***In The Golden Age Of Screwball Comedy-Katherine Hepburn and Cary Grant’s Bringing Up Baby
DVD Review
From The Pen Of Frank Jackman
Bringing Up Baby, starring Katherine Hepburn, Cary Grant, directed by Howard Hawks, 1938
No question that the 1930s and early 1940s were a golden age of the screwball comedy, the genre that the film under review Howard Hawk’s Bringing Up Baby falls under. No question as well that those who scratched their ways through the Great Depression and slogged through World War II, the parent of that who came of age in the 1960s, the generation of ’68, needed every laugh break they could get. What is (or was) strange in watching this film is that the director was Howard Hawks, a director I associate with films like To Have And Have Not and the like. Usually from this period I think of the comedic direction of Preston Sturges or Frank Capra but here Hawks hold his own on what some have described as a classic of the genre. (And, truth to tell a little more research into Hawks’ film credits showed a couple of other screwball comedy classics to his credit so he was not in over his head here.)
Now the plotline on this is a probably a little to sophomoric for today’s crowds and the pacing just a bit to frenzied (a bit too gag a minute for the sake of the gag) but it was serviceable. What pulls the whole thing together is Cary Grant’s comedic timing and Katherine Hepburn’s efforts in a genre I don’t associate with her. Her usually with the more sophisticated proper Bryn Mawr young woman with a head on her shoulders, severe looks, straight-up shoulders and no match for any man, including paramour Spencer Tracey. But here the pair are working overtime to keep this fast-paced comedy of errors moving.
Here’s the skinny. A young up and coming paleontologist (you know the guys and gals who go crazy over dinosaur bones), David, needs dough, and plenty of it, to finish up his latest project and get the fame he deserves (of course that money thing has haunted many guys with good ideas and no “angels” forever, even today). Beside that he is to wed his assistant and they are to collectively share his glory (the woman behind the man but apparently, to David’s chagrin, not under the satin sheets). Everything hinges on making a good impression on a certain lawyer for a rich widow who has the dough if on his word she likes the cut of the donee’s jibe. All David has to do is make nice on the golf course and sew the thing up (of course looking for dough except playing for a hundred dollars a hole on a golf course seems implausible on its face).
And that is where David’s his heartache (or is it heartburn) begins, no not the golf but one Susan, one well let’s call her “free-spirit” Susan Vance, the well brought up niece of that widow with the dough. Through a numbing number of pranks and pitfalls David and Susan “meet” and from there all hell breaks loose. Why? Well, remember this is a Hollywood screwball comedy which means that you must have a “boy meets girl” tagline. See old Susan is for some reason “smitten” with goofy David from the get-go and if there is one thing true about cinematic well-brought up, if free-spirited, young women- they will get their man.
And the bringing up baby part? Well to add to the mix Susan is baby-sitting for a leopard conveniently sent up off of expedition from her brother for, well, for that rich aunt. So Baby (or babies) dominated the action in the last half of the show as Susan puts David through about twelve forms of humiliation in her frantic desire (chaste desire since they don’t even kiss) to keep him from that damn woman he was supposed to marry. (That humiliation including taking his clothes while he is in the shower and he is forced to wear one of her nightgowns, and looking very dapper in said garment, hummm.) Of course even screwball comedies must come to an end and in the end Susan gets her paleontologist (you know those people who go crazy over dinosaur bones). And we get a look at what made our forebears laugh when they needed just that.
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