Bringing Up Baby

Okay, so I finally did my homework and watched this film. Now I'm just sorry I didn't do it sooner.

I enjoy the Hawksiness of it (supposedly the script was long enough that it would be three and a half hours if dialogue were handled normally), and after all these years Hollywood has still not found a suitable replacement for Cary Grant

And I had kind of forgotten just how much of a babe Hepburn was in her younger years (I don't know how old she is in this film). And hearing her drop the distinctive Hepburn accent for the gun moll business in the jail was jarring but fun.

The basic screwball comedy has been done a thousand times since (you should watch What's Up, Doc, which might represent the culmination of the genre) but this seems particularly well-tuned. But I haven't watched on in a while and I was kind of unpleasantly surprised at how close it comes to the Manic Pixie Dream Girl template. But I think a couple of aspects distinguish it.

MPDG movies are about a woman coming in to help the man straighten out his life, but here Hepburn never seems like a tool for helping Grant self-actualize. She sees him, she wants him, she proceeds to pursue him in a very Hawks-womanly direct way, and not because she is declaring that he really needs her to fix his life. She really has no idea whether his life needs fixing or not (in fact is well into her pursuit before discovering he's engaged), but wants him because she wants him. His big epiphany hardly gets much play, particularly notable because the film is so leisurely paced at times (I'll get back to that). In fact, she gets top billing. It's very much her story, so that's cool. It's possible that you could remake this with Zach Braff and Zooey Deschanel, but in my mind that becomes more about awakening his captive heart, and really, who cares.

Maybe it's part of the fashion of the time, but I really like the fact that she is an actual woman and not elevated to some inhuman force of nature, so over-the-top as a comedic device that she stops being an actual woman. Given that this is basically a farce, that's a pretty neat trick. Nor does she have to be made to suffer for being so direct and assertive. In the 30s a strong woman in film has to pay for it even if, like Scarlet OHara, it's so we can admire her strength in adversity (before she finally loses), but Hepburn never does in this film. In fact, now that I think about it, her "competition" is no weakling, either. In fact, if anything, the fiance is kind of mannish (businesslike, emotions subordinated to career, practical, buttoned-up clothing) which sets up Hepburn to be womanish, but in a totally kick-ass way.

I do think this is superior Hawks, though I don't know if it's his best. On first view, I felt a bit of a sag in the middle when we were just shuffling some characters about at the country house; I just felt we lost some forward thrust there for a while in what is, for 1938, a pretty long comedy. I had no idea that this movie was the first film to use "gay" in the modern sense. The technical tricks with leopard management were impressive for 1938. And IMDB tells me that this was her first comedy, so props for that.