"There is a leopard on your roof and it's my leopard and I have to get it," Katharine Hepburn's character says in what seems to be one breath, essentially summing up the madcap energy of Howard Hawks' Bringing Up Baby. There are no pauses for logic, no straight men, and no end to comic mayhem when Susan Vance (a 13 year old girl in Katharine Hepburn's body) sets her eyes on paleontologist David Huxley (Cary Grant). From there, we follow her rampage through Huxley's life, tearing up all semblance of order from the boring researcher's life.
This is not to say that I didn't enjoy the film - seeing Cary Grant and Katharine Hepburn play off of each other and a well-chosen supporting cast is certainly a treat. Grant always perfectly mixes outrage at the ridiculousness he encounters with an apologetic tone for his poor reactions to said ridiculousness. Plus, there's the interesting dueling ideologies of Vance and Huxley - the careless/carefree socialite dropping everything to chase a leopard on the loose and the paleontologist collecting the bones of long-extinct creatures while everything drops out around him. As film critic David Thomson says (in his book Have You Seen…?), "[Bringing Up Baby] says that life is lunacy, so that the diligent reassembly of a dinosaur skeleton (the pursuit of knowledge) means very little compared with getting your bone into a warm box." If you're looking for leopards, nonsense, and a fine bit of entertainment, you could do much worse than Bringing Up Baby.
Crew & Cast
Directed by Howard Hawks (Tiger Shark, Twentieth Century, The Big Sleep)
Written by Dudley Nichols (The Informer, Stagecoach, Scarlet Street, The Tin Star) & Hagar Wilde (I Was a Male War Bride, Carefree), based on Hagar Wilde's short story.
Cast
Cary Grant - Dr. David Huxley
Katharine Hepburn - Susan Vance
May Robson - Elizabeth Carlton Random
Charles Ruggles - Major Horace Applegate
Walter Catlett - Constable Slocum