David Huxley is waiting to get a bone he needs for his museum collection. Through a series of strange circumstances, he meets Susan Vance, and the duo have a series of misadventures which include a leopard called Baby.
A flop when it was first released in 1938 "Bringing up Baby" is now considered a classic in the screwball genre, a tribute it rightly deserves. Katharine Hepburn has never been funnier in her only foray into this type of zany comedy. And Cary Grant a master of both verbal repartee and skillful pratfalls is pure genius. The plot is both simple and yet defies description. Hepburn plays Susan Vance, a rich society gal who is a beautiful kook determined to land Cary Grant a stuffy paleontologist who is desperately in need of being set free from from his stodgy ways. That Kate does so and much more is the main thrust of the movie. From their first meeting on a golf course to their final declaration of love atop a set of dinosaur bones the picture is nonstop glorious insanity. The script is the apex of wit and director Howard Hawks keeps the pace up at a breakneck speed. I first saw the film as a young boy and was captivated by it. Hardly a year goes by when I have an insatiable urge to enter this upside down world and join in this gleeful romp where leopards run amok in Connecticut,Grant is forced to wear a negligee and Miss Hepburn creates a female heroine that is the epitome of beauty daffy shrewd insanity. Please do yourself a favor and enter this topsy turvy world.
God, I'm knackered.... The sheer pace of this frenetic comedy romance left me breathless without actually leaving my chair (except to turn up the oxygen!). Cary Grant is a typically inept dinosaur man who is just about to install the final bone in his magnificent skeleton of a something-o-saur and get married on the same day... Firstly though, he has to try and tap up the lawyer to a local bigwig for a $1m donation to his museum by playing golf - that's where he meets a feisty, flighty Katherine Hepburn and soon his ordered life has been thrown under the bus then reversed over... When he discovers that she has a pet leopard "Baby" - it all descends into chaos for them, and their community!. The two stars are in their element and their enjoyment is contagious. The dialogue flows like Niagara falls and there is ample (predictable) fun to be had throughout this enjoyable farce of a story. The yapping dog did get on my nerves after a while, I have to say, and the visual aspects of the comedy are much too slapstick to be appreciated well 80 years on, especially towards the end - but it's a joyous romp for two stars the like of whom we simply won't ever see again.
Absolutely fantastic, best comedy ever because it's timeless
**A striking comedy from the period between the world wars.**
This film is a light comedy, very good-natured and full of twists, in which the life of a quiet paleontologist at a natural history museum is completely changed after meeting a volcanic and clumsy young woman. He is about to get married, he is waiting for a large donation to the museum from a rich old woman and he is unaware that the young woman is, in fact, the niece and only heir of the donor whom he wants to please, and who he hopes to receive soon. a domesticated leopard to have in your home, as if it were a cat.
Produced and distributed by RKO, it was directed by Howard Hawks, it was such a failure at the time that it was only more than twenty years later, when it premiered on television, that it began to find its audience. Today, it is a great classic of pre-World War II light comedies and was considered culturally significant.
On a more personal note, I can say that I really liked the film and its comedy style, but I wouldn't go so far as to say that I would consider it a cultural landmark, even though I wouldn't deny it the classic label. Let's be quite honest, the film is funny, and it's perfect for family viewing, with its well-mannered humor and without the use of more cheesy jokes, common in our contemporary comedy. The action is so fast, everything happens so quickly that we don't have time to think much. It's not a film to analyze rationally, because it would fall like a house of cards. It's a film to watch with willingness and mental openness to successive jokes.
Cary Grant needs no introduction and, as he has done many plays and comedy work, he is perfectly comfortable with this type of material and the role he has been given. The result of his work is excellent: it will never be one of the defining films of the actor's career, but it is an honorable addition to his filmography and is unmissable for Grant's admirers. Katharine Hepburn, on the other hand, did not have great comedic ability nor had she done significant comedy work before this film. She struggled a lot with the character and with the material received, and this can be seen, at times, in the artificial and somewhat forced way in which she acts. Even so, we cannot give her effort a negative rating.