Bringing Up Baby is a 1938 screwball comedy film directed by Howard Hawks and starring Katharine Hepburn and Cary Grant. The movie tells the story of a scientist winding up in various predicaments involving a woman with a unique sense of logic and a leopard named Baby. The supporting cast includes Charles Ruggles, Barry Fitzgerald, Walter Catlett, and May Robson.
Adapted by Dudley Nichols and Hagar Wilde from a story by Hagar Wilde, Bringing Up Baby was an infamous box office catastrophe, causing Hawks to be fired from his next RKO film (Gunga Din, also starring Cary Grant) and forcing Hepburn to buy out her contract. As time went on, however, the movie gained more and more attention and is now revered as a sophisticated classic decades ahead of its time, and it continues to generate revenue for Hepburn's estate.
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, Alice Swallow (Virginia Walker) with a severe personality and must make a favorable impression upon a Mrs. Random (May Robson), 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 on a golf course. 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[1] named "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.
While David is there, Susan's dog George (Asta) steals and buries the last dinosaur bone that David needs to complete his Brontosaurus skeleton at the museum. Susan's aunt, Mrs. Elizabeth 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, 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 have been mistakenly locked up by a befuddled town constable, Constable Slocum (Walter Catlett) for breaking into the house of Dr. Fritz Lehman (Fritz Feld).[2] Susan tells the constable that they are all gangsters in "The Leopard Gang"; she refers to herself as "Swingin' Door Susie" and David as "Jerry the Nipper" (a name Cary Grant's character was called by Irene Dunn in the movie The Awful Truth, also starring Asta). David then tells the constable that she is making up everything "from motion pictures she's seen."
Eventually, Alexander Peabody (George Irving) shows up to verify everyone's identity, and after Baby and George stroll into the station, Susan, who has sneaked out of a window, unwittingly captures the circus leopard, although David saves her (by using a chair to shoo the leopard into a jail cell and then locking it inside). A few weeks later, Susan finds David, who has been jilted by Alice, working on his brontosaurus reconstruction at the museum. After presenting him with his bone, which George finally had returned, Susan informs David that she is donating a million dollars that Elizabeth has given to her to the museum. Then while perched on a tall ladder that scales the dinosaur, she extracts a confession of love from David. Although the excited Susan causes the one-of-a-kind reconstruction to collapse in a heap, David laughs at his misfortune and embraces his bride-to-be.[3]
Cast
- Katharine Hepburn as Susan Vance, a ditzy socialite
- Cary Grant as Dr. David Huxley (alias Mr. Bone), a mild-mannered paleontologist
- Charles Ruggles as Maj. Horace Applegate, big game hunter
- Walter Catlett as Constable Slocum, who arrests most of the cast
- Barry Fitzgerald as Aloysius Gogarty, a heavily stereotyped Irish-American gardener
- May Robson as Aunt Elizabeth Random, Susan's snobbish aunt
- Fritz Feld as Dr. Fritz Lehman
- Leona Roberts as Mrs. Hannah Gogarty, wife of Aloysius
- George Irving as Dr. Alexander Peabody, Mrs Random's lawyer
- Tala Birell as Mrs. Lehman
- Virginia Walker as Alice Swallow, David's shrewish fiancée
- John Kelly as Elmer
- Asta as George, a dog
- Nissa as both of the leopards
- Ward Bond as Motorcycle cop at jail (uncredited)
- Jack Carson as Circus Roustabout (uncredited)
- Karl 'Karchy' Kosiczky as Midget (uncredited)
Use of word "gay"
Arguably, this was the first work of fiction, aside from pornography, to use the word "gay" in a homosexual context.[4][5] 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."
Cory continued that it was such an insiders' term that "an advertisement for a roommate can actually ask for a gay youth, but could not possibly call for a homosexual."[6][7] According to Vito Russo, the script actually had David (Grant) saying to Aunt Elizabeth Random (Robson), in an attempt to explain why he is wearing Susan's marabou-trimmed negligee, "I... I suppose you think its odd, my wearing this. I realize it looks odd... I don't usually... I mean, I don't own one of these." However Grant ad-libbed his own line, "Because I just went gay, all of a sudden." Russo has pointed out that this was an indication that people in Hollywood, at least in Grant's circles, were already familiar with the slang connotations of the word. However, neither Grant himself nor anyone involved in the film ever confirmed this. The term "gay" did not become widely familiar to the general public until the Stonewall riots in 1969.[8]
Legacy; awards and honors
In 1990, Bringing Up Baby was selected for preservation in the National Film Registry by the Library of Congress as being "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant", the second year that the registry started preserving films. Entertainment Weekly 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. It is also consistently on the Internet Movie Database's list of top 250 films.
Premiere ranked Cary Grant's performance as Dr. David Huxley #68 on their list of The 100 Greatest Performances of All Time.[9] They also ranked the character of Susan Vance #21 on their list of The 100 Greatest Movie Characters of All Time.[10]
American Film Institute recognition
Trivia
The 1987 movie Who's That Girl? starring Madonna is loosely based on this film, as is the 1972 Barbra Streisand classic What's Up, Doc?, directed by Peter Bogdanovich. In fact, Bogdanovich, in the commentary track for Bringing Up Baby, discusses how the coat ripping scene in What's Up, Doc? was based directly on the scene in which Grant's coat (and then Hepburn's dress) is torn in Baby.
The nightclub scene where Hepburn's dress is torn and Grant walks behind her is recycled in Hawks' 1964 comedy film Man's Favorite Sport.
Notes
- ^ The story has a leopard being sent to Susan from Brazil, despite the fact that leopards are Old World animals, and Brazil is jaguar territory.
- ^ http://movies.nytimes.com/movie/7142/Bringing-Up-Baby/overview
- ^ TCM Overview
- ^ Censored Films and Television at University of Virginia online
- ^ John Boswell, Christianity, Social Tolerance, and Homosexuality, 1980, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, page 43
- ^ [1]
- ^ [2]
- ^ Vito Russo, The Celluloid Closet: Homosexuality in the Movies [revised edition] Harrow & Row, 1987. p. 47
- ^ [3]
- ^ [4]
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