Bringing Up Baby
Short description
David Huxley is a paleontologist who has spent years assembling a brontosaurus skeleton and is about to marry his secretary. Days before the wedding, he meets Susan Vance, a wealthy and impulsive young woman who becomes determined to keep him close. Her efforts to hold his attention set off a chain of mishaps, made worse by Baby, a tame leopard in her care. David's bone, his wedding plans, his funding hopes and his dignity all suffer as he is drawn further into Susan's chaos.
Howard Hawks directed and produced the film, working from a screenplay by Dudley Nichols and Hagar Wilde. It was his third film as director and followed Twentieth Century (1934), with Only Angels Have Wings (1939) coming next. Katharine Hepburn and Cary Grant lead the cast as Susan and David, supported by Charles Ruggles, Walter Catlett, Barry Fitzgerald and May Robson among 23 credited performers. The production, from RKO Radio Pictures, had a budget of about one million dollars and runs 102 minutes.
The results have held up well over the decades. On IMDb it holds a critics' rating of 9 out of 10 from 69 reviews, while on TMDB audiences give it 7.5 out of 10 from 1,124 votes. That split is a little unusual, with reviewers rating it more highly than the general public, though both point to lasting regard for the comedy.
What's left behind the scenes
- The scene where Susan's dress is torn was inspired by an incident that once happened in Cary Grant's life. He told director Howard Hawks (1896-1977) about this case, and he decided to include such a scene in the film.
- Katharine Hepburn had never starred in comedies before, so Howard Hawks and several experienced vaudeville actors specifically hired for this purpose served as her mentors in this regard.
- Before the film's release, Cary Grant (1904-1986) worried that he would never become a screen star, as he was already 34 years old at the time of filming, while younger actors like Errol Flynn (1909-1959) and James Stewart (1908-1997) were considered stars.
- Split-screen techniques and other optical effects were repeatedly used during filming to minimize the number of times the leopard was near the actors. This was especially true for Cary Grant, who was frightened by it even more than Katharine Hepburn (she repeatedly petted the animal, and the trainer even said that if she wanted to, she would have made an excellent predator trainer herself).
- May Robson’s character asks David, played by Cary Grant, why he is wearing a woman’s dress, to which he replies: “Because I just went gay all of a sudden.” Many believe this to be the first use of the word “gay” in a meaning approximately corresponding to the modern one. The word began to be used in that sense among homosexuals in the 1920s or even earlier, although it only entered widespread use as a designation for homosexuality in the 1960s. This line was not in the original script; Cary Grant came up with it on the spot.
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