Bringing Up Baby

This 1938 screwball comedy directed by Howard Hawks involves a drunken Irishman, a dinosaur bone, a terrier who buries it, the distraught scientist who seeks to recover it (Cary Grant), a young woman (Katherine Hepburn) with a pet leopard that belongs to her stuffy old aunt and who decides that she is going to marry the scientist, an escaped circus leopard, an incompetent sheriff, an overstuffed braggart of a big game hunter, a repressed and upright fiancée who plans to marry the scientist, and so on. There is much more, including the usual romance budding between the two main characters. The movie boils with a frantic desire to entertain and amuse and entertain. The New York Times review in 1938 accused it of resorting to timeworn and hackneyed clichés, and that may be the case, but it's still a successful film. Cary Grant seems to try too hard through much of the film, but Hepburn seems in her element, which is to say she tries too hard but does it convincingly. Were it not for the well known celebrity names and the somewhat elevated production values, you could easily see this film with Laurel and Hardy or the Three Stooges as the leading actors. Moreover, the wild harebrained humor is clearly influenced by the humor of the Marx Brothers (Animal Crackers and A Night at the Opera especially come to mind). We find a similar social satire, the attacks on social pretensions and wealth, the ethnic humor. The difference between those films and this one is the acting, which is superior, and the comedy, which is forced. Bringing Up Baby is entertaining and amusing, an iconic representative of a particular brand of American cinematic humor. The two main characters couldn't be more shallow, but the film wouldn't work if they were otherwise.