Bringing Up Baby (1938)

Written by Dudley Nichols & Hagar Wilde

Directed by Howard Hawks

1998 List Ranking: 97

2007 List Ranking: 88

When watching the list of winners of the Academy Award for Best Picture, I realized that I could count the number of comedies on the list on a single hand. It is so refreshing, then, that this list contains so many more. They may not all be great, or even good, but at least the American Film Institute doesn’t turn their noses up at them as the Academy seems to do.

I honestly didn’t know that Bringing Up Baby was a comedy when I started watching it, but it became very readily apparent. When comparing it to the other comedies so far on the list, I’d have to put it somewhere below the films of Chaplin and Keaton and above the films of the Marx Brothers: it’s silly, madcap, physical, and exhausting.

Katharine Hepburn and Cary Grant

Cary Grant stars as paleontologist David Huxley, a man nearly finished with assembling a huge brontosaurus skeleton and engaged to be married. In an attempt to gain one million dollars, he meets Susan Vance, played by Katherine Hepburn, a free-spirit who does what she wants and when, and who instantly falls in love with him. Hijinks ensue when she becomes the guardian of Baby, a leopard, and she wrangles David into helping her (partially in an attempt to make him fall equally in love with her). This was only my second time seeing a performance by Cary Grant, and the first in a comedic role, and I thought he handled himself rather well, although he does tend to get upstaged by his fellow actors. Part of this, I’m sure, is because of the character he plays (David is very mild-mannered without much of a backbone for a majority of the film).

However, it’s easy to be upstaged when your primary scene partner is Katherine Hepburn. This was her first comedic role, and while she’s not awful, she IS exhausting. Hepburn’s Susan talks a mile-a-minute, not stopping for a moment to let anyone sneak a word in, and it’s this steamroller performance that drives much of the comedy, but it also leaves the viewer, by the end, feeling as if they just ran a marathon. There is nothing wrong with making the audience work for their enjoyment, but this borders on sadistic torture.

Grant, despondent in his negligee

I do love that, despite Hepburn’s nonstop dialogue, the film derives much of its comedy from the physical aspect, both human and animal. I will say that, as tiresome as Hepburn becomes, she takes a pratfall over an end-table like a PRO. Grant’s physical work is a bit more limited, but even he gets to join in the fun (watching him run around in an almost sheer negligee was entertaining for a variety of reasons).

The plot itself is fine; it is a little strange that no one seems to question Hepburn’s motives of intentionally making Grant miss his wedding all because she wants him to herself (I’m all for getting what you want, but seriously, not a single person says “But, honey, he’s ENGAGED”). People are opposed to them as a couple, but never for that reason. Even when (SPOILER ALERT) Grant’s fiancé calls off the wedding in the final scene, it doesn’t feel real or important (but that could be because it seems so random: his fiancé blames him for Susan’s actions, when Susan literally did everything she could to keep him there, including sending off his clothes to the city).

Hepburn and Grant with “Baby”, played by Nissa

The biggest issue with the plot is that there is just so MUCH. Everything and the kitchen sink is thrown into this movie so that, on top of Hepburn’s incessant chattering, it just became too exhausting to keep track of everyone, where they were, and why they were doing what they were doing. This comes to a head when a SECOND leopard is introduced into the mix and when, eventually, everyone ends up in jail. It becomes overwhelming after a certain point, and I was praying for the credits by then. It’s never not funny (I found myself still at least chuckling in the final scene), but I felt like I needed a nap by the end of it.

The line in question

On a final, interesting side-note: allegedly, this is the first film to use “gay” in the sexual orientation sense, although the connotation of the usage here is debated, as it’s an ad-lib by Cary Grant. One argument against the idea is that the word “gay” didn’t become known to the general public in its modern connotation until after the Stonewall Riots of 1969, but it WAS being used in this connotation before this moment. I would say it IS the first film to use it in this way, because using it to mean “happy” doesn’t really work for the context in which it’s used.

Overall, I’d still take this film over some of the others on this list so far; it might be exhausting, and you might wish for peace and quiet by the end of it, but it’s still entertaining, and it’s great fun to watch a couple of dramatic actors really let loose.

FINAL GRADE: B