It is an inescapable fact that we don’t deserve Katharine Hepburn and Cary Grant.
Separately, together, it doesn’t matter. They were just too beautiful, too miraculous, too good. By the time I laid eyes on their second collaboration, Bringing Up Baby, in high school, I was already head over heels for Kate and Cary, but Howard Hawks’s daffy screwball comedy about the misadventures of a flighty heiress, a tightly wound paleontologist, and a purring leopard wasn’t something I could prepare for as it roared in the face of lucidity and reveled in the realm of lunacy.
The world of screwball comedy often tells us that “normal” is an illusion we create to feel safe and bring us comfort — which is why it can be so dangerous. If you’re hellbent on the construct of normalcy, what are you ultimately denying yourself? For Bringing Up Baby, the answer is a series of calamities that will take away your fiancée, your glasses, your million-dollar grant, and your dignity but will also give you a lifelong playmate whose sheer existence led to the best damn day you’ve ever had.
As I wrote for IU Cinema’s screwball series last year, the genre “emerged during the Great Depression and thrived until the early 1940s as American audiences hungered for escapism. A heady concoction of unparalleled sophistication, feverish situations, witty repartee, and punch-drunk love, screwball comedies look like chic chaos at first glance, but underneath their glimmering surface, they smartly interrogate and mock traditional ideas of gender, sex, social class, morality, and romance with all the exaggeration, eccentricity, and eroticism they can muster. Featuring plots that lean towards the nonsensical; zany characters; beautifully slapstick shenanigans and fast-paced verbal sparring; cock-eyed depictions of romance — from the meet-cute to the happily-ever-after to the divorce and back again — and fascinating roles for women that allowed them to dominate the screen, the screwball comedy’s mischievous soul and Production Code-defying antics make for a moviegoing experience unlike anything else.”
Released in 1938, audiences didn’t immediately embrace Bringing Up Baby. Despite good reviews, it wasn’t a box-office hit and lingered in people’s memories as an outrageous farce until decades later when it was recognized as the epitome of screwball and a highpoint of classic Hollywood filmmaking. The movie follows David Huxley (Grant), a repressed paleontologist whose fate one day becomes entwined with Susan Vance’s (Hepburn), a decidedly unrepressed socialite whose aunt is considering a large donation to David’s museum. All David wants to do is marry his fiancée, Alice, and complete his brontosaurus skeleton with the newly arrived intercostal clavicle bone, but when he is roped into helping Susan transport Baby, a leopard from Brazil sent by her brother, to her Connecticut farm, David’s life becomes bedlam.
Susan Vance doesn’t disregard convention so much as she never realizes it exists. “You look at everything upside-down,” David whines, but her reasoning, however skewed it may be, actually does make sense more often than not. With total trust and confidence in herself and those she loves, Susan is optimistic in her worldview and, unlike many screwball heroines, sincerely believes in humanity. She isn’t sarcastic, sassy, or cynical like the gals of Preston Sturges or Billy Wilder, embodying instead a breezy dynamism and guileless vulnerability that disarm with their boldness.
Growing up, the unstoppability of women in screwball comedy absorbed itself into my DNA, beginning with His Girl Friday. As a 13-year-old, I thought (and still think) Rosalind Russell’s Hildy Johnson was one of the most badass female characters ever captured on celluloid. Feminism in classic film, particularly Code films, can be tricky, though, because it often comes with caveats. A woman character can have premarital sex, but she’ll probably be punished for it with a baby she can’t keep or some other insurmountable heartbreak. She can be a top executive in a company, but she’ll probably have to give it up for the man she loves to soothe his fragile ego. She can lie, cheat, and steal to survive in a misogynistic world, but she probably won’t make it to the final reel.
Screwball comedy promises something more…magical. In this most intoxicating of genres, women can be wild, slapping, screaming, jumping, giggling, and scheming their way to happiness. By the end of Bringing Up Baby, Susan is left untamed, her ambition and weirdness intact — and also, it should be noted, her desirability. David may find her vivacity alarming or even tiresome at times, but he ultimately realizes he digs it. (I am so sorry.) Susan Vance and her cinematic sisters illustrate a womanhood that says, “Be annoying. Be maddening. Take up space. Question the systems that are in place — and then f*ck them up when they stifle you.” And boy, is it glorious.
That same ethos describes the actress who portrayed Susan, my woman of the century, Katharine Hepburn. Like Bette Davis, Myrna Loy, or Joan Crawford, Hepburn rarely transformed into her characters but rather nudged them into becoming a reflection of herself. After all, she was far more interesting than anyone she was asked to play. Insolent, prickly, resilient, hardy, radiant, and unmistakably Yankee, Hepburn was a thorough original who turned Hollywood upside down with her unapologetic attitude, unusual look, and idiosyncratic approach to being a celebrity, all of which punctured the idea of what a star, especially a female one, could be. It’s safe to say that the filmmaking industry hasn’t been the same since those formidable Hepburn cheekbones first appeared on the silver screen, and Bringing Up Baby is an ideal vehicle for the divine eccentricity that made her so electric.
