Bringing Up Baby (1938, Howard Hawks) is an exotic wildlife mental illness screwball comedy. It’s about a socialite and an archaeology professor who want a bone. It’s about hunting big game as metaphor for finding true love. And more than any other film, the spirit of Bringing Up Baby best epitomizes the spirit of the screwball comedy. If a man and woman who can make each other laugh is how love was depicted during this period, how do you top that? By depicting it as utter chaos, career-jeopardizing, nervous breakdown-inducing, serious jail time-incurring, life-threatening, non-stop adventure bonding, that’s how.
First of all make no mistake, this entire movie is about the sex impulse. We got DAVID HUXLEY with this cold fish fiancée who’s introduced clearly announcing that because of their shared career objectives they won’t have time for children, or a honeymoon, or any type of domestic distractions. And her name is MISS SWALLOW; don’t think about that name too much, it’ll only get you in trouble.
Okay it’s time here I go reaching for metaphorical implications trying too hard to read something into a film that’s probably not there, but. Huxley’s fiancée works with fossils because that’s how she is in bed. But SUSAN has a leopard in her bedroom as to indicate some kind of ferocious voracious sexual appetite. Baby’s tame though, you say? Domesticated? Jump to the end of the film. Who but Susan is able to single handedly capture the killer leopard? This is psychoanalytic creative freedom at its boldest.
Cary Grant and Katherine Hepburn with their star personae affected way of speaking are my favorite Hollywood comedic performers of this era, and together they are why Bringing Up Baby has gotta be my all-time favorite comedy. And Grant with those glasses only enhances the contrast between their caricatures.
The force of Susan and the way in which she crashes into David’s life is the stuff of nature encoding in us an overwhelming physical attraction to someone. At the golf course she overtakes his life. He can’t reason with her—just as you can’t reason with lust, nor love. And when he literally falls head over heels in that restaurant inexplicably running into her again, do you believe he wants nothing to do with her as he appears to act like? Well, he rips the back of her dress apart in this scene too though, which is pretty hot.
That moment when David’s reached his limit and sends Susan home the ultimate male romantic fantasy of her becomes fully apparent. She sobs out of desperation. She fell out of the sky and instantly in love with this boring academic. She’d do anything for him. She never wants to leave him. And when Hepburn is crying I’ve fallen in love with this role she’s created. Susan’s this rich, crazy, impossible, reckless, beautiful young woman who’s always so much fun and so unpredictable. This is the potential of what a movie can do. The grand finale with Susan next to the broncosaurus skeleton atop that ladder rocking defying the laws of physics is the most satisfying ending of any romantic comedy we'll ever see.
Okay it’s time here I go reaching for metaphorical implications trying too hard to read something into a film that’s probably not there, but. Huxley’s fiancée works with fossils because that’s how she is in bed. But SUSAN has a leopard in her bedroom as to indicate some kind of ferocious voracious sexual appetite. Baby’s tame though, you say? Domesticated? Jump to the end of the film. Who but Susan is able to single handedly capture the killer leopard? This is psychoanalytic creative freedom at its boldest.
Cary Grant and Katherine Hepburn with their star personae affected way of speaking are my favorite Hollywood comedic performers of this era, and together they are why Bringing Up Baby has gotta be my all-time favorite comedy. And Grant with those glasses only enhances the contrast between their caricatures.
The force of Susan and the way in which she crashes into David’s life is the stuff of nature encoding in us an overwhelming physical attraction to someone. At the golf course she overtakes his life. He can’t reason with her—just as you can’t reason with lust, nor love. And when he literally falls head over heels in that restaurant inexplicably running into her again, do you believe he wants nothing to do with her as he appears to act like? Well, he rips the back of her dress apart in this scene too though, which is pretty hot.
That moment when David’s reached his limit and sends Susan home the ultimate male romantic fantasy of her becomes fully apparent. She sobs out of desperation. She fell out of the sky and instantly in love with this boring academic. She’d do anything for him. She never wants to leave him. And when Hepburn is crying I’ve fallen in love with this role she’s created. Susan’s this rich, crazy, impossible, reckless, beautiful young woman who’s always so much fun and so unpredictable. This is the potential of what a movie can do. The grand finale with Susan next to the broncosaurus skeleton atop that ladder rocking defying the laws of physics is the most satisfying ending of any romantic comedy we'll ever see.
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