Bringing Up Baby (1938)

Terry's Grade: B

First the basics, because I didn't really have any idea what I was getting into with this movie. Dr. David Huxley (Carey Grant) is a palaeontologist about to marry a cold, sexless woman who informs him in the opening scene that they will not have a honeymoon, since he needs to get to work completing his brontosaurus skeleton, adding " I see our marriage purely as a dedication to your work." The disparity in their sexual motivation is apparent when he nearly mounts her to give her a kiss, and she pushes him away. Fortunately, he runs into Susan Vance (Katherine Hepburn), a hurricane of a daughter of  wealthy parents, who derails his life for about 24 hours. "Baby" is the leopard that Vance's brother has sent home as a gift and motivates most of plot by getting lost and found, etc. The leopard gets loose, a dinosaur bone gets lost, and Huxley runs into danger of missing his own wedding. How does it end? You can figure it out.

This movie started out strong, but I found myself less and less interested as it went on. The plot is pretty transparent and predictable; most of the enjoyment I got out of it was from playing "I Spy" with the 1930s-isms and trying to read a lot of subtext. That said, I did enjoy the movie. Like all good comedy, the best jokes in Bringing Up Baby are the ones that aren't the most obvious. It's possible that I was Room-ing it, basically inserting jokes that weren't there. Whatever it was, Rachel and I definitely watched this movie differently; I thought it was entertaining, and she just couldn't wait for it to be over. Well, it was her turn to suffer after I had to sit through A Night at the Opera.

I'm sure that people who know more about this sort of thing could comment on the historical context of this movie; it came out in 1938, just before World War 2. When I played the game of imagining what this movie would look like if it were made today, I decided it would be a lot dirtier. There's already plenty of sexual references in the movie, from the hump/kiss I mentioned above to the famous bathrobe scene: Huxley has eventually ended up at Vance's house and takes a shower to clean up. Vance decides to hide his clothes, then herself take a shower. It's obvious that he'd be happy to barge in her, and she wouldn't mind it if he did, but the conventions of 1938 filmmaking does not allow that possibility. Instead, we end up with what might be the first use of the term "gay" meaning "homosexual" in a Hollywood movie. (Interestingly, that line is the third-oldest usage of "gay" listed in the OED, with the one earlier example coming from Gertrude Stein, in 1922, and another from the lyrics to a Noel Coward song from 1929.)

I really don't know what to say so I'll wrap this up. In the end this movie just had too much Baby. When Hepburn's character starts wooing Grant at the beginning of the movie, I thought it had the potential to be a smart romantic comedy, but it ends up just being a lot of conventional "screwball comedy," definitely not one of my favorite genres. The scene where Hepburn does a gangster routine in the jail is pretty funny. On the other hand, I didn't think the jailer was funny even though he was obviously supposed to be. The drunk Irish gardener is funny, if you want to trace the roots of Groundskeeper Willy (although I suspect the drunk Irish gardener is a stock character in plenty of other movies too). Otherwise it's offensive. I guess the kind-of-ditzy, so-in-love-I'll-do-anything Vance could be viewed as offensive too; the idea that women just lose their minds when they come across a Cary Grant is kind of insulting. I really do wish that Hepburn's character had been a bit stronger (not headstrong); the movie would have been better off.

Basically, I can't recommend this movie to anyone who isn't sure whether they'd like it or not. If you're into black-and-white screwball comedies, watch it. If you've got free time, watch the first 20 minutes, and then you can decide whether you want to finish it or not; you'll have a good idea of what's coming by then.