1 the Genius of Bringing up Baby (Howard Hawks, 1938)
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1 The Genius of Bringing Up Baby (Howard Hawks, 1938) … and It Happened One Night (Frank Capra, 1934); My Man Godfrey (Gregory La Cava, (1936); The Awful Truth (Leo McCarey, 1937); Nothing Sacred (William Wellman, 1937); My Favorite Wife (Garson Kanin, 1940); His Girl Friday (Howard Hawks, 1940); The Lady Eve (Preston Sturges, 1941); Palm Beach Story (Preston Sturges, 1942); Mr and Mrs Smith (Alfred Hitchcock, 1941) and The Philadelphia Story (George Cukor, 1942) This film’s only available on DVD as part of a four-pack Cary Grant item containing in addition three mediocre films, made later in Grant’s career. 1 It’s yet further evidence that, as William Goldman said of Hollywood, “People don’t know anything”. For Bringing Up Baby is one of cinema’s great masterpieces. I’ve often shown it to female audiences, who like it as a bubbly event – “a wonderful period piece” – but who always add, “But I can’t see anything deeper in it”, or words to that effect. From this I deduce that they find it offensive, but either can’t, or aren’t prepared to, articulate why. Cary Grant plays David Huxley, who’s a bespectacled innocent, and is what we would call a palaeontologist. He’s a specialist in dinosaur skeletons – reconstructing the long-dead. He lives in a world of bones, and bumps into things all the time. He has a fiancée called Miss Alice Swallow, who admires him because of his dedication to his work, and who, as soon as they’re married, anticipates with great pleasure his continuing with it. Even he is a bit puzzled at her attitude to honeymoons; but she insists that their marriage will “involve no domestic entanglements of any kind” – his latest dinosaur skeleton will be their child. We find her attitude a bit hard to sympathise with, because, although his metier may be dryasdust, he has great charm, energy and (behind the specs) great looks – after all, he’s Cary Grant. His latest dinosaur skeleton is that of a brontosaurus, which lacks only one bone to be complete – the intercostal clavicle. The skeleton looms over him and Miss Swallow throughout the first scene of the film. For a thing so central to both their lives, it seems a bit remote and unresponsive. At the golf club, where he’s cultivating a lawyer called Peabody, whose client has promised him funding, a girl called Susan Vance (Katherine Hepburn), steals his golf ball, then steals his car. We don’t know why: the movie gives her no introduction – suddenly she’s just there in a forest clearing, appropriating everything that is his. She too is energetic, but out of control; everything Miss Swallow isn’t. She kidnaps him in her automobile, driving off with him standing on the running-board and calling out to Mr Peabody that he’ll “Be with you in a minute” – a promise he’s fated not to keep until the film’s penultimate scene. Throughout the action, whatever Susan’s responsible for, she blames on David. A hilarious sequence in the dining-room of the Ritz ends with his top hat squashed, his coat-tail 1: No longer so (2005). 2 ripped, and the back panel of her skirt missing: all, she claims, his fault. “The love impulse in men often reveals itself in terms of conflict”, she says, parroting a twitching psychiatrist she’s just been chatting to, and oblivious to the fact that all the conflict so far has been initiated by her. Logic is not her forte. “You look at everything upside down – I’ve never known anyone quite like you”, he says. “I wouldn’t dare give a reason for anything you do”, he adds later. This shot isn’t from the film. Grant’s not acting. As they sit at her flat with her mending his coat, he suddenly announces that he’s engaged. Howard Hawks gives us the film’s first close-up as Susan realises there’s opposition, and her face hardens. Later (after she’s knocked Mr Peabody out with a stone hurled at his window), David tells her he’s getting married the next day. She giggles on an in- breath: she knows intuitively that he’s getting nothing of the kind (Hepburn repeats this giggle in The Philadelphia Story : see below). This is the film’s second close-up. When she announces to her aunt that “He’s the only man I’ve ever loved”, it looks as if she’s only just worked that out. She’s a ruthless predator, but is also, in her way, as innocent as him. The remainder of the film shows how she gets him, even though, unlike Miss Swallow, she