“Bringing Up Baby” has been called the best of the screwball comedies and has an assured place as one of the top Hollywood comedies of all time. Yet like a number of the great classic films, it’s being made at all was almost accidental. Director Howard Hawks was hired by RKO Pictures to direct “Gunga Din”. However RKO was unable to get the actors they wanted, including Clark Gable, from MGM and this left Hawks with time on his hands. He wasn’t the type to spend time waiting by playing golf and instead decided to make a film of a hilarious story by Hagar Wilde that he had read in Colliers. She was paired with screenwriter Dudly Nichols, who had written scripts for John Ford.
Though the casting seems inspired now, it was really almost experimental. Hawks had mainly directed crime and action pictures but had enormous success with the screwball comedy “Twentieth Century” in 1934. Cary Grant was just coming into his own and developing the Grant character film lovers came to know. Up to this point he had been a necessary good looking boyfriend in early films and had a vague sense of menace in “Sylvia Scarlett” (his first film with Hepburn) and even “”Topper”. “The Awful Truth”, the comedy that made his name and introduced his new character had been filmed but not yet released. After several noted actors turned down the role, Hawks hired Grant on the recommendation of their mutual friend Howard Hughes.
Katharine Hepburn was reaching her early nadir as an actress, not in ability, but in finding an audience. Despite successes like “Alice Adams” and “Little Women” there were numerous films that failed at the box office. She was about to be included on the notorious “Box office poison” list of the Independent Theater Owners’ Association. She had never done a comedy. This was a role that Irene Dunne or Carole Lombard could have done effortlessly, but Hawks wanted Hepburn and even instructed the writers to write it with her in mind.
Borth Grant and Hepburn were unsure of their suitability. Grant, who to himself was still Archie Leach from Bristol, felt he wasn’t up to playing an intellectual type like Doctor of Paleontology David Huxley, and had to be coached and assured by Hawks and Hughes. Hawks gave him Harold Lloyd-type glasses over the studio’s objections, and these likely helped him get into a different persona.
Hepburn proved a bigger challenge, as they soon found out that she really didn’t know how to do comedy, but continually overacted in order to sound funny. It took the help and advice of several older comedians on the set, especially Walter Catlett, to teach her that acting naturally was more effective in comedy than exaggeration. She had his role as Constable Slocum expanded so he would always be on the set.
The secondary players were all excellent, as was often the case in classic Hollywood. May Robson is wonderful as Susan Vance’s (Hepburn) eccentric Aunt Elizabeth, who wanted a pet leopard in the first place. She would usually be the “normal” character who would be aghast at Susan’s escapades but here is as eccentric as her niece. Hawks thought the film’s failure was due to there being no normal characters with whom the audience could identify. Charlie Ruggles, who often played hicks, is equally good as Elizabeth’s friend, Major Applegate. Virginia Walker is effective as Gran’t fiance, in this context the woman who isn’t right for him, an assistant more interested in his work than in himself. You will also familiar John Ford regulars Barry Fitzgerald and Ward Bond in smaller roles.
It was a pleasant set full of people who were already friends with mutual friends like Hughes and Ford dropping by. In fact it got too convivial at times with production delays caused by endless chatter and laughter, especially by Hepburn, who was even called out over it by Hawks; he should talk - he called off production for a day to go to the races. The picture ran considerably over budget. But the result was an extraordinary film. Hawks’ direction kept the film from getting too frenetic as some screwball comedies do, by less back and forth editing and longer takes that allow scenes to develop smoothly. Not being adapted from a stage play, the script relied less on witty dialogue - though there is enough of that - than on the zany situations created by Susan.
That’s where Hepburn really came through. Thirties films, especially comedies, often existed in a world of wealth. Depression audiences wanted to pretend, if for just a couple hours, that they had the problems of the affluent. Though there might be a serious-minded pater familias (often played by Eugene Pallette) making the money, the rest were frequently a bunch of flighty eccentrics or partygoers given to drinking and clubbing all night. Susan Vance (Hepburn) was typically capricious, ethereal, scatterbrained and self-centered. Ordinarily she would be a very obnoxious and unsympathetic character, especially the way she keeps messing things up for Grant’s Dr. Huxley. But somehow she makes Susan likeable and her capriciousness merely a n result of her upbringing. There’s a vital person there, someone Dr. Huxley needs to allow himself to have a little fun (and hopefully, bring her a little more down to earth).
The film famously failed at the box office and got Hawks fired from RKO (“Gunga Din” did get made, but with George Stevens directing and Cary Grant in the lead role intended for Gable). But the failure is a bit overstated. Early reviews were mostly very positive. The film was a hit on the West Coast and most of the East Coast as well, and it was never expected to be big with Midwesterners. The notable exception was New York City where it was expected to be so big that it was booked into the 6,000 seat Radio City Music Hall where it was pulled after one week.
That may have been the result of a devastating New York Times review by noted critic Frank Nugent. He had a lot of influence and was a reliable critic overall, later becoming a screenwriter for many of John Ford’s films. He was noted for his perceptive understanding of how camerawork can be effective in quickly showing what only pages of writing can explain. In this case, I think he was suffering from critics’ fatigue. His main complaint was that the film was a bunch of cliches, already hackneyed, but that’s true of many films. Every genre has its tropes and situations, and screwball comedies have roots stretching far back in European stage comedy. Critics see so many films, far more than the average person, that the nuts and bolts become all too transparent. The film made its cost back and went into profit in its second run in 1940. Not such a flop.
So enjoy “Bringing Up Baby” for all it is. Will Dr. Huxley recover his intercostal clavicle?
You’ll have to see it and find out. That, of course, is not what’s important here. It’s the crazy situations, one unfolding after the other that Susan gets Huxley into on their dreamlike journey to deliver a leopard.
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