Bringing Up 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.