It’s difficult to judge a screwball comedy such as Bringing Up Baby (1938) because it is screwball. The term comes from a baseball pitch popularized by Carl Hubble in 1934 where the ball travels in an unpredictable path. So you cannot insist on plot coherence. What is paleontologist Dr. David Huxley (Cary Grant) doing taking a leopard to New Jersey on the day he is supposed to marry his icy research assistant? You cannot demand realistic characterization. Why does Susan Vance (Katharine Hepburn), a beautiful, ditzy socialite, suddenly pick David off a golf course to be her future husband? You cannot even hold the movie to the genre standards of a “screwball comedy,” because the term has no agreed-upon definition. It is generally applied to certain films made from 1934 to the early 1940s. Mistaken identities often add to the chaos, but not in Bringing Up Baby. Because of the Great Depression, class is often an issue, but not in Bringing Up Baby. Rather this film features the classic screwball romance—a mismatch in temperament and wealth between man and woman, with the woman planning the marriage from the get-go. The film also features farce, placing the characters in ridiculous situations. For example, as the two leads exit the party, she steps on his tux tails and rips his suit, and he tells her to leave him alone. When she turns to go back into the party, he is standing on the hem of her dress and rips the back panel out of it. She, however, is in no mood to listen to a word he says and walks back into the party unaware that her undergarments are exposed. When she finally figures it out, he’s there to help her make a Chaplinesque exit.
In 1938, New York Times film critic Frank Nugent slammed the movie because it had no original jokes. But, again, who says the jokes in a screwball comedy have to be fresh? The bottom line is the movie has to make you laugh or smile or, at least, be quietly amused, and a lot of that humour has to come from farcical situations. Bringing Up Baby worked for me! Why?
The plot of a scatterbrained woman getting an good-looking nerdy professor to marry her avoids a couple of obvious pitfalls. She could be too scheming to be likeable, but Susan is so chaotic that she doesn’t really have a master plan of how to get her man. Katharine Hepburn was wonderful. I never realized how good-looking she was—and the outfits she wore made her look more attractive. She had a girlish charm that made it difficult to dislike her. As for her victim, he could have become nasty about how she was screwing up his orderly life, but Dr. Huxley soldiers on, never getting vicious, always holding onto the hope that things will work out reasonably. Just as I never realized how attractive Hepburn was, I never knew what a solid actor Cary Grant was. I had assumed he was another handsome face. I didn’t know he’d run away from home to learn his vaudeville chops with a touring acrobatic company, or that at 18 he’d left the company in New York to pursue a gruelling life of stage plays and third-rate movies before he finally hitting his stride in films such as Bringing Up Baby.
The comedy is not just monodimensional farce. There’s slapstick—she drops an olive, he steps on it and falls on his top hat. There’s madcap chaos—three people talk at once and the dog, George, starts barking. There’s sly jokes—Dr. Huxley is introduced at dinner as a big game hunter, and he quietly spends the meal getting up to look for a dog. As another example, Dr. Huxley and Susan have to calm the ubiquitous pet leopard by signing, “I can’t give you anything but love, baby,” when the leopards’ name is, of course, Baby, and the two singers who don’t get along are falling love. There’s situational jokes—just when Dr. Huxley and Susan lose Baby, a traveling circus loses its dangerous leopard. And there’s the abstract conceptual joke—a dignified, systematic man of science is reduced to a humbled, confused man in love. I enjoyed the whole thing from start to finish.