The chasm between critics and the general public is best illustrated by films championed as the greatest ever made by the former and rejected at the box office by the latter. This phenomenon includes even comedy, arguably the most audience-friendly genre of all. One such example is Bringing Up Baby, the 1938 film directed by Howard Hawks, hailed as one of the best screwball comedies ever made and one of the finest works of Classic Hollywood.
The plot is based on a short story by Hagar Wilde, who co-wrote the screenplay with Dudley Nichols. The protagonist, played by Cary Grant, is Dr. David Huxley, a palaeontologist who has dedicated the last four years of his life to building a huge skeleton of a brontosaurus. He is about to collect the last remaining bone just as he is going to wed his dour, workaholic assistant Alice Swallow (played by Virginia Walker). Events start to conspire against those plans when on a golf course he stumbles into free-spirited socialite Susan Vance (played by Katharine Hepburn) and, through a series of mishaps, keeps stumbling into her with increasingly embarrassing and disastrous consequences.
Along the way he learns that Susan is the niece of Elizabeth Carlton Random (played by May Robson), a wealthy philanthropist who is about to decide whether to give a $1 million grant to Huxley’s museum. He also learns that Susan has a tame leopard named “Baby” delivered for her aunt and has to bring it to her aunt’s home in Connecticut. David reluctantly decides to help her, partly because her dog George has hidden the precious bone and partly because he, despite all the catastrophic mayhem that occurs when they are together, senses that they can’t deny the attraction they feel for each other.
Bringing Up Baby was greeted extremely well by critics after the premiere, earning the status of a genre classic that it enjoys to this day. Much of that should be credited to Howard Hawks, one of the most versatile and talented directors of the Classic Hollywood era. In this film he took a very pragmatic approach to filmmaking by slashing the original script, which had been 202 pages long, into something that could be used for a more digestible feature film format. His directing style, based around medium shots, works well and the editing is superb, allowing nearly seamless transitions between scenes relying on verbal humour and slapstick. Bringing Up Baby is, like so many 1930s Hollywood films, unusual for its almost complete lack of music with the exception of “I Can’t Give You Anything But Love, Baby”, a popular jazz song that is used by the characters to great comical effect. Hawks, who made the film almost entirely in the studio, used the technical resources of RKO Pictures well and Bringing Up Baby also provides good examples of stunt work, special effects and, last but not least, rather impressive animal handling. This is especially so in the scene when Baby (played by tamed leopard Nissa) and George (played by Skippy, the dog made famous for playing Asta in The Thin Man series) are fighting each other.
Hawks, on the other hand, failed to keep the budget under control and that was one of the reasons why Bringing Up Baby turned out to be a flop, despite good reviews (although it managed to turn a profit during a re-release a few years later). While the production of the film was more expensive and longer than originally planned, it was, by everyone’s account, one of the most pleasant experiences for almost everyone on the set, with the cast and crew having a lot of fun and enjoying themselves. One of the reasons for the constant need to re-shoot various scenes was the habit of Cary Grant and Katharine Hepburn constantly bursting into laughter while being together. Unlike many instances when such a good atmosphere on the set failed to translate on screen, the chemistry between the two actors is undeniable. Nevertheless, despite the ease of their performance, it was still a result of good and hard work.
Grant, who would soon become one of the greatest stars of Hollywood, was still unsure whether he would establish himself as a romantic lead because of his relatively advanced age of 34. He took the job very seriously, modelling his performance and image on the works of famous silent-era comedian Harold Lloyd. Hepburn, who was cast to play a character with certain similarities to herself (both being free-spirited daughters of wealthy families), had realised that comedy wasn’t actually her forte. She nevertheless decided to do something about it and Walter Cartlett, a vaudeville veteran who played Constable Slocum in the film, volunteered to act as her coach. The result was one of truly spectacular performances that redefined Hepburn’s career.
Grant and Hepburn were helped by a number of experienced character actors, often playing supporting but at times equally eccentric characters. Hawks later complained that he had perhaps gone a little overboard with “screwball” characters and that Bringing Up Baby lacked “straight” or normal characters with whom the audience could identify and that this probably contributed to the film’s initial failure at the box office. Those complaints are perhaps most valid in the case of Aloysius Gogarty, Mr. Random’s gardener, played by veteran Irish actor Barry Fitzgerald, who appears to be burdened with too many ethnic stereotypes.
Bringing Up Baby was nevertheless recognised as a great film and provided a model for numerous screwball comedies and homages, the best known of them all being Peter Bogdanovich’s 1972 film What’s Up Doc? starring Ryan O’Neal and Barbra Streisand.
To some of today’s audience, Hawks’ film is important because of a small detail that made sense only decades later – a scene in which Grant’s character, after being caught wearing women’s clothes, explains that “he went gay”, which is sometimes considered the first use of the word in today’s meaning that associates it with homosexuality. This detail, however, somehow managed to go past the prudish MPAA censors at the Hays Office, just like the delightfully funny scenes when both Grant’s and Hepburn’s characters suffer wardrobe malfunctions at the night club (apparently inspired by Grant’s similar mishap in real life). The ability of Hawks to slip such “problematic” content into his film during the period of most severe censorship is just another example of the creativity and talent that is today associated with one of the most celebrated eras of cinema history.
RATING: 8/10 (+++)
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