Bringing up Baby *****

 

by Allan Fish

my choice as best film of the 1930s…

(USA 1938 102m) DVD1/2

Searching for the intercostal clavicle

p  Howard Hawks  d  Howard Hawks  w  Dudley Nichols, Hagar Wilde  story  Hagar Wilde  ph  Russell Metty  ed  George Hively  m  Roy Webb  art  Van Nest Polglase, Perry Ferguson  cos  Howard Greer

Katharine Hepburn (Susan Vance), Cary Grant (Prof.David Huxley), May Robson (Aunt Elizabeth), Charles Ruggles (Maj.Horace Applegate), Walter Catlett (Constable Slocum), Fritz Feld (Dr Fritz Lehman), Barry Fitzgerald (Mr Gogarty), Leona Roberts (Hannah Gogarty), George Irving (Alexander Peabody), Virginia Walker (Alice Swallow), Jack Carson, Ward Bond,

Bringing up Baby is one of those films which is a pleasure to discuss, a pleasure to write about, a film that, to those in on the joke, needs little introduction or even another viewing prior to putting digits to keyboard.  It’s so indelibly imprinted on the memory as to be not only irremovable but cherished.  Screwball comedies are a thing of beauty to many film buffs opining for them in an age when they seem no longer possible and outmoded.  Yet do any films move faster than they?  Even now, contemplating this sub genre, one mourns the absence of such other gems as The Awful Truth, Ball of Fire and Easy Living from this list.  Yet they are merely classics, whereas Howard Hawks’ masterpiece is the greatest of its type ever committed to celluloid and one of the funniest films ever shot.  It’s also one of the quickest, maybe only surpassed by Hawks’ other comedy masterpiece His Girl Friday.  Yet Friday is a knowing film, a cynical film in which the characters are as hard boiled as their surroundings.  Baby is quite the opposite, a film in which innocence and almost surrealism are to be cherished.  It’s also the finest film anyone involved with it ever made, and when you think of Hawks, Grant and Hepburn, that is not a statement to be made lightly.

            Professor David Huxley seems to have it all; he’s about to get married to his secretary cum assistant and he has finally found the missing bone from the dinosaur skeleton on show in his museum, the intercostal clavicle.  However, he also needs funding, so he sets off to play golf with the lawyer of a potential backer only to become sidetracked by a wacky young woman who will change his life forever.

            After The Awful Truth, Grant was an old hand at this sort of thing, but even he was took to his limits here, as his character suffers humiliation upon setback upon disaster.  He’s superb, but it’s Hepburn who’s the real revelation here.  Let us not forget, Hepburn at this point was known for dramatic roles in the likes of Morning Glory, Little Women and Stage Door, Spencer Tracy had not yet entered the scene and she was hardly a shoe in for comedy.  Yet she is magnificent, mixing a wonderful spontaneity and passion for the frankly mad with a real gift for comic timing.  For me, it’s her finest hour, a performance of such endearing wackiness, half lovable and half insufferable, as to be unforgettable.  The supporting cast is likewise handpicked, with Ruggles adding another masterpiece to his comedy CV six years after Love Me Tonight and Trouble in Paradise, deliciously faking animal mating cries, May Robson just wanting her pet leopard, Walter Catlett’s deliciously incompetent local sheriff who locks everybody up in jail and Fritz Feld’s pretentious shrink.  All have a place in immortality through their roles here.

            It’s true that the film was not popular in its day, but It’s a Wonderful Life and Duck Soup are other examples of audiences not really knowing what’s good for ’em.  Any one of a dozen moments in Baby would be enough for classic status; Hepburn’s impression of a Mae Clarkesque gangster’s moll by the name of Swinging Door Susie, Grant caught in a frilly negligee (“I just went gay all of a sudden!“), Hepburn dragging in the wrong leopard, Baby’s love of the song ‘I Can’t Give You Anything But Love’, trying to capture the leopard with a butterfly net, and of course the finale.  These are, to paraphrase Prospero and Sam Spade, such stuff as dreams are made of.  All I can guarantee is that, after dreaming of this, you’ll wake up smiling.  We never shall see its like again.