118. Bringing Up Baby (1938)

Directed By Howard Hawks


Synopsis

A zoologist is builing a brontossaurus, the last piece of the puzzle is coming the same day he is getting married. In the meanwhile he meets Kathrine Hepburn, loses his bone and cross-dresses. Fun for all the family. Oh and leopards are involved.

Review

This was a great film, really, really funny and with stellar performances by both Hepburn and Cary Grant. I had already expressed my love for Grant here before, so now let me expresss my love for Hepburn. Katherine was one of the best female actors of her generation, in fact I would probably consider her the best in terms of comedy at least. Here she plays an insufferable but endearing character that you can't help but love despite your more rational instincs.

It is easy to see why Grant would fall for her in the film, but only reluctantly. No one would actually want to love her, but it would be hard to help yourself, and the way Hepburn puts across such a complex comedic character is pretty impressive. That put aside the writing in the film is phenomenal, it is fast to the point of chaotic, to the point where you can't quite understand it because in a very Altmanesque way they keep talking over each other.

The film must be watched to be believed, the plot-line is surreal, the acting is fantastic and the pacing is so frenetic that you will often want it to go slightly slower so you can stop cringing for one minute before another disaster happens. All in all pretty perfect comedy with some of the best casting ever and one of the first uses of the word gay with its more usual meaning instead of "happy". You should really get it at Amazon UK or US.

Final Grade

9/10


Trivia

From Wikipedia:

Arguably, this was the first film to use the word "gay" in a homosexual context. Robert Chapman's The Dictionary of American Slang reports that the adjective "gay" was used by homosexuals, among themselves, in this sense since at least 1920. Donald Webster Cory writes in The Homosexual in America (1951):

"Psychoanalysts have informed me that their homosexual patients were calling themselves gay in the nineteen-twenties, and certainly by the nineteen-thirties it was the most common word in use by homosexuals themselves."

Donald Webster Cory wrote that it was such an insiders' term that "an advertisement for a roommate can actually ask for a gay youth, but could not possibly call for a homosexual." According to Vito Russo the script actually had David (Grant) saying, in an attempt to explain why he is wearing Susan's marabou-trimmed negligee, "I... I suppose you think its odd, my wearing this. I realize it looks odd... I don't usually... I mean, I don't own one of these." However Grant ad-libbed his own line, "Because I just went gay all of the sudden." Vito Russo had pointed out that this was an indication that people in Hollywood, at least in Grant's circles, were already familiar with the slang connotations of the word. However, Grant himself nor anyone involved in the film ever confirmed this. Of course Grant was speculated to have been bisexual, and may have avoided the question altogether. The question may have never been asked in the first place. The term "gay" did not become widely familiar to the general public, until the Stonewall riots in 1969.


Trailer: