Bringing Up Baby (1938)

Film: Bringing Up Baby

Director: Howard Hawks

Country: USA

Released: February 1938

Runtime: 102 minutes

Genre: Romantic Comedy

Studio: RKO

Influenced: Preston Sturges, Susan Seidelman, Peter Bogdanovich, John Hughes, Adam McKay

In the great pre-WWII era of Hollywood Romance and screwball comedy films, Bringing Up Baby by Howard Hawks stands out along side Lubitsch's Trouble in Paradise as one of the great examples of this new wave of "battle of the sexes" movies. By 1938, Hawks was well-established in the studio system with a broad and high-quality body of work, including Scarface (1932) and Today We Live (1933), and this diversity in his work would remain as a feature throughout his long career. 

Bringing Up Baby was based on a short story by Hager Wilde, and its plot entails a continual stream of lunatic mayhem which Hawks marshals with great mastery. Katharine Hepburn is charming and bewitching as the wealthy heiress Susan, especially to all the men she meets, casting a magic spell over them and the audience. She has a pet dog (George) and a pet leopard (Baby) and both animals are essential to driving the plot forward and keeping the two lovers apart until the end of the film.

Grant plays the logically-minded paleontologist David who slowly falls for the scatterbrained charms of Susan – echoes of the Ross and Rachel relationship in Friends immediately come to mind – thanks to a variety of mishaps including the dog stealing the dinosaur bone that David need to complete the skeleton. There's something magical about their scenes together in the woods, with the lighting reminiscent of A Midsummer Night's Dream, and Hawks deserves credit for keeping the film so well-balanced between romance and comedy – and how did he film the scene involving the leopard fighting the dog?

Hawks was considered in some critical quarters as a Hollywood workhorse until an article by French director Jacques Rivette appeared in Cahiers du Cinéma in 1953 entitled, The Genius of Howard Hawks. This helped to define some of the unique qualities of Hawks' cinematic style, such as the "marvellous blend of action and morality". The whole concept of the "Hawksian woman" – fun, tough-talking and forthright, often besting her male counterpart – has evolved since then in film theory.

In Bringing Up Baby, what's so innovative is the mix of fast physical comedy (notably the Chaplinesque elements of Cary Grant's character in his crumpled top hat) and even faster verbal comedy, with Hawks encouraging his stars to move away from a slow, theatrical style of acting to a quickfire method of delivering lines. On top of that, there's the wonderful reversal of power between the sexes, with Hepburn in the dominant role, continually interrupting Grant and stripping away at his "dignity" and pomposity until they finally see eye to eye. So much of the DNA of romantic comedies is in this film.