Profile- Bringing Up Baby (Howard Hawks, 1938)

Context

When modern critics and scholars analyze Bringing Up Baby, it is impossible for them to consider it outside of its relation to other Hepburn-Grant films.  Since the film, Katharine Hepburn and Cary Grant went on to make the successful comedies Holiday (George Cukor 1938) and The Philadelphia Story (Cukor 1940) together.  Separately, both actors went on to many successful roles in comedies as well as in other genres, and are now remembered as being two of the greatest motion picture performers of the Twentieth Century.

Howard Hawks (1896-1977) was one of the most successful filmmakers of the 1930s.  Some film scholars have dubbed him an auteur. Hawks cited Chaplin as a source of inspiration when it came to his comedies.

At the time of Bringing Up Baby’s development, Katharine Hepburn (1907-2003) had gained some notice in dramatic pictures, but RKO wanted her to branch out into comedy.  When the film failed financially, the studio blamed her. Hepburn was quite athletic, and Hawks’ film allowed her to express her abilities. Her physicality set her apart from the other female leads of the time, who could impress only on a verbal level, to which she could add a physical level.

Like Clark Gable at the time of making It Happened One Night, Cary Grant (1904-1986) was not yet the megastar that he would become later in his career.  He had already appeared in the successful The Awful Truth (Leo McCarey 1937) with Irene Dunne, but after Bringing Up Baby he appeared in a string of successful comedies, to only later branch out into other genres in the 1950s and 60s.  Eventually, he became the ideal American man.

Reception

The film eventually did make a small profit, but not enough to satisfy the studio. While the reviews were mixed, the critical reaction was not as negative as many scholars would lead one to believe.  Norbert Lusk of the Los Angeles Times hated the film, stating that it was the wrong type of film for Hepburn.

Film Weekly found the film to be passable, but criticized it, “The opening is a little off-key and several comic sequences have only the elementary appeal of slapstick”.  Those were the only negative contemporary reviews that I was able to find.  Note how both use comic terms, particularly “outrageous”, “slapstick”, and “parody”.  Also notice how the reviewer for film weekly finds physical comedy, “slapstick” in particular, to be only “elementary”.  Unlike these two reviewers, reviewers from four major publications gave the film positive reviews.  Another reviewer for The Los Angeles Times incorrectly predicted, “in the end Bringing Up Baby will probably be a decisive hit”.  Mae Tinee of the Chicago Daily Tribune said, “It’s been a long time since we’ve had a real feature length slapstick comedy.  As a quite amusing specimen of this class, I welcome Bringing Up Baby”.  Variety praised the performances of Hepburn and Grant and called it “definite box office”.  We see critics praising the inclusion of slapstick as they did with Duck Soup (1933), and the performers as they did with It Happened One Night (1934).

After the success of later Hepburn-Grant projects like Holiday (1938) and The Philadelphia Story (1940), Bringing Up Baby found a renewed interest among film reviewers and audiences.  Most recent reviews praise the rapid pace of the film.  In 1997, Jeffrey M. Anderson of Combustible Celluloid said, “It’s a brilliant movie, and one of the greatest and most intense ever made”—using the term “intense” to describe the film’s use of the Principle of Comic Logic.  Diane Wild of DVD Verdict described the Screwball Comedy’s collaborative nature, calling it “Magic…a sublime convergence of greatness”.  Jon Danzinger of Digitally Obsessed added, “It really is one of the all-time great screen comedies, and in almost seventy years it’s lost none of its fun, charm, wit or spirit”, speaking of its longevity.  Joshua Rothkopf of Timeout New York Magazine agreed with Danzinger, saying, “A comedy that never should have worked is now all but immortal”.  

Legacy

In subsequent decades, Bringing Up Baby inspired dozens of television series and motion pictures, most notably Peter Bogdanovich’s What’s Up, Doc? (1972). Bogdanovich had several interviews with Hawks before and after making his film, and credited Bringing Up Baby for giving him the idea for What’s Up, Doc?.  Hawks himself called his own Man’s Favorite Sport (1964) a remake of Bringing Up Baby.

The rapid, zany style of Bringing Up Baby influenced later Screwball comedies, including Arsenic and Old Lace (Frank Capra 1944) and The Odd Couple (Gene Saks 1968).  In 2006, Premiere Magazine named it one of The 50 Greatest Comedies of All Time and Entertainment Weekly named it the 24th Greatest Film Of All Time.  The genre of comedy and the subgenre of the Screwball Comedy would not be the same without Bringing Up Baby.  Like It Happened One Night, it is a treat to witness two of the last century’s most acclaimed performers lose all inhibition and act goofy.  Notice, from It Happened One Night to this film, how reviewers look for chemistry between the romantic leads—revealing a critical convention in the analyses of romantic comedies that first appears in the critical language of the mid-1930s.