Review of Bringing Up Baby (1938) by Bob V — 18 Mar 2011

Bringing Up Baby is a hilarious comedy about an heiress with a pet leopard who meets an absent-minded paleontologist. Cary Grant plays David Huxley, a paleontologist set to get married that afternoon who needs to finish his exhibit on dinosaurs and needs to land a $1 million grant for his museum. He goes out to meet his potential benefactors at a golf outing where he is spotted by Susan Vance (Katharine Hepburn) who decides to have him at all costs by using her pet leopard, Baby, to trick him into driving her to her Connecticut home, where a dog wanders into his room and steals the last bone that he needs to complete his dinosaur project. Things get more complicated when another leopard escapes from the local zoo and Baby is mistaken for it. This leads them to many idiotic and insane schemes to save the leopard from the authorities. After all of this and even going to a local jail, the two inevitably fall in love through all the craziness.

Bringing Up Baby is quite possibly the quintessential screwball comedy as it perfected the whole genre on its look at the idle rich that made defined the genre. It's a story of mistaken identities, love, a dog, a bone and a leopard. Howard Hawks' direction is at its comedic best delivering a hilarious and fast-paced story brightened by the performances by the two leads. The dialogue is delivered by the actors at an incredible rate. There probably isn't a film with so much dialogue consistently delivered in a short amount of time. Bringing Up Baby is an essential film as Hawks' direction was hardly ever better, and both Grant and Hepburn have hardly ever delivered such great comedic performances before or after. Bringing Up Baby is a true classic of the screwball comedy genre. 10/10.