Bringing Up Baby

Bringing Up Baby, directed by Howard Hawks in 1938, is one of the greatest screwball comedies and a treasure from the Golden Age of Hollywood. Cary Grant plays a naive and repressed paleosaurologist who becomes entangled with (and ensnared by) a wilful heiress (Katharine Hepburn). Chaos ensues as romance blossoms and not one but two leopards are set loose in verdant Connecticut. Hawks is at his best: there is a wonderful ensemble cast, his visual style is characteristically refined yet unself-conscious, and a wild succession of pratfalls, innuendo, and jokes (written by Dudley Nichols and Hagar Wilde) make the movie a model of a comic classic. Yet beneath the chaos and good cheer is a serious tale of escaping life's hardships by dint of nothing more or less than nerve and luck. Bringing Up Baby, directed by Howard Hawks in 1938, is one of the greatest screwball comedies and a treasure from the Golden Age of Hollywood. Cary Grant plays a naive and repressed paleosaurologist who becomes entangled with (and ensnared by) a wilful heiress (Katharine Hepburn). Chaos ensues as romance blossoms and not one but two leopards are set loose in verdant Connecticut. Hawks is at his best: there is a wonderful ensemble cast, his visual style is characteristically refined yet unself-conscious, and a wild succession of pratfalls, innuendo, and jokes (written by Dudley Nichols and Hagar Wilde) make the movie a model of a comic classic. Yet beneath the chaos and good cheer is a serious tale of escaping life's hardships by dint of nothing more or less than nerve and luck.