A genre that was very popular during The Great Depression (thriving within the 1930s), screwball comedy was a sub-genre of the romantic comedy archetype that satirized traditional love stories with a higher focus on ‘battle of the sexes’ dynamics between its male and female leads (with the woman often dominating the relationship with the man), an escapist ideology that focused on a quick paced overlapping repartee, characters that are often more unconventional and less proper for the time (which is why its called ‘Screwball’) and the most important aspect of all, its main focus on being funny rather than romantic. Famous examples like It Happened One Night, His Girl Friday, What’s Up, Doc, and The Philadelphia Story showed the strengths of the genre, but it wasn’t always going to result in box office success for the company that made them, even if the movie eventually becomes a big hit, case in point, the 1938 film, Bringing Up Baby. After recently receiving a dinosaur bone for his exhibit, paleontologist David Huxley (played by Cary Grant) hopes to impress Miss Elizabeth Random (played by May Robson) to make sure she gives his museum a million-dollar-donation. He happens to stumble across Susan Vance (played by Katharine Hepburn), a free-spirited woman who seems to think more with her heart than her head, which causes a lot of issues for Huxley as she constantly seems to mess up his business. After getting stuck together due to circumstances mainly puppeteered by her means, the two end up taking a tamed leopard named Baby to a farm in Connecticut but find that hi-jinks seem to follow them everywhere they go, and the situation goes very messy and very screwy because of it. Based very slightly on the short story of the same name written by Hagar Wilde, Bringing Up Baby wasn’t a commercially successful film at the time, and it even convinced studios that Katharine Hepburn was ‘’Box office poison’’ for a while. Despite this, it garnered a cult following over the years and people eventually warmed to its energy and zany antics.

For a movie of this caliber, getting director Howard Hawks to work on it, is both a smart and odd choice. He has a filmography that branches out into several different genres from crime thrillers, musicals, war pictures, adventures dramas and various others, so he’s a director that isn’t afraid to test out new waters and not do the same kind of film, and he’s also dabbled with several comedies including His Girl Friday, Twentieth Century, and Fig Leaves, so this wasn’t something new for him either. The interesting and probable best reasoning for why he could work in a screwball comedy of this type is because a lot of his earlier work was not only comedic films, but silent ones at that. That specific type of comedic directing would have been heavily focused on the physicality of the humor, which is essential to a screwball film like this, and it really comes across when watching this film. Its true that the set-up for the film is very traditional earlier cinema comedy-based narratives; it doesn’t have a lot of meat on it and it feels like its driven by circumstance and any set-up really only existed for an eventual pay-off as opposed to anything dramatic, but it’s a movie that doesn’t require that as it utilizes these simple situations very effectively to result in something that, while nothing ground-breaking or especially special for today’s standards, seems to be pretty effective for the time period and perfectly serviceable nowadays. His past experience with silent film comedies would have helped shape the lay-out and feel of the movie, but thankfully the movie doesn’t rely only on physicality to make it work, it has plenty of verbal gags as well and it doesn’t feel imbalanced. It feels like a nice balance between what worked in previous eras as well as what worked in the current era; it avoided or at least shortened screen-time to a lot of lazy cliches (although the forced romance is pretty useless), both the male and female lead are given equal amounts of time on screen, and both are allowed to take part in the physical slapstick.

For a movie where its quality is very much tied to its writing and actors to really pull people in, you need good performers who are able to handle the fast and witty dialogue effectively as well as not be afraid to handle some stunts and actions that could put them in danger (especially since the movie had an actual leopard in it) and Cary Grant and Katharine Hepburn are clearly talented enough people to work in a movie like this. It feels like the movie benefited from the star-power that came from these two and they are comfortable enough to change from their usual roles into more flexible and vulnerable personas. It actually feels like the two are going against type for the film; the usually suave, light-hearted, and debonair demeanor of Grant becoming this frantic, constantly stressed, imperfect looking man, and the vibrantly electric, outspoken, and headstrong Hepburn turning that edge into something more aery, childish and often times destructive. Both do very good jobs at working off each other (clearly both of them had a great time filming together) and both have a good understanding of comedic timing to make watching them a fun joy (despite this being Hepburn’s first true comedy). The rest of the cast is filled with lunatic characters that provide their own sense of odd-ball nature that makes the entire world the movie inhabits feel a little bit more bizarre and entertaining, it doesn’t feel like it operates on real-world logic and has fun with that.

A lot of work went into writing up this short story into a proper film. It went through its own share of rewrites, changes and altercations, it featured a decent amount of ad-libbing which could work in a comedic setting like this, several writers were brought in not just to flesh out and change the original story, but to also work on specific sections that others couldn’t handle, with Dudley Nichols and Hagar Wilde acting as the main screenwriters and even veterans of vaudeville like Walter Catlett and Harry Llyod found their way into the production and managed to help things out in the long run. The movie is one where its most enticing aspect is its speed and chemistry that comes from its actors. On its own, the writing and even most of the stunts aren’t anything that dramatically new even for the time, so it needs to bring something fresh and energized to this project to make it feel worth sitting through and thankfully, that passion and care from the actors really helps make it come alive, because a lot of the improvisational stance that Hawks’ took with the project led to the movie going over-budget. Older comedies often had the benefit of feeling more interesting and actively more engaging with its humor thanks to its physical nature when a lot of stunts and gags of the sort couldn’t be faked as easily, and while nothing overly dramatic on the physical end is in this film (outside of a large skeleton destruction near the end), it is nice to see everybody actively taking part in the movie and everybody feels so lively because of it. Even seeing an actual leopard on screen and interacting with the actors helps the situation feel more bizarre, more frantic, and more absurd.

Bringing Up Baby probably isn’t going to be a movie that everybody will be familiar with, even ignoring the fact that its an old film. Considering how frequent screwball comedies were at the time, this one probably just existed as another one in the line-up with famous names, an odd situation and familiar tropes and energy to make it still worth a watch, but nothing ground-breaking. Even now, you can feel that comedies have gone to much stronger lengths to be different among each film, as comedy feeling similar to something else can make it less memorable. But for a movie of the time, it does its job perfectly decently and even years later, it has enough likeable elements to make it worth a watch. Its scenario is absurd but not off-the-walls for its type, the cast is likeable and work really well off each other, the movie is nicely paced and quick enough to make the humor work, the physicality and verbal humor is nice and punchy (never feeling too slow or too show) and despite some plot contrivances and minimal stakes in the grand scheme of things, Bringing Up Baby is an average outing with two odd-ball characters that manages to entertain just fine enough.

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