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MovieMail's Review
One of the things that strikes you about Bringing Up Baby is how remarkably fresh and effervescent it still is. Sixty-five years after it was made, it retains the power to surprise, to catch you off-guard. Of course, its archetypal ‘screwball’ origins ensconce it firmly in the late thirties/early forties’ penchant for the free-for-all, madcap comedy, but there are other factors that give Baby a more astute timelessness that has escaped many of its contemporaries.
First and foremost must be Katharine Hepburn’s performance as Susan, the unpredictable young society heiress who ropes Cary Grant into helping her look after a pet leopard – the eponymous Baby. Acting, of course, like any other facet of the movies, tends to date, but Hepburn’s breathless vitality and sexiness here still seems up to the minute. Her sassy confidence is the driving force of the film, and surely gives it its relevance today – that is, as a paean to the allure of carefree abandon over stuffy conventionalism.
As her ‘prey’, bumbling palaeontologist Grant has the Ross-from-Friends vibe down pat a full sixty years before David Schwimmer, and presents a masterclass study in comic exasperation and even-tempered male defeatism. His sparring with Hepburn brings a microcosmic sex battle into this zany sequence of events, and the connection between the two leads is so electric you wish they’d been teamed more often.
Moulding all this into a slick and frenetic package is Howard Hawks, who directs as if he was born to do comedy. For years Hawks was regarded as just another director for hire, turning his hand equally optimistically to comedies, thrillers, westerns and even science fiction. But, if he was just an optimist, Bringing Up Baby, along with His Girl Friday, Red River and Monkey Business certainly gives weight to David Thomson’s claim that Hawks was ‘the greatest optimist the cinema has produced.’
If only they made them like this today! Arguably the best Hollywood madcap caper ever, a riot of comic misadventures come fast and furious. Both Grant and Hepburn are brilliant, he is all bumbling perplexity and she is all cack-handed impulsiveness, and there is a fine supporting cast including an engaging leopard. Watch and be helpless with laughter.
