Bringing Up Baby

Bringing Up Baby (1938) starts with a palaeontologist. David has spent four years assembling a dinosaur skeleton and is waiting for the final bone; he is also getting married tomorrow and has to persuade a wealthy woman to endow his museum. He meets Susan, and from that moment everything in his life comes apart in order. Susan also has a leopard. Its sense of pace is treated as the definition of the genre: lines overlap, nobody stops to think, and events accumulate without ever slowing. There was a real leopard on set. While filming with the trained animal, Nissa, her handler stood by with a whip. Hepburn was generally comfortable with her, but in one scene Nissa lunged at her and had to be stopped by the whip. Cary Grant was terrified of the animal and doubles were used for most of his close work. The film failed on release. Its run at Radio City Music Hall in New York took only 70,000 dollars and was pulled after a week. The total came to 1,109,000 dollars against a 1.1 million budget, barely breaking even. The consequences were serious. Howard Hawks was released early from his two picture contract at RKO and Gunga Din was handed to another director. Katharine Hepburn had already been labelled box office poison by theatre owners; she was allowed to buy out her RKO contract for 22,000 dollars. Her career only recovered two years later with The Philadelphia Story. It was rediscovered when television started showing it in the fifties and is now taken as the defining example of its form. It runs 102 minutes. Good for: screwball comedy, classic Hollywood, and Grant and Hepburn. Less good for: the pace is tiring for some viewers and the characters shout constantly. Susan's behaviour reads as manipulative to a modern eye. The rear projection in the leopard scenes is obvious.