Bringing Up Baby - Classic Screwball Comedy

I just finished watching "Bringing Up Baby" starring Katherine Hepburn and Cary Grant, directed by Howard Hawks.

I expected to enjoy this screwball comedy from 1938 because I've enjoyed them before (It Happened One Night, The Awful Truth, Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, His Girl Friday, My Favorite Wife, and The Philadelphia Story).

There were humorous moments throughout and the chemistry between Katherine Hepburn and Cary Grant is fun. I think I'll enjoy the movie more in retrospect because this screwball comedy went just a bit over the top for me.

Unfortunately, I found myself irritated by the excessive screwball antics in this movie. Everything that happened could have been easily solved if people had any consideration for other people, or communicated clearly, or not been so concerned with appearances and being overly polite. Its hard to tell whether the screenwriter's drove the plot based on those attitudes of the day and the characters they've created, or if, subversively, the plot is driven by the idea that women manipulate men (Susan Vance trying to get David Huxley to marry her). Either way, I'm a bit offended by it. (And I'm not even going to think too much about the animals. Did they have animal welfare back then?)

After the movie I listened to a few minutes of Peter Bogdanovich's commentary on the movie. In the commentary, Bogdanovich references an interview he did with Howard Hawks at least partly about this movie (he also mimics Howard Hawks voice).
I learned an important thing in that commentary - Howard Hawks said there was one fault of the screenplay and its that there were no 'normal' characters. Every single person was a little wacky because they ALL jumped to conclusions and wouldn't listen to anybody and kept things secret. He felt that if he'd had at least one character who was normal - even if it was a secondary character such as the Constable or the Gardener - it wouldn't have been as over the top.
The movie didn't do all that well at the box office in its time, and that might explain it.
It does for me. Now I feel I can appreciate the movie more because I understand the problem. Phew. I love Cary Grant and Katherine Hepburn and I'd hate to not like this movie.

Here are some excerpts from Eric Barker's review on Shotgun Reviews:

"...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."

"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."

"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."