Something about seeing the svelte and dapper Cary Grant in dishabille and with fuzzy sleeves—apparently undiminished in all his glory by this exercise in the emasculating of his figure—creates a brand of giggly awe that might be peculiar to this glorious era of the classic screwball comedy, of which Bringing Up Baby is undoubtedly one. There is awe because Cary Grant stays in unflagging character even in this getup, and giggling because it is quite a getup. And it is not as though it diminishes his vigorous dapperness—on the contrary, he doesn’t look half-bad if viewed aesthetically (and maybe from a distance).
Bringing Up Baby has all the hallmarks of the Hawksian universe in which man and woman come together almost despite themselves, out of some primitive mutuality that is equal parts vain, hopeless, desperate, and absurd. The result of course is often comical and at times poignant, as though one were watching in the divine Garden of Eden the first groping between an Adam and an Eve saddled with each other and trying to make the best of it.
Because she hadn’t normally played in this kind of headlong slapstick, Katharine Hepburn has an interesting role as the ditzy and desperate (dare I say self-destructive) Susan Vance, who takes on Cary Grant’s slumberous intellectual of a paleontologist David Huxley. Would he have been better off with that glumly straitlaced fiancée? He falls for one hell of a woman in any case, and she just about obliterates his life as a curator of rare and precious paleontological things (like an intercostal clavicle).
But why watch this slapdash succession of moments that come at the viewer, one after the other, like the spurts of an exhausted geyser? It is purely entertaining and has moments laugh-out-loud excess, it features two of the greatest actors of the era doing silly things, and it has a well-rounded cast that takes its own silliness in good stride. And it also has a (completely tame) leopard. If you would like to line up for the black-and-white greatness of a classic, the line begins here. Behind me.
