Bringing Up Baby
1938 lobby card
Directed by	Howard Hawks
Produced by	Cliff Reid Howard Hawks
Written by	Dudley Nichols Hagar Wilde
Starring	Katharine Hepburn Cary Grant Charles Ruggles Walter Catlett May Robson Fritz Feld
Music by	Roy Webb Jimmy McHugh
Cinematography	Russell Metty
Editing by	George Hively
Distributed by	RKO Radio Pictures
Release date(s)	February 18, 1938 (1938-02-18)
Running time	102 minutes
Country	United States
Language	English
Budget	$1,073,000
Box office	$2,472,000

Bringing Up Baby (1938) is an American screwball comedy film directed by Howard Hawks, starring Katharine Hepburn and Cary Grant, and released by RKO Radio Pictures.^[1][2]

The movie tells the story of a paleontologist winding up in various predicaments involving a woman with a unique sense of logic and a leopard named "Baby". The supporting cast includes Charles Ruggles, Barry Fitzgerald, Walter Catlett, and May Robson. The screenplay was adapted by Dudley Nichols and Hagar Wilde from a short story by Wilde that originally appeared in Collier's Weekly magazine on April 10, 1937.^[3]

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

Plot[link]

David Huxley (Cary Grant) is a mild-mannered paleontologist beleaguered by problems. For the past four years, he has been trying to assemble the skeleton of a Brontosaurus but is missing one bone (the mythical "intercostal clavicle"^[4]). To add to the stress, he is about to get married to a dour woman, Alice Swallow (Virginia Walker) with a severe personality and must make a favorable impression upon a Mrs. Random (May Robson), a wealthy woman who is considering donating one million dollars to his museum. The day before his planned wedding, David meets Susan Vance (Katharine Hepburn) by chance on a golf course. She is a free-spirited young lady and, unknown to him at first, happens to be Mrs. Random's niece.

Susan's brother Mark has sent her a tame leopard from Brazil^[5] named "Baby", which she is supposed to give to her aunt. Susan believes David is a zoologist rather than a paleontologist and she practically stalks him in order to get David to go to her country home in Connecticut to help her take care of Baby, which includes singing "I Can't Give You Anything But Love" which Baby likes. Complications arise as Susan decides that she has fallen in love with David and she endeavors to keep him at her house for as long as possible to prevent him from marrying his colleague.

Grant and Hepburn in a key scene from the film

While David is there, Susan's dog George (Asta) steals and buries the last dinosaur bone that David needs to complete his Brontosaurus skeleton at the museum. 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, as do George and a decidedly untame leopard from a nearby circus that Susan and David had inadvertently let loose from its cage on its way to its execution, thinking it was Baby. 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 befuddled town constable, Constable Slocum (Walter Catlett) for breaking into the house of Dr. Fritz Lehman (Fritz Feld).^[6] 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" (a name Cary Grant's character was called by Irene Dunne in the movie The Awful Truth, also featuring Asta). David then tells the constable that she is making up everything "from motion pictures she's seen."

Eventually, Alexander Peabody (George Irving) 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 (by using a chair to shoo the leopard into a jail cell and then locking it inside). A few weeks later, Susan finds David, who has been jilted by Alice and his donation to the museum been rejected, working on his brontosaurus reconstruction at the museum. After presenting him with his bone, which George finally had returned, 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 one-of-a-kind reconstruction to collapse in a heap, David embraces Susan.^[7]

Cast[link]

Katharine Hepburn and Nissa the leopard in a publicity photograph for the film

• Katharine Hepburn as Susan Vance
• Cary Grant as Dr. David Huxley (alias Mr. Bone)
• Charles Ruggles as Maj. Horace Applegate, a big game hunter
• Walter Catlett as Constable Slocum
• Barry Fitzgerald as Aloysius Gogarty, a gardener
• May Robson as Elizabeth Random, Susan's aunt
• 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
• Virginia Walker as Alice Swallow, David's fiancée
• John Kelly as Elmer
• Asta as George, a dog
• Nissa the leopard, as both of the leopards
• Ward Bond as Motorcycle cop at jail (uncredited)
• Jack Carson as Circus roustabout (uncredited)

Reception and legacy[link]

After its New York premiere on March 3, 1938 at Radio City Music Hall, the film did such poor business that it was lifted a week early to make way for Jezebel starring Bette Davis.^[8] However, the legend that Bringing Up Baby was a failure at the box office is largely false: In its initial run the film broke even, making a profit, albeit unimpressive, of $13,000; a 1940-41 reissue earned RKO an additional $150,000. Baby did go almost $330,000 over its $768,000 budget and 40 days over schedule—this is likely the reason Hawks was released early from his two-film contract with RKO.^[9] (The film he was originally supposed to do for the studio, Gunga Din, also starring Grant, was eventually directed by George Stevens.) Legend has it that "Baby" was one of the films that led to Hepburn being named "box office poison" by a group of US movie theater owners.^[10] In fact, many reviews marveled at her new skill with low comedy, and Life magazine called her "the surprise of the picture."^[11]

Since its release, the popularity of Bringing Up Baby has grown considerably. The film was placed by the American Film Institute on its list of the 100 greatest American films of all time. It was also named the fourteenth funniest American film of all time.

Bringing Up Baby was the second of four films starring Grant and Hepburn, the others being Sylvia Scarlett (1935), Holiday (1938), and The Philadelphia Story (1940), the last three of which belong to a sub-genre of screwball comedy called the comedy of remarriage described by the philosopher Stanley Cavell as Hollywood's crowning achievement.

Awards and honors[link]

In 1990, Bringing Up Baby was selected for preservation in the National Film Registry by the Library of Congress as being "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant", the second year that the registry started preserving films. Entertainment Weekly voted the film number twenty-four on its list of the greatest films. In 2000, readers of Total Film magazine voted it the forty-seventh greatest comedy film of all time. It is also consistently on the Internet Movie Database's list of top 250 films.

Premiere ranked Cary Grant's performance as Dr. David Huxley #68 on their list of The 100 Greatest Performances of All Time.^[12] They also ranked the character of Susan Vance #21 on their list of The 100 Greatest Movie Characters of All Time.^[13]

American Film Institute recognition

• AFI's 100 Years...100 Movies - #97
• AFI's 100 Years...100 Laughs - #14
• AFI's 100 Years...100 Passions - #51
• AFI's 100 Years...100 Movie Quotes:
  • "It isn't that I don't like you, Susan, because after all, in moments of quiet, I'm strangely drawn toward you; but, well, there haven't been any quiet moments!" - Nominated
• AFI's 100 Years...100 Movies (10th Anniversary Edition) - #88
• AFI's 10 Top 10 - Nominated Romantic Comedy

Adaptations[link]

Bringing Up Baby has been adapted several different times. Hawks himself recycled the nightclub scene in which Hepburn's dress is torn and Grant walks behind her in his 1964 comedy Man's Favorite Sport. Peter Bogdanovich's 1972 film What's Up, Doc?, starring Barbra Streisand, was intended as an homage to the movie. In his commentary track for Bringing Up Baby, Bogdanovich discusses how the coat ripping scene in What's Up, Doc? was based directly on the scene in which Grant's coat (and then Hepburn's dress) is torn in Baby. The 1987 movie Who's That Girl?, starring Madonna, is also loosely based on Bringing Up Baby.

Use of word "gay"[link]

It is debated whether Bringing Up Baby is the first work of fiction, aside from pornography, to use the word "gay" in a homosexual context.^[14][15] In the scene in question, Cary Grant's character is wearing a woman's marabou-trimmed négligée, and when asked why replies, in an exasperated tone, "Because I just went gay all of a sudden!", leaping into the air on the word "gay". It is not certain whether the word is being used in its older sense of "happy", or whether it was intentionally a joking reference to homosexuality.

According to Robert Chapman's The Dictionary of American Slang, 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) that "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." It was not, however, in common usage. Cory continues 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."^[16][17] The term "gay" did not become widely familiar to the general public until the Stonewall riots in 1969.^[18]

In the film, the word "gay" was apparently an ad-lib by Grant. According to Vito Russo in the book The Celluloid Closet (1981, revised 1987), the script originally had Grant's character say "I... I suppose you think it's odd, my wearing this. I realize it looks odd... I don't usually... I mean, I don't own one of these." Russo suggests that this indicates that people in Hollywood, at least in Grant's circles, were already familiar with the slang connotations of the word. However, neither Grant himself nor anyone involved in the film ever suggested this.^[18]

References[link]

Notes

External links[link]

Wikiquote has a collection of quotations related to: Bringing Up Baby

• Bringing Up Baby at the Internet Movie Database
• Bringing Up Baby at AllRovi
• Bringing Up Baby at the TCM Movie Database
• Pauline Kael analysis
• Bringing Up Baby at moviediva
• Reprints of historic reviews, photo gallery at CaryGrant.net
• Bringing Up Baby on Theater of Romance: July 24, 1945

v t e Katharine Hepburn Filmography 1930s A Bill of Divorcement (1932) Christopher Strong (1933) Morning Glory (1933) Little Women (1933) Spitfire (1934) The Little Minister (1934) Break of Hearts (1935) Alice Adams (1935) Sylvia Scarlett (1935) Mary of Scotland (1936) A Woman Rebels (1936) Quality Street (1937) Stage Door (1937) Bringing Up Baby (1938) Holiday (1938) 1940s The Philadelphia Story (1940) Woman of the Year (1942) Keeper of the Flame (1942) Stage Door Canteen (1943) Dragon Seed (1944) Without Love (1945) Undercurrent (1946) The Sea of Grass (1947) Song of Love (1947) State of the Union (1948) Adam's Rib (1949) 1950s The African Queen (1951) Pat and Mike (1952) Summertime (1955) The Rainmaker (1956) The Iron Petticoat (1956) Desk Set (1957) Suddenly, Last Summer (1959) 1960s Long Day's Journey Into Night (1962) Guess Who's Coming to Dinner (1967) The Lion in Winter (1968) The Madwoman of Chaillot (1969) 1970s The Trojan Women (1971) A Delicate Balance (1973) The Glass Menagerie (1973) Love Among the Ruins (1975) Rooster Cogburn (1975) Olly, Olly, Oxen Free (1978) The Corn Is Green (1979) 1980s On Golden Pond (1981) Grace Quigley (1985) Mrs. Delafield Wants to Marry (1986) Laura Lansing Slept Here (1988) 1990s The Man Upstairs (1992) This Can't Be Love (1994) Love Affair (1994) One Christmas (1994) Related articles Awards and nominations Coco Houghton family The Katharine Hepburn Cultural Arts Center Katharine Houghton Katharine Martha Houghton Hepburn The Lake Spencer Tracy Tea at Five