While somersaults and double takes were Cary Grant’s bread and butter, they were a whole new beast for Hepburn, who was convinced during production that she was giving a terrible performance. You can understand why with her voice pitched an octave or two higher than normal, making it flutterier and more girlish, and her ramrod-straight body hurtling through the air as she wobbles, weaves, wiggles, and writhes. In theory, it is odd to think of Hepburn as a screwball heroine like Susan, a woman you have to imagine the actress would deem silly if they ever met in real life. Then again, Hepburn herself just might have been the screwiest dame of classic Hollywood, a woman who believed in pants, cold swims, freckles, open windows year-round, and plain old common sense. Watching something like Hepburn’s iconic interview with Dick Cavett, you can see how she might’ve identified with a whirling dervish like Susan as she takes charge of the proceedings, switching out coffee tables, moving chairs, and spontaneously deciding to tape the conversation a day early. Hepburn and Susan know what they want — why should they beat around the bush and act coy about it? I mean, can you imagine anything more boring?
When we meet Susan, one of the first things she says as she drives David to the brink of hysteria on a golf course is “What does it matter? It’s only a game anyway!” Not only does this line encapsulate her entire outlook, it’s the unofficial tagline for the film — and the core of why Susan and David clash. Make no mistake, though, David is not the straitlaced academic he seems to think he is. From the very start, he is on a different frequency, his nerves in knots as he sputters and stammers through conversations while his body lurches and vibrates. The man is a ticking time bomb, and Susan is the bomb squad member who decides that the best course of action isn’t to defuse him but to accelerate the clock. She recognizes the inner weirdo in David screaming to get out and she is more than happy to push, pull, and prod him until it is free.
Hepburn and Grant’s work here is so different than their other, more grounded collaborations that it almost gives you whiplash. A nerdy square with the face of the handsomest man who ever lived, the character of David requires the acrobatic elegance and sidesplitting exasperation that were often part of Grant’s comedic arsenal, but it also asks for broad choices like full-throatedly serenading a leopard, leaping in a fuzzy negligee, and repeatedly opening his mouth to speak only to be ignored. Grant would indulge in this specific kind of hammy-ness (I say that with love) just two more times in 1944’s Arsenic and Old Lace — which was a performance he hated because he felt he went too over-the-top — and 1966’s Father Goose — which he believed was the closest to who he really was. But those films are no match for the mania of Bringing Up Baby, whose quirkiness still runs amok 85 years after its release.
Propulsion is the name of the game here. Dialogue, characters, gags — all of it must be constantly moving. There is a fluidity to the film’s dance, with every character toeing the line between sanity and insanity. Identities are fabricated, tried on, and discarded like a cigarette match. The truth, something that we like to think will help and vindicate us, is rarely believed, its elasticity stretched to the breaking point. You saw a leopard roaming the streets? Impossible. Your aunt is Elizabeth Random? Couldn’t be, she just said her niece is home in bed. You accidentally picked up someone else’s purse that is identical to yours? Nah, you definitely swiped it on purpose.
It’s as if the film has stumbled through the looking glass, with Alice becoming a man in Harold Lloyd glasses and Wonderland the cozy Connecticut countryside of the 1930s. When Susan’s Aunt Elizabeth first discovers David in her home, she repeatedly asks him who he is until he replies, weakened, “I don’t know, I’m not quite myself today,” echoing Alice’s musing to the Caterpillar, “I knew who I was this morning, but I’ve changed a few times since then.” Like Lewis Carroll’s story, there is a fantasy element to Bringing Up Baby, not only because it features an impish sprite of a leading lady and a leopard who is soothed by the bouncing melody of “I Can’t Give You Anything But Love,” but also because it creates a world where absurdity wins out, where the life you’re expected to lead and the responsibilities tied into that — a career that safely tucks you away somewhere, a marriage that solves the crisis of singledom, a mortgage that anchors you to growing debt — are revealed as the scams we should suspect them to be. David clings to convention like the security blanket it is, but his time with Susan unravels that blanket until it is just a tangle of loose threads for Baby to play with. Spirited away from the comforts of his staid museum where he can consider ideas in silence and receive telegrams about the latest archeological find, David is thrust into the anarchic universe of Susan, where the noise is unrelenting, the thoughts are fast and furious, and instead of reading about a dig site, you make your very own in the front yard with a rascally terrier named George.
Right away, from David and Susan’s first collision, you can see their compatibility in their bodies; they aren’t rigid and composed like everyone around them, they’re loose-limbed and frenetic. At the end of the film, David’s fiancée Alice tries to insult him by calling him a butterfly, but it’s true. He and hummingbird Susan float through the air, alighting on chairs and beds and rocks only to spring up and move on to the next adventure. There is a symmetry to their movements, such as when they’re talking on the phone with each other and Susan trips over the cord. Believing her to be in danger, David starts to rush out of his apartment until he is also felled by his phone’s cord. This happens throughout the film as they both plummet down hills, plunge into a deceptively deep river, dig for the intercostal clavicle, and fight the aggressive leopard who has escaped a nearby circus and is confused for Baby.
