Sleep" (1946), and "Red River" (1948); Hepburn regained her standing in Hollywood with "The Philadelphia Story" (1940), "Woman of the Year" (1942), "Adam's Rib" (1949), and "The African Queen" (1951); and Grant's popularity was never in question.
"Bringing Up Baby" shares much in common with its main characters. On the one hand it's breezy, intelligent, and urbane; on the other, it's zany, madcap, and screwball. Because of its buoyant, lighthearted attitude, the movie is easy to enjoy time and again. I confess it does not make me laugh out loud too often, but it never fails to bring a smile to my face almost continuously every time I watch it. Its humor ages well.
Hepburn plays a feisty socialite heiress, Susan Vance, impetuous, impulsive, both brilliant and scatterbrained. The character appears to be somewhat like the young Hepburn herself, who came from a wealthy family, was known as an outdoorswoman, and was used to getting her own way.
Wearing glasses inspired by silent-film star Harold Lloyd, Grant plays a timid paleontologist, Dr. David Huxley, who is just about to be married to a fellow scientist, Alice Swallow (Virginia Walker), at the Stuyvesant Museum of Natural History. But Susan turns David's life upside down when she sets her sights on marrying him herself.
Susan and David first coincidentally meet on the golf course, where Susan ruins his car. Later, she runs into him at a night spot, where she trips him and tears his coat. These are only the beginnings of a relationship that has Susan pursuing continuously and David trying frantically to dodge out of the way.
Complications arise over Susan's caring for a tame leopard, Baby, whose favorite song, naturally, is "I Can't Give You Anything But Love, Baby," which Susan and David periodically sing to it. Then, there are the eventual mix-up of Baby with a vicious leopard escaped from a circus and the loss of a valuable brontosaurus bone that David desperately needs to complete one of his specimens, a bone Susan's dog buries, to complete the lunacy.
It's a battle of wills, as David's stubbornly conservative character eventually gets caught up in Susan's devil-may-care world. Sight gags combine with clever banter to produce a comedy that gets increasingly sillier (and funnier) as it goes along. When David sees the leopard in Susan's apartment, he's scared to death and worried about her safety. "Susan, you've got to get out of this apartment," he pleads. "But, David," she replies, "I can't; I've got a lease."
David is not only getting married and putting the final touches to his brontosaurus skeleton, he's also trying to secure a million-dollar loan from a rich old lady, who just happens to be Susan's aunt. Susan sees this as an opportunity to pursue David further. But when she persuades him to help her take the leopard to her home in Connecticut, everything goes haywire. "Now," says David, "it isn't that I don't like you, Susan, because, after all, in moments of quiet I'm strangely drawn toward you. But, well, there haven't been any quiet moments."
"Oh, don't be so irrelevant," she tells him.
Of course, a good screwball comedy needs a good supporting cast of colorful, oddball characters, and "Bringing Up Baby" has them. Mary Robson is Susan's Aunt Elizabeth, a wealthy widow who hears only the sound of her own voice. Charlie Ruggles is Major Horace Applegate, a dotty old big-game hunter and friend of the aunt's. Walter Catlett is Constable Slocum, forever flustered by the goings on. Barry Fitzgerald is Mr. Gogerty, the aunt's most-often inebriated handyman. And Fritz Feld is Dr. Fritz Lehman, an exasperated know-it-all psychiatrist who pops up everywhere as the accidental victim of Susan and David's escapades.
Exchanged cars, mistaken purses, mixed up leopards, a lost bone, the police, a circus, and everyone winding up in jail make "Bringing Up Baby" one of the funniest and most outrageous films of the thirties (or the forties, fifties, sixties, or any other decade).
Its purpose is only to delight, and it succeeds.
Video:
Of course, the picture is presented in a 1.33:1 screen ratio, closely approximating its original 1.37:1 Academy Standard dimensions of the day. The print shows few signs of age or wear, few or no age spots, scratches, flecks, or faded areas. Grain is also at a minimum, and while the images are reasonably well delineated, the black-and-white contrasts are not the strongest I've ever seen. Be that as it may, it's a fine showing for an older movie and quite probably the best shape anybody has ever seen it in decades.
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[release]14117[/release]