Bringing Up Baby (1942)

A+ SDG Original source: National Catholic Register

The zaniest, most delightful, most romantic screwball comedy of them all, Bringing Up Baby features Katherine Hepburn at her effervescent best and Cary Grant in a marvelous performance combining stuffiness and injured dignity with his usual debonair charm.
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1942, RKO. Directed by Howard Hawks. Katharine Hepburn, Cary Grant, Charles Ruggles, Walter Catlett, Barry Fitzgerald, May Robson, Fritz Feld.

Artistic/Entertainment Value

Moral/Spiritual Value

0

Age Appropriateness

Kids & Up

MPAA Rating

NR

Caveat Spectator

Mild comic menace; a fleeting jocular reference to cross-dressing.
About These Ratings

Grant plays a bookish paleontologist unfelicitously engaged to his even stuffier assistant (Virginia Walker); Hepburn’s a flighty, madcap socialite who bursts into his life on the 18th fairway and is very soon literally driving him to distraction. Grant’s meticulously assembled dinosaur skeleton perfectly embodies the ossified, dead-end direction his personal life is currently taking, and contrasts strikingly with the much livelier and more formidable (not to mention quirkier) beast he meets in Hepburn’s company — a Brazilian leopard with old-fashioned taste in music.

In a performance reportedly inspired by silent comedian Harold Lloyd, the bespectacled Grant does the slow burn beautifully; and Hepburn’s battering-ram personality and non-sequitur repartee are irresistible rather than irritating. From the rollicking dialogue to the daft situations to the deft physical comedy, Bringing Up Baby has it all.

 Comedy, Romance, Screwball Comedy

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