Barker’s Classic Movies #3: BRINGING UP BABY *****
Bringing Up Baby (1938)
running time: 1 hr., 42 m. / original studio: RKO
produced & directed by Howard Hawks; screenplay by Dudley Nichols & Hagar Wilde, from story by Wilde; director of photography, Russell Metty; edited by George Hively
with: Katharine Hepburn (Susan), Cary Grant (David), Charlie Ruggles (Maj. Applegate), May Robson (Aunt Elizabeth)
A zany socialite sets her cap for a handsome paleontologist, but her plans are skewed by the arrival of an unwanted gift: a full-grown leopard.
The very essence of screwball comedy, and in many ways its zenith, Bringing Up Baby is an hour and three-quarters of stylishly choreographed madness, starring two of the most compelling and dazzling movie stars in the history of the medium, Cary Grant and Katharine Hepburn. A virtual catalogue of pratfalls, mistaken identities, outlandish double-entendre, continuous plot reversals and escalating comic mayhem, Bringing Up Baby is almost exhausting the first time you watch it, so much is being fired at you at any given moment. But it is well worth multiple viewings. This is among the handful of movies that just grow funnier and funnier, and frankly astonishing, each time you see them.
Much of the film’s enduring appeal can be laid at the feet of Howard Hawks, its producer-director, a man with a peculiar genius for odd casting choices and breathless pacing. At this stage of his career, Hawks was acknowledged as one of the top directors in Hollywood, capable of finessing any genre with wit and imagination. He was a peerless entertainer, and a confirmed master of what was known as “the Invisible Style” — a judicious use of editing and camera movement to tell a story, especially light on close-ups of actors just for the sake of them. The studios wanted and needed a product that would draw audiences into a movie’s world and make them forget their cares and woes outside the theatre, so they demanded movies that were photographed and cut simply and economically. But for Hawks, this visual simplicity was more than a mere style it was his religion, an integrated element of his moviemaking philosophy, which he turned into canonical law in his mind: “Thou shalt not cut to a close-up; the audience will do it for you.”
In every other way, Hawks was a completely unorthodox moviemaker and Bringing Up Baby marked the pinnacle of his disregard for Hollywood convention. He had only taken on the film as a lark, to keep himself busy between more ambitious projects that were stalled in the RKO front office, choosing a magazine story from studio archives because it had made him laugh out loud. And yet to adapt it for the movies, he brought in a screenwriter who had never shown any special talent for being funny, the great Dudley Nichols, whose specialty up to now had been crafting many highly regarded dramas for director John Ford (one of Hawks’ closest friends).
Though Nichols had little experience writing punch lines, he certainly knew symbolism when he saw it. Working closely with Hawks and the story’s original writer, Hagar Wilde, Nichols turned Bringing Up Baby into the silliest of odysseys, a topsy-turvy fantasy of modern courtship and sex where everything is also something else: a dinosaur skeleton (read: extinct ideals) represents a man’s life’s work, it’s only missing the final “bone” that would complete the assembly, a bone he cherishes but which keeps getting lost; an uninhibited heiress, who should embody the financial stability and material resources the man desperately needs for his work, becomes chaos made flesh, the utter destruction of identity in the whirlwind of attraction; and a wandering leopard named Baby is the prickly and troublesome equivalent of a newborn, the inevitable, disruptive offspring of the couple’s forbidden desires.
Bringing Up Baby is a relentless, button-pushing slide through a fun house, gathering together all the things you couldn’t say about love in the 1930s (and sometimes still can’t) and transforming them into the stuff that giggles are made of. It’s also a headlong plunge into the darker ambiguities underlying true romance, constantly challenging audience preconceptions of what is funny, founded on the proposition that, far from making us complete, falling for someone may destroy everything else we know.
