Bringing up Baby

Bringing Up Baby(育婴奇谭)is one of versatile director Howard Hawks' greatest screwball comedies adapted from a story by Wilde. It is often considered the definitive screwball film. It is also one of the funniest, wackiest and most inspired films of all time with its characteristic breathless pace, absurd situations and misunderstandings, perfect sense of comic timing, completely screwball cast, series of lunatic and hare-brained misadventures, disasters, light-hearted surprises and romantic comedy.

Bringing Up Baby was an infamous box office catastrophe, causing Hawks to be fired from his next film and forcing Hepburn(the heroine of the film) to buy out her contract. At the time of its release, it failed miserably at the box-office and was soon forgotten. However, as time went on,the movie gained more and more attention and is now revered as a sophisticated classic decades ahead of its time.

Directed by: Howard Hawks

Produced by: Cliff Reid Howard Hawks

Written by: Dudley Nichols Hagar Wilde

Editing by: George Hively

Distributed by: RKO Radio Pictures

Release date: February 18, 1938 (US)

Running time: 102 minutes

Country: United States

Language: English

Genre: romance comedy

David Huxley is a mild-mannered and stuffy paleontologist. For the past four years, he has been trying to assemble the skeleton of a dinosaur but is missing one bone. Meanwhile he has to finish an exhibit on dinosaurs and needs 1 million grant for his museum. To get the money, he must make a favorable impression upon a Mrs. Random, a wealthy woman who is considering donating one million dollars to his museum. The day before his planned wedding with his fiancee, Alice Swallow with a severe personality, David meets Susan Vance by chance on a golf course. She is a free-spirited young lady and happens to be Mrs. Random's niece.

Susan's brother Mark has sent her a tame leopard from Brazil named "Baby", which she is supposed to give to her aunt. Susan believes David is a zoologist rather than a paleontologist and She uses her pet leopard, Baby, to trick him into driving to her Connecticut home, where a dog wanders into Huxley's room and steals the vital last bone that he needs to complete his project.

Susan's aunt, Mrs. Elizabeth Random arrives. She is unaware of who David really is because Susan has introduced him as a man named "Mr. Bone". Baby runs off and the real trouble begins when another leopard escapes from the local zoo and Baby is mistaken for it, leading Huxley and Susan into a series of harebrained and increasingly more insane schemes to save the cat from the authorities. Inevitably, the two end up in the local jail. Now Susan and David must find Baby, George, and the dinosaur bone, while ensuring that Mrs. Random donates her million dollars to the museum. To accomplish this, they must first get out of the county jail, where they have been mistakenly locked up by a town constable. Susan tells the constable that they are all gangsters in "The Leopard Gang". She refers to herself as "Swingin' Door Susie" and David as "Jerry the Nipper". David then tells the constable that she is making up everything from motion pictures she's seen.

Eventually, Alexander Peabody shows up to verify everyone's identity, and after Baby and George stroll into the station, Susan, who has sneaked out of a window, unwittingly captures the circus leopard, although David saves her.

A few weeks later, Susan finds David, who has broken up with Alice and his donation to the museum been rejected, working on his skeleton reconstruction at the museum. However, Susan informs David that she is donating a million dollars that Elizabeth has given to her to the museum. Then while perched on a tall ladder that scales the dinosaur, she extracts a confession of love from David. Although the excited Susan causes the reconstruction to collapse in a heap, David laughs at his misfortune and embraces her.

Katharine Hepburn as Susan Vance, a ditzy socialite and completely dotty heiress, her relentless pursuit of Grant engages him in a series of comic misadventures which become increasingly foolish as the movie progresses.

Cary Grant as Dr. David Huxley, a mild-mannered and an overly stuffy, self-important paleontologist who by nature is docile, submissive, and dutiful, has his dignity stripped away layer by layer in the course of Hepburn's bizarre schemes.

Virginia Walker as Alice Swallow, David's shrewish fiancée

May Robson as Aunt Elizabeth Random, Susan's snobbish aunt

Charles Ruggles as Maj. Horace Applegate, big game hunter

Walter Catlett as Constable Slocum, who arrests most of the cast

Barry Fitzgerald as Aloysius Gogarty, a heavily stereotyped Irish-American gardener 

Fritz Feld as Dr. Fritz Lehman

Leona Roberts as Mrs. Hannah Gogarty, wife of Aloysius

George Irving as Dr. Alexander Peabody, Mrs Random's lawyer

Tala Birell as Mrs. Lehman 

John Kelly as Elmer

Asta as George, a dog

Nissa as both of the leopards

Robert McGowan was hired by RKO to write gags for this film. His contribution to the final film has not been confirmed, however. On August 16, 1937，director Howard Hawks began preliminary shooting, which included tests and process photography. Although the principal photography was scheduled to begin two weeks later, the actual start date was September 23, 1937.

