Bringing Up Baby (1938)

Bringing Up Baby, the definitive screwball comedy, was the first film Howard Hawks made in a six-picture contract with RKO in 1937. Unpromisingly based on a short story about a young couple and their tamed leopard, the shoot went forty days over schedule and over budget. It earned so little upon release in 1938 that Hawks was fired from RKO and Katherine Hepburn had to buy herself out of her own contract. Ahead of its time, its amazing breakneck pace and disarmingly witty dialogue set new standards for such comedies thereafter.

At his whimsical best, Cary Grant is Dr. David Huxley, a handsome and easily distracted paleontologist who spends his days piercing together a brontosaurus skeleton while he is taken apart by his henpecking fiancee. With one more bone to go before the four-year museum project will be complete, Huxley manages to bumble an important meeting on the golf course with a wealthy potential patron. There, Huxley meets Susan Vance (Hepburn). As beautiful and scatterbrained as he is, she steal his golf ball. After that, Huxley's world never snaps back into place. Trying anything to keep him from marrying another girl, Vance uses Baby, the house-trained leopard sent to her by her brother in South America, as a worthy Huxley diversion. By the time the family dog buries Huxley's precious dinosaur bone, the couple are headed to jail.

The laughs in Bringing Up Baby are real, almost completely disguising its deft analyses of 1930s-style gender expectations, sex, and marriage. So suspicious was the censor of the script's deeper and possibly sexual meanings that Huxley's quest to find his "lost bone" was queried as a reference to lost masculinity. The scene where Huxley dons Vance's feathery feminine bathrobe didn't dissuade that notion, containing as it does one of the first popular appearance of the word "gay" being used to mean something than "extremely happy." The critics may have hated it, the audiences may have stayed away, and Oscar didn't smile upon it at the time, but Bringing Up Baby has had the last laugh on all its detractors. It remains one of the true masterpieces of celluloid wit.

Quote of the Day - David Huxley - "Now 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."

Tomorrow: Sergeant York (1941)