Bringing Up Baby (1938) - film review

To secure a million dollar donation for his natural history museum, palaeontologist David Huxley finds he has to play a round of golf with his donor’s agent, Mr Peabody.  David’s attention is diverted by an erratic young woman, Susan Vance, who happens to be the niece of his wealthy donor.  Believing that Susan will help him convince Peabody and her aunt that his is a worthwhile cause, David allows himself to be drawn into her chaotic life.  Things start out mildly enough when Susan receives a leopard from her brother in Brazil and her dog, George, runs off with the rare bone that David needs to complete his skeleton of a Brontosaurus.   After that, things rapidly get out of hand and David realises that he will never be the same again...

Although it was very ill-received when it was first released, Bringing Up Baby is now considered the definitive screwball comedy, the film that inspired a whole new sub-genre of film comedy in the 1930s and ’40s.  From start to finish, the film is a relentless barrage of madcap situations which get increasingly ludicrous (and increasingly side-splittingly hilarious) as things progress.  You end up wondering whether anyone involved with the making of this film could possibly have had a grain of sanity.

Gloriously over the top, their high class élan never faltering for a millisecond, Katharine Hepburn and Cary Grant are the perfect screwball couple.  Neither actor has ever been funnier or will ever be as funny again.  Hepburn deserves some kind of medal for unflagging endurance as she cranks up the film’s momentum so that it resembles a snowball careering down the side of an alpine mountain, getting faster and funnier by the minute.  Although it scales new heights of absurdity almost with each successive scene, Bringing Up Baby is more than just a chaotic farce.  It is also a keen satire on gender roles and is the forerunner of that perennial favourite, the battle of the sexes comedy, where the man and the woman struggle to take the dominant position in their relationship (with the woman invariably winning, just as in real life).  

The substantial losses that Bringing Up Baby incurred resulted in its director, Howard Hawks, being dismissed from RKO and prompted Hepburn (who saw little merit in the film) to buy herself out of her contract.  However, since its dismal failure at the box office, the film has grown in popularity and today it is considered one of the high points of 1930s American film comedy.  It is worth watching just for the scene where Cary Grant loses his clothes and ends up in a frilly bathrobe.  Utterly, utterly mad – and utterly irresistible.

© James Travers 2008

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