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Bringing Up Baby

Arguably the best "screwball comedy" of all time, "Bringing Up Baby" was voted as the 24th Greatest Film of all time by Entertainment Weekly. Yet when the film debuted in 1938, it was considered a huge flop.

On the eve of his wedding, dedicated paleontologist Dr. David Huxley, played by Cary Grant, is sent to play golf with a man whom he hopes will put in a good word for him with a rich old woman, Mrs. Carlton Random. She is looking to give $1 million to a worthwhile cause. While on the 18th fairway, Huxley meets a real character, Susan Vance, played by Katharine Hepburn. She appears to be eccentric. David and Susan do not hit it off and Susan claims that the golf ball David is looking for belongs to her. She also claims that the car she is trying to maneuver out of the parking lot belongs to her, even thought it belongs to David. In this, Susan creates an intended chase between she and David. Each event between them causes David to follow Susan in order to fix the damage she has created.

On his wedding day, Susan traps David and brings him to her aunt's home in Connecticut. Throughout the course of the day's events, he ends up in prison, with lovely Susan naturally. As you can imagine, David and Susan do fall in love and David even goes as far as to say that the crazy day he spent with Susan was, "the best day of my life!"

"Bringing Up Baby" parades Cary Grant's enormous talent to literally she his "debonair" persona, and throw himself completely into acting like a goofball. Katharine Hepburn, who in 1938 was widely known for her ability to act in serious pictures, also had to shed her typecast and emerge as a rowdy comic in the film.

Grant and Hepburn do a marvelous job of playing off of each other's comedic remarks, as well as timing their jokes and comebacks perfectly. The screwball acting of every character in this film is superb in the fact that at some point in the film, each character makes a complete fool out of his or her self.

In 1938, "Bringing Up Baby" flopped at the box-office, yet as time went on the film became increasingly in popular. Many critics attribute the initial failure of the film to Katharine Hepburn, not due to her acting ability, but rather because she had been in so many serious films that she lost her appeal to audiences. Obviously, the past stays in the past and today, "Bringing Up Baby" is considered a timeless, wonderfully executed screwball comedy.

Written by: Kelcey Bridges

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