| Collector's Corner February 2009
Bringing Up Baby
- Starring: Katherine Hepburn, Cary Grant,
Charles Ruggles, Walter Catlett, Barry Fitzgerald
- Directed by: Howard Hawks
- Theatrical release: 1938
- DVD release: 2005
- Video: 1.37:1 (fullscreen)
- Sound: Dolby Digital 2.0 mono
- Released by: Turner Home Entertainment
 Bringing Up Baby is
prima facie evidence that Hollywood has a short memory. When it was released in 1938, the
film was considered so bad that the production studio, RKO Radio Pictures, fired its
director, Howard Hawks, and banished Katherine Hepburn to such a terrible movie (Mother
Carey’s Chickens -- surely you remember that classic) that she bought out
her contract and left the studio. Today, Bringing Up Baby is considered one of
American film’s great treasures, and has won a slew of awards. It’s in the
National Film Registry, and is #87 in the American Film Institute’s list of the 100
Greatest Films and #14 on the AFI’s list of the Best Comedies. Entertainment
Weekly ranked the film #24 on its list of the 100 Greatest Movies, and the National
Society of Film Critics listed it as #14 on its list of 100 Essential Films. The
Guinness Book of Film calls Bringing Up Baby the second best comedy ever. What
a difference a few years makes. But why did critics and audiences so hate the film in
1938, and why do we love it so much now?
Bringing Up Baby is a fast-paced screwball comedy in
which befuddled paleontologist Dr. David Huxley (Cary Grant) is searching for a lost bone
-- the bone meant literally as the paleontologist’s stock in trade and figuratively
to represent his apparently missing mojo. Huxley is all set to marry his bloodless
assistant when he runs into Susan Vance (Katherine Hepburn), an upper-class wacko so full
of sexual energy that it’s symbolized and embodied by her pet, a deadly leopard. The
ins and outs of the plot are complicated -- if your attention lags for even a moment,
you’ll be hopelessly lost. In between are cute animals, cross-dressing, and verbal
crossfire riddled with so much sexual innuendo that, even after several viewings,
you’ll still be hearing new reasons to laugh yourself silly.
Bringing Up Baby follows the classic recipe for a
screwball comedy: a mix of farce -- mistaken identities, crazy relationships resolving
into love affairs, an ornate plot line in which only the audience understands the
complicated misunderstandings between the characters -- and healthy doses of barely
concealed sexual subtext. The recurring joke of this script is a bone in a box, if you get
the drift. Most audiences today (Home Theater & Sound readers excluded, of
course) have lost the ability to appreciate anything requiring a little thought, and no
matter if the action is coy or crazy, there’s hardly a second in the 102 minutes of Bringing
Up Baby without a knowing wink or a tongue in a cheek.
 Why did it fail so badly? At
the time, the public’s perception of Katherine Hepburn was similar to its view of Tom
Cruise now. Cruise is still big box office, but he’s become so full of himself that
it’s hard to take him seriously. Hepburn was in the same position, and audiences were
no longer willing to cut her much slack. She could play the icy ingénue in a drawing-room
comedy waiting to be sexually thawed by a strong man -- which is what everyone thought she
was anyway -- but the moviegoers of 1938 weren’t ready for her to play a comic
juggernaut creating constant mayhem around her. To an audience used to seeing her play
women who were brainy and reserved, Hepburn now seemed more sarcastic than lame-brained.
Bringing Up Baby also suffered because, while it looks
like slapstick, its script is full of rich, meaningful dialogue -- as if a Three Stooges
vehicle had been written by S.J. Perelman. Plus, there’s so much going on in the
movie that it can be tiresome to many people. Most writers of film comedies would be happy
to serve up only a few of this script’s jokes, but Bringing Up Baby, written
by Dudley Nichols and Hagar Wilde, is a veritable banquet of gags. They fly by so fast you
can’t catch all of them -- or your breath.
Of the film’s box-office failure, Hawks later said
that it was he who made the mistakes -- principally, in casting only actors who were
insane. As he told director, actor, and film historian Peter Bogdanovich (who provided the
hilarious and helpful commentary track for this DVD edition), "I think it would have
done better at the box office if there had been a few sane folks in it -- everybody was
nuts." Then, as an aside, Hawks admitted, "Harold Lloyd told me, though, that he
thought it was the best-constructed comedy he had ever seen."
Hawks reserved a bit of the responsibility for the
film’s financial failure for Hepburn. "I tried to explain to her that the great
clowns -- Keaton, Chaplin, Lloyd -- simply weren’t out there making funny faces; they
were serious, sad, solemn, and the humor sprang from what happened to them. . . . Cary
understood this at once. Katie didn’t."
Here's how bad it was: In February 1938, New York Times
critic Frank S. Nugent wrote, "To the Music Hall yesterday came a farce which you can
barely hear above the precisely enunciated patter of Miss Katharine Hepburn and the
ominous tread of deliberative gags. In Bringing Up Baby Miss Hepburn has a role
which calls for her to be breathless, senseless, and terribly, terribly fatiguing. She
succeeds, and we can be callous enough to hint it is not entirely a matter of
performance." By the end of the critical ravaging, helped along by her frequently
imperious attitude toward the rest of the world, Hepburn was considered box-office poison.
This exile lasted only a little more than a year. In 1940
Hepburn was back with a huge hit in The
Philadelphia Story. Hawks resurfaced at Columbia Pictures, where he had two big
hits: Only Angles Have Wings (1939) and His
Girl Friday (1940). Cary Grant, who never fell out of the
public’s favor, starred in all three.
Howard Hawks belongs in the pantheon of great American
directors -- John Ford, arguably the greatest of all American directors, considered Hawks
his main competition. Yet the only Oscar Hawks ever won was an honorary award given at the
end of his career, and he was nominated only once, for Sergeant York (1941).
Director John Carpenter, an astute student of film history, told interviewer Ted Elrick,
"I consider Howard Hawks to be the greatest American director. He’s the only
director I know to have made a great movie in every genre. . . . Hawks’s sense of
comic timing is unsurpassed. . . . In my opinion, the man literally invented American
cinema. He showed us ourselves, the way we are, the way we should be."
Carpenter’s assertion is bold, but he’s right
about the breadth of Hawks' genius -- of the directors of Hollywood’s Golden Era, no
one else showed such a wide range. Various of his films stand at or near the pinnacles of
comedy (His Girl Friday), the western (Rio Bravo, 1959), mystery (The Big
Sleep, 1946), and war (Sergeant York). Hawks even directed, without
credit, one of the great science-fiction flicks, The Thing from Another World (aka The
Thing, 1951, and remade by John Carpenter 31 years later). And there’s a
big contingent of film critics and scholars -- the AFI, for one -- that thinks Bringing
Up Baby is the best thing he ever did.
Turner Home Entertainment has wisely invested some money in
restoring Bringing Up Baby to its original gorgeousness, with clean, well-shaded
blacks and whites, and few indications of the film’s age. The commentary track by
Peter Bogdanovich, who knew all the principals and discussed the film with Hawks at
length, yields some hilarious stories. A second DVD includes Richard Schickel’s
wonderful interview with Hawks from his old TV show, The Men Who Made the Movies,
as well as a competent 30-minute bio of Cary Grant. The movie and most of the
extras show up on TCM regularly, but anyone with a library of film classics should
definitely own a copy of this brilliant set.
. . . Wes Marshall
wesm@hometheatersound.com |
