Cinema Sunday: Bringing Up Baby

Hi there! Welcome back to another installment of Cinema Sunday wherein I post about movies I’ve seen at some point in my life, from childhood to college years to alleged adult person to the old, bitter cantankerous person I am now.

Last week, I opted to show my bonafides as a cinephile of some actual taste by writing about Citizen Kane.

Today, I’ve decided the focus should move to  comedy and look back at what I regard as one of the funniest movies I have ever seen.  Today’s film is Bringing Up Baby,  a 1938  comedy film directed by Howard Hawks and starring Katharine Hepburn and Cary Grant.  

I have to be blunt: I have no recollection of the first time I saw this movie. I will watch it whenever the opportunity presents itself in TCM’s rotation of classic movies. But the why and wherefore of how I came to be first introduced to this movie completely eludes any recollection, I might hazard a guess that I saw this in college, perhaps in association with the film history course where I first saw Citizen Kane.  But that would be only a guess not supported by an specific anecdotal evidence.

Bringing Up Baby is a classic tale of two disparate persons being forced together by circumstance and falling in love.  David Huxley (Cary Grant) is a paleontologist, mild-mannered, methodical; he’s a man who needs a plan and to follow that plan. David’s plans include looking for a specific bone, an “intercostal clavicle” to complete assembly of a brontosaurus skeleton; getting married to his fiancé, Alice, a dour woman with no sense of humor or adventure; and meeting with Harriet Random, a wealthy woman considering a million dollar donation to the David’s museum. So David has a plan but it’s a plan that causing him a lot of stress.   

What he doesn’t need is more stress.

Enter Susan Vance (Katherine Hepburn), Harriet Random’s free spirited niece.  Susan is  a woman given to following her impulses wherever they may lead.  If Susan is impulsive towards life, it seems life can be impulsive towards her as well. To wit, Susan's brother Mark in Brazil has sent her a tame leopard named Baby. As one might do for one’s sister, I suppose. I never had a sister so it may be completely expected and appropriate to gift a leopard to your sister. 

Baby’s tameness is helped by hearing the song "I Can't Give You Anything But Love". Well, of course it does.

After chance encounters with David on a golf course and at restaurant, Susan has decided that David is a zoologist; she also decided she’s in love with him.

So Susan manipulates David into accompanying her in taking Baby to her farm in Connecticut.

Things get complicated.

David receives his long awaited intercostal clavicle only for it to be stolen by Susan’s dog, George.  Because he is a dog just living his best life, George has buried the bone somewhere on Harriet Random’s estate. 

Over the course of events, David and his clothes get to be quite a mess. While David’s taking  a shower, Susan “helpfully” takes the clothes to be cleaned.  She really determined to keep David around as long as possible.

Meanwhile, David is left with nothing to wear but a negligee which is what he happens to be wearing when he first meets Harriet Random. Remember, this is the woman who’s thinking about donation a million dollars to David Huxley’s museum. So this is awkward. When questioned by Mrs. Random why he’s wearing a negligee, David exclaims, “I don’t know! I just decided to go gay all of a sudden!”   

Meanwhile, George has run off. David needs to follow the dog to find out where he buried the dinosaur bone.  And Baby has run off as well so Susan needs to find her missing leopard. 

Added to the mix is a 2^nd leopard, a dangerous cat who has recently mauled her trainer at a circus. This leopard has escaped and is not going be calmed down by anyone singing "I Can't Give You Anything But Love". Or anything else from the 1938 hit parade.

So there’s your mix for confusion, disaster and hilarity. 

There’s a point where David and Susan wind up in jail where  Susan spins out a narrative for the sheriff that she and David are part of the "Leopard Gang", calling herself "Swingin' Door Susie" and David "Jerry the Nipper".   


Every time I see Bringing Up Baby, I cannot help but laugh out loud. The absurd pile on bizarre circumstance followed by another  bizarre circumstance followed by another and another is more than sufficient fodder for comedy. But what really sells this movie is it's two leads. Katherine Hepburn goes a mile a minute as she races from one of Susan's cooky ideas to another. Cary Grant has a pitch perfect grasp of David's confusion, trying to desperately to hold on to whatever slim remnant of sanity he can find when remnants of sanity are increasingly in short supply.  Hepburn and Grant have a chemistry that fairly crackles with life. 

When I have to think of a movie that is guaranteed to make me laugh every time I see it. Bringin Up Baby is the movie that first comes to mind. 

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In next week's Cinema Sunday, I'll look at collection of movies I've seen over the years with one defining characteristic: they've all the won the Oscar for Best Picture.