Film: 'Bringing Up Baby' (1938)

It's a cult classic. It's divisive. Katherine Hepburn can seriously annoy many people with her dippy performance. The dialogue comes so quickly that it might as well come with a health warning and an ear trumpet. There are two, count them, two different leopards in Connecticut in the narrative! On top of all those things, I of course love it. That's 'Bringing Up Baby'.

There's not much time to think whilst watching 'Bringing Up Baby'; It's a screwball comedy with added screw, and the word is they had already used up two previous balls in preparation. It's Howard Hawks at his most frenzied directorial pace, and it works. It's the story of Cary Grant playing a geeky paleontologist who crosses paths with the eccentric heiress played by Katherine Hepburn, who happens to be minding a tame leopard in her apartment until it can be delivered to her aunt. Inevitably they end up in some form of love by the frenzied end, via canine thefts of brontosaurus bones, a police station farce, and numerous clothing gaffes!

There are many things to love about this film, but there's also the enduring enigma of Katherine Hepburn's virtual lynching in the aftermath. She was dropped like a poisoned hot potato in the Arctic Circle, and left to rot, which is a shame as she proves her range beautifully by playing a scatterbrained twit wonderfully. She and Cary Grant just popped as a screen couple, as they already had in 'Holiday' and would again in 'The Philadelphia Story'. They might have made many more, if not for the Spencer Tracy / Hepburn combo that would dominate her following career.

Now, you see, I've digressed from 'Bringing Up Baby' to the second hand specifics of Katherine Hepburn culled from various nefarious sources, which is rather alarming. I'm reasonably sure that there should be a servant around here to stop such digressions, except it's not the 1920s anymore and I had to sell off Bates to get the gyrocopter out of hock. Sigh. We'll get back to Katherine Hepburn and her own rebuilding of her career in 'The Philadelphia Story'. That was one forceful lady.

'Bringing Up Baby' is wickedly funny if you can keep up, and oddly endearing. The ease with which Hawks introduces all the elements and then dispenses with the boring prerequisites so quickly is alarmingly good. He knows how to play fast and clever dialogue - something I miss very much in contemporary cinema - to the hilt and then slip in some more jokes for second and third viewings seemingly effortlessly. It's true that in Cary Grant and Hepburn he couldn't have found any smarter cast to act as accomplices but he gets the main share of the credit, as do of course the writers.

Ultimately, though, it's all Hepburn. She breaks it or makes it. Maybe it was the higher-pitched voice she was squeaking through the whole thing that alarmed people? It's a great comedy, and I can't think of any other which finales in a recreated dinosaur skeleton tumbling into disarray. Can you?

O.

Notes: Must watch 'Woman of the Year', and also follow up with 'The Philadelphia Story' and 'His Girl Friday', finishing with 'Holiday'.