Despite David and Susan never sharing a kiss, there is an unconventional eroticism to their interactions. In screwball, the couple that plays together stays together, and in an era where the Production Code restricted sex onscreen, the genre’s leading men and ladies channeled their lust into wordplay that fizzed like champagne, fights that challenged, frustrated, and impassioned them (as Bringing Up Baby tells us, “The love impulse in man frequently reveals itself in terms of conflict”), and a different type of physicality that makes them moan, gasp, and maybe even scream as they slip, trip, and fall.
In Bringing Up Baby, David and Susan are pulled into each other’s orbit, as wonderfully exemplified by the scene where they run into one another at a cocktail lounge. As they bicker over who is following whom, he accidentally tears her gown after she clumsily rips his tuxedo jacket. Of course, “ripping off each other’s clothes” is usually a phrase associated with sex, and it’s hard not to think of its appropriateness here when the scene ends with her undergarment-clad backside exposed, forcing David to cover it up by placing his arm around her waist and pressing himself against her body so they can walk out of the room in lockstep.
With Alice, sex isn’t a priority; much to David’s chagrin, she dismisses the prospect of a honeymoon or children. With Susan, though, sex — however it could be disguised to tiptoe past the Production Code — is at the forefront. As many others have written before me, David’s fixation on finding and keeping his bone is, uh, quite the euphemism for the character’s sexual desire. There is also the way he and Susan tumble over each other literally and figuratively, their bodies crashing into one another while their words overlap or even meld, such as whenever they sing to Baby.
Bringing Up Baby isn’t an overtly romantic film, but the delicious chemistry of Hepburn and Grant is enough to make anyone feel woozy as they tease the romance out of the script with an illegal amount of charm. You can see it when David groans that all he wants to do is get married and the camera cuts to a two-shot of Susan and her aunt, who ignores him and directs her questions to her niece. Susan, however, does react. She knows that David is talking about marrying Alice, but the softness and adoration radiating from her face as she gazes at him reiterates what we already know: Ms. Swallow won’t be the bride David has in mind. It’s a look that lasts only seconds, and yet it telegraphs the seriousness of Susan’s feelings exquisitely.
Although Susan is the one who becomes enamored first and lets everyone know it, there are glimpses of David’s defenses crumbling. The most obvious might be when he suggests Susan go home during their trek in the woods so he can find Baby alone, causing her to burst into sobs. With her head buried in his shoulder, he is trying to reassure her when she suddenly lifts her moonlit face to his and says with a pleading, trembling voice, “Oh, David.” Before their lips can touch, though, he catches himself and agrees to let Susan remain with him.
My favorite example, however, is their duet to coax Baby off of a neighbor’s roof. Hesitant at first, David slowly gives into the ridiculousness of the moment as he harmonizes with Susan, George the dog, and even Baby, flashing a smile and nodding his head in approval whenever he is pleased with a particular note they hit. This is what love should be: standing side by side with your partner, singing with your entire bodies to a tune that no one else can hear.
To me, the best cinema is the kind that makes you believe in the profundity of nonsense. I don’t need logic and reason, not when I can have the simplistic but stunning musicals of classic Hollywood, the earnest wearing of hearts on sleeves in romantic comedies, and the life-affirming foolishness of screwball comedies like Bringing Up Baby. I have never understood the idea that a film is lesser than because it doesn’t brood or send me into an existential spiral or wring every tear from my eyes. I can find meaning from films that do that, sure, but they don’t often pierce my heart. However, pure insanity like the spectacular aquamusicals of Esther Williams, the madcap follies of a Mitchell Leisen screwball, or the swooning rom-coms of Hugh Grant (who once asked co-star Emma Thompson if Love Actually was the “most psychotic” movie they’ve ever done, a flawless quip I honestly think about once a week)? That is what makes me curl my toes in delight and remember the goodness of life.
The world is terrible and everything is on fire, so why not surrender to silliness? Why not let your heart take over your head? Why not let joy be its own merit rather than a motive for denigration? In short, why not chase a leopard?
Although Bringing Up Baby sadly isn’t part of IU Cinema’s upcoming line-up, you can catch plenty of other classics on our big screen this summer with our series Critics’ Pics: Selections from AFI and Sight & Sound.
Michaela Owens is thrilled to be the editor of Establishing Shot, in addition to being IU Cinema’s Communications and Outreach Media Specialist. An IU graduate with a BA in Communication and Culture and an MA in Cinema and Media Studies, she never stops thinking about classic Hollywood, thanks to her mother’s introduction to it, and she likes to believe she is an expert on Katharine Hepburn and Esther Williams.