Bringing Up Baby Movie

Bringing Up Baby
Rating:
Run Time: 103 min
MPAA Rating: NR
Released: 1938
Directors: Howard Hawks
Genre/Type: Comedy
Romantic Comedy
Screwball Comedy
Producers: Howard Hawks
Plot Synopsis by Don Kaye
Katharine Hepburn and Cary Grant star in this inspired comedy about a madcap heiress with a pet leopard who meets an absent-minded paleontologist and unwittingly makes a fiasco of both their lives. David Huxley (Grant) is the stuffy paleontologist who needs to finish an exhibit on dinosaurs and thus land a $1 million grant for his museum. At a golf outing with his potential benefactors, Huxley is spotted by Susan Vance (Hepburn) who decides that she must have the reserved scientist at all costs. She uses her pet leopard, Baby, to trick him into driving to her Connecticut home, where a dog wanders into Huxley's room and steals the vital last bone that he needs to complete his project. The real trouble begins when another leopard escapes from the local zoo and Baby is mistaken for it, leading Huxley and Susan into a series of harebrained and increasingly more insane schemes to save the cat from the authorities. Inevitably, the two end up in the local jail, where things get even more out of hand: Susan pretends to be the gun moll to David's diabolical, supposedly wanted criminal. Naturally, the mismatched pair falls in love through all the lunacy. Director Howard Hawks delivers a funny, fast-paced, and offbeat story, enlivened by animated performances from the two leads, in what has become a definitive screwball comedy.

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David Huxley is waiting to get a bone he needs for his museum collection. Through a series of strange circumstances... more | add synopsis
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Not any of them they all seem to have bits of the method that is wrong and for me I would have to do what came naturally at the time of doing it. what about you which one would you go for? I would also feel lucky that I was able to have ...
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Cast

Actors Character Born
Katharine Hepburn Susan Vance May 12, 1907 in Hartford, CT
Cary Grant David Huxley Jan 18, 1904 in Bristol, England, UK
Charlie Ruggles Maj. Horace Applegate Feb 8, 1892 in Los Angeles, CA
Barry Fitzgerald Mr. Gogarty Mar 10, 1888 in Dublin, Ireland
May Robson Aunt Elizabeth Apr 19, 1858 in Melbourne, Australia
Ward Bond Motorcycle Cop Apr 9, 1903 in Benkelman, NE
Walter Catlett Constable Slocum Feb 4, 1889 in San Francisco, CA
Fritz Feld Dr. Lehman Oct 15, 1900 in Berlin, Germany
Leona Roberts Hannah Gogarty
George Irving Alexander Peabody Nov 28, 1895 in New York City, NY
Tala Birell Mrs. Lehman Sep 10, 1908 in Vienna, Austria (or Bucharest Rumania)
Buck Mack Zoo Officials
Buster Slaven Caddy
Jeanne Martel Cigarette Girl
George Humbert Louis, Headwaiter
D'Arcy Corrigan Professor La Touche Jan 2, 1870 in County Cork, Ireland
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Back to the topReview

Review by Bruce Eder
Bringing Up Baby is the quintessential screwball comedy, and one of the crowning comic achievements in the careers of director Howard Hawks and stars Katharine Hepburn and Cary Grant. It may also be one of the defining examples of comedy feature film at its purest and most basic. At the time of its release, it seemed to close out the screwball genre: the portrayals in film inflated and punctured an array of movie (and social) stereotypes in as fine a style had ever been accomplished. The screwball comedy originated in the depths of the Great Depression as a reaction to the despair of everyday life, as well as to the publicized antics of wealthy fops and heiresses who seemed oblivious to the fact that people were literally starving to death. The idle rich were the genre's essential ingredient, from satirical pre-screwball efforts such as Zoltan Korda's Cash (an especially offbeat example since it was made in England) to pioneering Hollywood screwball comedies like Gregory La Cava's My Man Godfrey. As time passed, however, other targets became acceptable, including intellectual "eggheads" and eccentric members of officialdom. Bringing Up Baby skewers all of them and more -- including over-zealous psychiatrists and blustery, pretentious upper-class stuffed shirts -- hitting the bullseye with each one. Apart from its acting, pacing, and verbal acrobatics (an essential element of any Howard Hawks talking picture), Bringing Up Baby is a masterful achievement precisely because it distills its diverse ingredients down to the characters. The plot, such as it is, deals with mistakes and mistaken identities (right down to heiress Hepburn's pet leopard) but is really about nothing -- absolutely nothing, to paraphrase a standard articulated by Jerry Seinfeld in the 1990s. Even the one main element of the "story" -- the search for a missing dinosaur bone belonging to the museum where Cary Grant's character works -- is such an obvious, ridiculous comic device, a comedic equivalent to Hitchcock's "MacGuffin" concept. The screwball comedy was never quite the same, nor was any filmmaker or cast able to build a film on such slight material so successfully ever again. Indeed, most attempts that followed -- and there were ever fewer as the 1930s gave way to the 1940s -- seemed increasingly more pallid, awkward, and unimpressive.
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