We can't give 'Baby' anything but love


By Dan Craft
Published March 3, 2005

The funniest movie ever made about pet leopards and dinosaur bones finally arrived on DVD this week.

Let's be more specific: It's the funniest movie ever made, period, with or without pet leopards and dinosaur bones.

If you know it, then you don't need us to either egg you on or ward you off.

If you don't know it ... baby, are you in for a surprise.

Whether it's a pleasant one or otherwise, we can't say for sure.

Let us explain.

When the movie, "Bringing Up Baby," opened in theaters 67 years ago, it landed with a splat, which is the sound that results after you lay an egg from on high.

It became one of RKO Radio Pictures' big red-ink items of 1938.

And the red ink that spilled across the ledger amid the Great Depression touched the film's two stars, Cary Grant and Katharine Hepburn, both at the peak of their youthful powers.

Why didn't audiences 67 years ago see what a masterpiece of comedy construction the movie was, is and always will be, long after the rest of American popular culture has turned to dust?

And why do some people still not "get" "Bringing Up Baby," even when it just seems to get better and better with the passage of time and the coarsening of our culture?

The movie was directed by one of Hollywood's top talents, Howard Hawks, who had pretty much founded the entire '30s screwball comedy cycle with "Twentieth Century" four years earlier (a film given its first-ever DVD release just several weeks ago, too, and equally recommended for many of the same reasons).

Some people chalk "Baby's" failure up to a general mass-audience distaste for the angular and strong-willed Hepburn, who had just come off a string of rather ponderous period dramas -- heavy-going fare like "Mary of Scotland" and "The Little Minister."

After "Bringing Up Baby," she was slapped with the warning label "box office poison" by America's movie exhibitors and, as a partial result, didn't make another film for two years.

Others cite the movie's failure to its sheer velocity, which left some audiences eating its dust, unable to keep up with its exhausting pace and dialogue, much of it dispensed at full pitch in the midst of absolute and utter chaos.

The absolute and uttter chaos goes something like this:

Grant plays David Huxley, a prim, bespectacled museum paleontologist about to be married to a stern, bespectacled fellow scientist.

Hepburn plays Susan Vance, an eccentric, madcap heiress who crosses paths with David on a golf course and promptly decides she will have him for her own, or else.

In the wake of this accidental meeting, David winds up threatening both his career and impending marriage by way of an escalating series of disasters, all tied in some manner to Susan.

They include her pet leopard Baby, an irritating dog named George (played by Asta from the "Thin Man" movies), mistaken identities, a stolen dinosaur bone, a second leopard, a collision with a truck full of chickens, a moment in drag, frequent performances of "I Can't Give You Anything But Love, Baby" (to placate the first leopard, if not the second) ... and worse.

Much worse.

Though Grant starred in two more of the era's funniest comedies (1937's "The Awful Truth," 1940's "His Girl Friday," the latter also directed by Hawks), he was never funnier than when he played flatly against type as he did in "Baby."

And Hepburn, going for broke, creates a bewildering vortex of comic energy, the viewing of which might be likened to peering into the maw of a nuclear reactor: leave the protective goggles off, and you can kiss your retinas goodbye.

OK, we exaggerate.

But the pace, the timing, the direction and the playing of this movie is, by our estimation, one of the seven or so wonders of cinema nature -- permissible only once in God's Creation, and never again (just check out Peter Bogdanovich's pale 1972 reworking of the movie as "What's Up, Doc?" with Barbra Streisand and Ryan O'Neal, lest you doubt it).

Still, "Bringing Up Baby" is not an easy sell to this day.

We recall the sobering episode several years ago in which we were invited to sit down with a class from a university that shall be nameless and discuss the movie, recently assigned to the students.

Instead of hearing hallelujahs over "Baby's" timeless joys, we were confronted with comments like, "the story wasn't believable" ... "it went on too long" ... "I didn't like the characters"... and plenty more where those came from.

Not everyone in the class rejected it. But neither was it warmly embraced and nearly hugged to death in the way that we felt was the only sane response.

Ah, well.

Maybe our definition of sanity is different from theirs and possibly yours.

One final note: In addition to being beautifully restored and given a lavish two-disc special edition, "Bringing Up Baby" has been packaged in a boxed set with five other comedy masterpieces by our caring friends at Warner Bros. Home Video:

"Dinner at Eight" (1933), with Jean Harlow and John Barrymore; "Libeled Lady" (1936), with Harlow, Spencer Tracy, Myrna Loy and William Powell; "Stage Door" (1937), with Hepburn and Ginger Rogers; "The Philadelphia Story" (1940), with Grant, Hepburn and James Stewart, also in a lavish two-disc special edition; and "To Be or Not to Be" (1942), with Jack Benny and Carole Lombard.

In terms of classic American comedy, it doesn't get any better, folks.

Contact Dan Craft via e-mail at dcraft@pantagraph.com