Howard Hawks
Bringing Up Baby

The screwball comedy was one of the most popular genres in America during the 1930s, attracting directors like Frank Capra, Leo McCarey, Preston Sturges, and especially the eclectic Howard Hawks, who achieved unsurpassable results. These films, which combined farce, slapstick, and sophisticated comedy, typically featured pairs of eccentric or "crazy" characters, a man and a woman who start as adversaries but, through absurd and paradoxical situations, inevitably fall in love.

Chaos, dynamism, and (innocuous) madness were the main characteristics of a genre that brought a breath of healthy, anarchic extravagance to the rigid Hollywood system during the roaring thirties. This system was influenced but not yet fully subjected to the strict rules of the infamous Hays Code, prior to the harsher censorship and moralism of the forties and fifties.

Bringing up Baby, from 1938, a beautiful and crazy film much like its protagonist, is the quintessence of screwball comedy. It contains all the typical situations, characteristics, and stylistic elements, including a certain tendency towards mechanization of the plot. However, Hawks takes the chain of cause and effect to unattainable levels of absurdity (and comedy): it touches upon delirium, but it's a delirium organized with mathematical, infallible precision.

Summarizing its plot means doing an injustice to the devilish screenplay by Hagar Wilde and Dudley Nichols, centered, like any respectable "screwball comedy," on the clash of characters with opposing traits: in this case, the rigid rationality of paleontologist David Huxley, who is about to marry his assistant and is engaged in reconstructing a dinosaur skeleton, and the unleashed instinctiveness of heiress Susan, who after a chance meeting falls in love with him, disrupts his life, sabotages his marriage, and throws him into the most embarrassing situations. In the mix, there’s also a brontosaurus bone to find, a mischievous dog, and an innocent baby leopard (the "baby" from the title) to hide, which gets mistaken for a ferocious leopard escaped from the zoo.

In the end, after an unstoppable climax of gags and crazy situations (including a night in jail), of skirmishes and ambushes between the two characters, as often happens in Hawks' work, the male will succumb to the net that the predatory female has set for him: but not even the final kiss will be safe from the destructive fury of the cyclone Susan...

Curiously, what is rightly considered today as one of the most entertaining and successful comedies (for rhythm, gags, intelligence of direction, and screenplay) in cinema history was astonishingly ignored by the audience of its time, despite the presence of two top stars like Cary Grant and Katharine Hepburn. The losses amounted to $365,000, with Hawks having to abandon the RKO production company. Yet, if this film still holds up magnificently after 70 years, it is partly thanks to the performance of the formidable duo, who in Bringing up Baby literally exhaust their rich comedic repertoire.

While Grant, in an unprecedented nerdy and scatterbrained version, is priceless as ever, Hepburn has something unforgettable in her mix of beauty, naivety, non-conformism, and "feline" instinctiveness (it's not so strange after all that her animal is a leopard!), which makes her one of the most fascinating female characters (and ahead of her time) in classic American cinema.