Bringing Up Baby
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Bringing up Baby is a 1938 screwball comedy which tells the story of a scientist who winds up in various predicaments with a woman who has a unique sense of logic and a leopard named Baby. It stars Katharine Hepburn, Cary Grant, Charles Ruggles, Barry Fitzgerald, Walter Catlett, and May Robson.
The film was adapted by Dudley Nichols and Hagar Wilde from a story by Hagar Wilde. It was directed by Howard Hawks. It was originally considered a box office failure, which caused Hawks to be fired from his next RKO film, and forced Hepburn to have to buy out her contract. As time went by the film gained more and more attention and is now considered a classic, and continues to generate revenue for Hepburn's estate.
Bringing up Baby is consistently on the Internet Movie Database's list of top 250 films, was number ninety-seven on American Film Institute's 100 Years, Movies, number fourteen on its 100 Years, 100 Laughs, and number fifty-one on its 100 Years, 100 Passions, and has been selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry. Entertainment Weekly also voted the film number twenty-four on its list of the Greatest Films. In 2000, readers of Total Film magazine voted it the forty-seventh greatest comedy film of all time.
Plot
David Huxley (Cary Grant) is a mild-mannered paleontologist beleaguered by problems. For the past four years, he has been trying to assemble the skeleton of a Brontosaurus but is missing one bone (an "intercostal clavicle"). To add to the stress, he is about to get married to a dour woman with a severe personality and must make a favorable impression upon a Mrs. Random, a wealthy woman who is considering donating one million dollars to his museum. The day before his planned wedding, David meets Susan Vance (Katharine Hepburn) by chance. She is a free-spirited young lady and, unknown to him at first, happens to be Mrs. Random's niece.Susan's brother (Mark) has sent her a tame leopard from Brazil, "Baby," which she is supposed to give to her aunt. Susan believes David is a zoologist rather than a paleontologist and she practically stalks him in order to get David to go to her country home in Connecticut to help her take care of Baby. Complications arise as Susan decides that she has fallen in love with David and she endeavors to keep him at her house for as long as possible to prevent him from marrying his colleague. At this point, the plot becomes further entangled as Susan's dog, George, steals and buries the last dinosaur bone that David needs to complete his brontosaurus skeleton at the museum. Susan's aunt Elizabeth (Mrs. Random) arrives. She is unaware of who David really is because Susan has introduced him as a man named "Mr. Bone". Baby runs off, as do George and a decidedly untame leopard from a nearby circus that Susan and David had inadvertently let loose from its cage, thinking it was Baby. Now Susan and David must find Baby, George the dog, and the dinosaur bone, while ensuring that Mrs. Random donates her million dollars to the museum. To accomplish this, they must first get out of the county jail, where they've been mistakenly locked up by a befuddled town constable.
Cast
- Katharine Hepburn
- Cary Grant
- Charles Ruggles
- Walter Catlett
- Barry Fitzgerald
- May Robson
- Fritz Feld
- Leona Roberts
- George Irving
- Tala Birell
- Virginia Walker
- John Kelly
- Asta (George, the dog)
- Nissa (Baby, the leopard)
Trivia
Arguably, this was the first film to use gay in a homosexual context. Robert Chapman's The Dictionary of American Slang reports that the adjective "gay" was used by homosexuals, among themselves, in this sense since at least 1920. Donald Webster Cory writes in The Homosexual in America (1951):
- "Psychoanalysts have informed me that their homosexual patients were calling themselves gay in the nineteen-twenties, and certainly by the nineteen-thirties it was the most common word in use by homosexuals themselves."
Footnote
External links
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