In particular, the film’s madcap heiress Susan is an unqualified terror — one unforgettable sight gag makes plain that she’s more dangerous than any wild leopard. She is wantonly destructive in her pursuit of the mild mannered David, while her ditziness, which might be charming on an actress less talented and eccentric than Katharine Hepburn, begins to assume a very calculating, garish fit. In fact, Nichols tailored the role specifically for Hepburn, inspired by watching her ill-fated romance with John Ford a couple of years before on the set of Mary of Scotland. Hepburn was fully aware of this and she hides nothing in her characterization, including Susan’s pathological neediness and the very real aggression behind everything she says and does. It’s an incredible star performance, patently uninterested in appearing chic or lovable, every moment placed in service of telling a most ridiculous story.
Hepburn is thoroughly matched by an ensemble of world-class vaudevillians and clowns, and almost loses the film to her leading man. Cary Grant had only just become a top box-office attraction, in Leo McCarey’s comedy of post-nuptial errors The Awful Truth (1937), and he was clearly ready to cut loose after years of toil in films that made little use of his talent. With Baby he proved himself a sublime comedian, equally adept at both slapstick and rapid-fire one-liners, an indefatigable master of timing and inflection. Just as unconcerned as Hepburn with courting audience sympathy, he cajoles and seduces instead, the most dashing of nerds in a pair of Harold Lloyd glasses (see Notes), falling on both his face and ass with equal aplomb, turning exasperation and even anger into a special, manic grace.
Hawks directed one-and-all with the decree to make it fast no matter what was happening, infusing every scene with his own brand of overlapping dialogue, an almost musical style in which everyone seems to be talking at once, even though the important lines still get heard. It feels theatrical at first, and it is, but it is also refreshing and exhilarating, Hawks drawing attention to the way people actually communicate in the real world, which is too often not at all. Mistake piles upon mistake, calamity upon calamity, and all could be averted if only the characters would just stop and listen to each other for a second. But no one ever listens to anyone else in this film, which makes it more realistic than most dramas if you ask me, certainly more so than the average contemporary romantic comedy, a cacophonous, rolling wreckage of a movie bounding happily toward its final, astounding, knee-slapping crash.
* * *
“Now it isn’t that I don’t like you, Susan, because after all, in moments of quiet, I’m strangely drawn toward you but, well, there haven’t been any quiet moments.” — Cary Grant as David
A financial disappointment in its day, Bringing Up Baby was the picture that inspired a spokesman for the national theatre owners, in a famous public statement, to label Hepburn “box-office poison.” The film was actually a modest success, but it had proven very expensive to make thanks to the problems inherent in shooting with a trained jaguar (standing in for a leopard), and its respectable returns were not enough to put it in the black. RKO was so unhappy with the film’s performance they forced Hepburn to buy out her remaining contract with them, and they replaced Hawks with George Stevens on what was to be his next film, Gunga Din (1939). They would have blamed Grant as well, but he was a free agent with multiple deals at several studios. There was little that could be done to him.
The moral of the story is familiar, and never learned: box-office tallies do not equal reasoned judgment in a corporate boardroom. Audiences that were able to see the film roared from start to finish, and it would have only required a little extra marketing push from the studio to make it a certified hit. Meanwhile, Hawks, Hepburn and Grant each moved on, all three breaking through as superstars within a couple more years, while Bringing Up Baby triumphed in re-releases and on TV, discovered by critics of the fifties and sixties and finally recognized for what it was, one of the most insightful, delirious, and satisfying comedies of the movies’ first century.
Expect hilarious performances by a veteran supporting cast: Charlie Ruggles as a scatterbrained big game hunter, May Robson as Hepburn’s blustering aunt; and Walter Catlett as the hopelessly befuddled constable.
Jaw-dropping highlights include: a horrifying “meet cute” on a golf course; the ever-expanding torn-dress gag, which was suggested and choreographed by Grant and gave censors heartburn; searching for the valuable bone with George, a dog; and the riotous finale in a small town jailhouse.
NOTES:
Selected for preservation by the National Film Registry in 1990.
HAROLD WHO?: Harold Lloyd (1893-1971) was a much-loved comedian of the silent era, sometimes called “the Third Genius,” after Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton. His most popular character was a bespectacled geek known simply as “The Boy,” who always found himself embroiled in death-defying situations, as when he hangs hundreds of feet in the air above L.A. traffic in the famous shot from Safety Last (1923). Lloyd did his own stunts and, like Keaton, was injured many times for the sake of a laugh.