has no interest in dinosaurs at all. She lures him to her aunt’s Connecticut home, steals his clothes this time (almost wearing them for a split second), and forces him to wear her negligée: “I just went gay all of a sudden!” yells Grant, in a line even more meaningful now than it was then. Then he changes into her brother’s foxhunting outfit, which doesn’t fit him. She reveals to him that her aunt Elizabeth is the wealthy patron for whom Mr Peabody works – so that he has to take on an assumed identity to avoid discovery (she decides he’s called Mr Bone). Her fox terrier barks at him, and steals his dinosaur’s intercostal clavicle. With a view to entrapping him, Susan systematically humiliates him and deprives him of everything which gives him identity and self-respect. At one point she even calls him a zoologist. 3 Neither the Grant character nor the Hepburn character understand what’s happening. “In moments of quiet I’m strangely drawn towards you,” he says, “but there haven’t been any quiet moments”. Is not Grant’s manner, we suddenly think, slightly camp – and Hepburn’s more than slightly gamin? Is the root cause of the conflict and bewilderment the fact that they’re both bisexual (as both actors were in life)? Trotting is a recurrent image in the process of Grant’s degradation and entrapment: sometimes Grant trots after Hepburn, sometimes Hepburn trots after Grant, sometimes they both trot after the dog. In one shot Grant is down on all fours crawling after the dog. Both are at the mercy of their subconscious urges. She’s following hers, which draw her to him; he’s trying to escape from his, which draw him to her. The film’s informing metaphor for their subconscious urges consists of two leopards. One is tame and called Baby: it’s been sent to Aunt Elizabeth by her son, who’s an explorer in Brazil, but has been delivered to Susan by mistake. The other is savage and nameless: it’s escaped from a travelling circus. Seamless special effects create the illusion that Grant, Hepburn and the rest of the cast are on screen at the same time as either of the two leopards. In fact they never were; but the synchronisation of the human and animal movements and noises is ninety-nine percent perfect, and the back-projection is so good you marvel at the number of other movies you’ve seen where you can detect back-projection at once. The tame leopard is very fond of the song I Can’t Give You Anything But Love , which sums up all Susan has to offer David. An important character is a big-game hunter called Major Horace Applegate (“At least that’s what I think my name is – it was this morning”) who admires Susan’s aunt, but seems quite insecure as to his own identity. When introduced to “Mr Bone”, he says “Goodbye, Mr Applegate”. Is this the kind of wreck to which David will be reduced after a few years in Susan’s company? Applegate is cheerful and entertaining, but has no idea who he is any more. He’s a doppelgänger for David: a warning of what’s in store for him. At another point David addresses him as Major Appletree. At yet another, he addresses David as Boney. Applegate is very good at imitating the cry of a leopard. A wonderfully funny sequence is the one in which he shows off his skill, and is answered by the cry of a real leopard from the garden. At first Applegate says it’s a loon. He tries again; but the garden leopard answers before he’s made his introductory noise. “Noises in the Night” is a major leitmotiv in the film. David and Susan end up lost in a dark wood, in pursuit of – as they think – the tame leopard, Baby. Compare Inferno I, 1-36. Grant at one point turns round to see that Hepburn’s crawling after him. Together they fall down embankments and try to ford a stream which turns out to be ten feet deep. She burns his socks, and breaks his glasses. They don’t know that there are two leopards; and another part of the film’s skill lies in the fact that we can at once tell which leopard is which, even though none of the characters can; certainly not Susan. She’s fearless in the company of both, not realising that while one will purr at her, the other will eat her. The leopards are like the two faces of Puck in A Midsummer Night’s Dream – one helps lost people, the other disorientates them still further. The leopards also embody David’s feelings for Susan – he doesn’t know whether to kiss her or kill her – and Susan’s way of dealing with David – she loves him, so she humiliates him.