In a modern interview, Hawks said of the film script: "I bought a short story written by a girl. I got the girl to come over, and she didn't know anything about pictures. But I wanted to keep exactly the same thought, that method of treating it. She had the characters for both Hepburn and Grant so well. So Dudley Nichols worked with her on the script.

Howard Hawks uses the division of his characters into masculine and feminine stereotypes in order to allow each to have a liberating effect on the other. When the two are united as a couple at the film's end, the effect is an uneasy integration of sex-role principles. Katharine Hepburn as  Bringing Up Baby exaggerates the lover-antagonist formula of the screwball comedy for a humorous battle between the sexes in which the stereotypes of sex roles are reversed.

Robert Montgomery and Leslie Howard were considered for the role of "David." M-G-M refused to loan Montgomery to RKO, while Howard turned down the part in favor of the title role in Alexander Korda's production, Lawrence of Arabia. RKO borrowed Charlie Ruggles from Paramount for the film. Hollywood Reporter production charts add Wesley Barry and Marek Windheim to the cast, but their participation in the final film has not been confirmed.

According to RKO production files, exteriors were shot at the Bel Air Country Club in Los Angeles and at the Arthur Ranch in Malibu, CA. The exterior of the "Peabodys'" house, which previously had been seen in Frank Capra's Mr. Deeds Goes to Town, was shot at the Columbia Ranch. Connecticut country road scenes were filmed at Oakgrove Park in Flintridge, CA, while New England street scenes were filmed at the Twentieth Century-Fox Studios. According to modern sources, the museum scenes were shot at the Los Angeles Museum of Natural History.

Bringing Up Baby(育婴奇谭)cost RKO $1,200,000 to produce. While the film was still in production, the Independent Theatre Owners Association published a list of actors who had been deemed "box office poison," and Hepburn, along with Joan Crawford and Marlene Dietrich, was on it. Concerned about Hepburn's bad press, RKO decided to shelve the project before spending any additional money on editing, scoring and advertising. Multi-millionaire Howard Hughes, who later bought RKO, purchased the film from RKO and had it booked in the Loew Circuit. In spite of Hughes's help and good reviews, the film lost more than $350,000 at the box office. RKO subsequently forced Hepburn, who refused to play the lead in the low-budget programmer Mother Carey's Chickens, to buy out her contract for $220,000. Hepburn then teamed up with George Cukor and Grant and made Holiday for Columbia.

When the film was initially released in 1938, it met harsh criticism and indifferent audiences. Hepburn, who headed the Independent Theatre Owners Association list of "box-office poison" movie stars, grated on the critics' nerves. In addition to Hepburn's seeming unpopularity, a critical disdain for what the New York Times reviewer called a "zany-ridden product of the goofy farce school" may have contributed to the film's lack of success. But today Bringing Up Baby enjoys frequently revived popularity due to its breakneck pace, superb comic timing, humorous swipes at sex roles, and partnering of Hepburn and Grant.

"The durability of Hawks's films lies in the way that they have a mysterious life of their own going on under the familiar, facile surfaces. It is the constant cross-graining of cliché and inventive detail which produces the shock of pleasure his best work provides. 

—critic Peter Dyer

This is certainly one of the funniest and wackiest comedies of all time. The cast is unforgettable, right down to the smallest roles. A classic gem I could never tire of watching.

I never miss an airing of "Bringing Up Baby". It is the definitive classic Madcap Comedy. The cast is fantastic, including the multi-talented Asta. Grant and Hepburn are at their comedic best and the supporting cast is icing on this fun and endearing cinematic cake.

I just watched bringing up baby, and just loved it, and couldn't believe that at the time it wasn't a box office hit, it was very very funny.

—all from filmgoers

Bringing Up Baby(育婴奇谭)employs the successful formula of such classic films as It Happened One Night and My Man Godfrey in which madcap heiresses pit their senses of fun, irreverence, and total irresponsibility against the seriousness, logic, and dignity of working class heroes. In such screwball comedies of the 1930s the leading couple's courtships of verbal battles provide a series of humorous sexual conflicts that are overcome but unresolved in the reconciliation during the "happy endings." Bringing Up Baby takes the antagonisms and extremes embodied in the screwball comedy a little further than any of the other films of the genre.

In 1990, Bringing Up Baby(育婴奇谭)was selected for preservation in the National Film Registry by the Library of Congress as being "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant".

No.24 on list of the greatest films of Entertainment Weekly

No.47 on the greatest comedy film of all time of Total Film magazine

One of the top 250 films on the list of Internet Movie Database

No.68(Cary Grant's performance as Dr. David Huxley) on the list of The 100 Greatest Performances of All Time of Premiere

No.21(the character of Susan Vance) on the list of The 100 Greatest Movie Characters of All Time of Premiere

No.97 AFI's 100 Years 100 Movies

No.14 AFI's 100 Years 100 Laughs

No.51 AFI's 100 Years 100 Passions

No.88 AFI's 100 Years 100 Movies (10th Anniversary Edition)

Bringing up Baby