Hawks claimed that Grant was uncertain he could do justice to Bringing Up Baby until it was suggested that he play David as Harold Lloyd, after which he needed no further direction.
ARCHIE: If you think you know Cary Grant (1904-1986), you don’t, which was a pivotal ingredient of his mystery and appeal. Born Archibald Leach in working class Bristol, England, his much-imitated accent was a refined, never-quite-eradicated Cockney. Archie began his career as a vaudeville acrobat when he was still a teenager, then spent a decade on Broadway as a secondary romantic lead. He changed his name at the behest of a studio executive when he moved to Hollywood.
Perhaps the most underrated film actor of his generation, nearly everything about his performances was invented including his star persona, culled from personal observation and imagination, giving only the slightest hint of his personal demons as a role demanded. No other actor understood his own presence so well, or had such an intimacy with the camera, which seemed to register everything he was thinking, and hiding.
Often the object of ugly rumor in the world’s bitchiest business, Grant never spoke ill of others in public. He retired in 1966 when he was still a major star, yet he remained world-famous, continually watched and enviably good looking, until the time of his death twenty-years later at age 82.
Indispensable Cary Grant: the aforementioned The Awful Truth; two other films with Hawks, Only Angels Have Wings (1939) and His Girl Friday (1940); The Philadelphia Story (1940, re-teamed with Hepburn); ultimate tearjerker Penny Serenade (1942); and three brilliant collaborations with Alfred Hitchcock, Notorious (1946), To Catch a Thief (1955) and North By Northwest (1959).
KATIE: scion of a prominent East Coast family, Katharine Hepburn (1907-2004) needs no introduction, one of the most honored actors in the history of film. She was also no airhead, in spite of her convincing portrayal of Susan: a silent investor in Baby, she collected residuals on the film for the rest of her life, even though RKO cheated her out of money they owed her as the top-billed star.
Trained in classical theatre, she was a novice at comedy when she started this film, overplaying her punch lines and driving Hawks to distraction until he called in vaudevillian Walter Catlett to coach her. Catlett demonstrated that comedy, in order to be funny, must be played straight; characters in a comedy should never know they are funny. She was so grateful to her new acting teacher, she insisted that Hawks give him a role in the movie.
Other must-see Hepburn films: Alice Adams (1935), Stage Door (1937); The Philadelphia Story; any of her nine movies with Spencer Tracy, but especially Woman of the Year (1942) and Adam’s Rib (1949); The African Queen (1951), Suddenly Last Summer (1959), The Lion in Winter (1968).
THE DVD: released for the first time on DVD at the beginning of March in a two-disc edition from Turner Entertainment and Warner Home Video.
On disc one, Baby has never looked or sounded better. The Turner organization, which owns the rights to a staggering number of good movies from the Classic Era, has come a long way from the days when Ted just wanted to colorize everything he saw. The boss is a genuine movie lover, whatever else can be said of him, and they now do an exemplary job of preservation and restoration. There’s also a fine commentary by critic/filmmaker/raconteur Peter Bogdanovich, who offers many insights into the fundamentals of comedy and the origins of specific scenes in the film.
Disc two has a bizarre Merrie Melodies cartoon from the same year as the film, directed by Friz Freleng, and a comedy short of the kind that was common in the thirties, although why these are placed so far from the movie itself isn’t clear. The real attraction here is an excellent 90-minute documentary on Cary Grant’s career, originally made for Turner Classic Movies. Interviews with Grant’s third wife, actress Betsy Drake, are especially salty and funny.
A bit pricey at the moment, which is the whole point of two-disc editions. It’s 30% off at DVD Planet - http://www.dvdplanet.com/main.asp - the same price you’ll get at Amazon while it’s new. Part of a trio of Turner/Warner releases this month starring Hepburn, rounded out by Stage Door and a two-disc set of The Philadelphia Story, an equally wonderful film.
Eric Barker is an independent filmmaker and writer living in Denver.
Barker’s Classic Movie #2 was Invasion of the Body Snatchers
