Bringing Up Baby

2 Pages 395 Words

Bringing Up Baby (1938)

Howard Hawks’ Bringing Up Baby is basically a screwball comedy about a scientist, Dr. David Huxley, who is ready to be married the next day but runs into Susan Vance who falls in love with him. To keep him for leaving for New York and getting married Susan tries to keep him with her first by coercing him into helping her take care of a leopard called Baby.
The story takes you on an amusing journey with Susan demonstrating what a woman will do to when she falls madly in love with a soon to be married man. What starts out as an innocent little game turns up more and more problems for David as he looses both a million dollar grant and a rare dinosaur bone he needs for his museum. The movie goes on as David tries to regain those losses while Susan tries to gain David's love.
Although I enjoy many screwball comedies I think Bringing Up Baby is lacking the cleverness a screwball comedy needs to succeed in capturing and keeping the attention of an audience. David is just too unrealistic. He just seems to wander around aimlessly throughout the whole movie while all these wacky mishaps happen to him and never seems to gain control of any situation. I can handle this type of character in many movies but I think that David pushed wacky to stupidity.
Susan was not only unrealistic but obnoxious. I don’t think I could handle hearing her say another word for the rest of my life as it seemed as though she was dramatically whining the whole time.
I don’t blame Katharine Hepburn or Carey Grant for the unrealness of the movie. I thought they did a pretty nice job acting as two very unreal characters. I think that this script tried to take a played out story line of love and drama and make it into something original. Although they did succeed somewhat in originality, for instance the misadventure of taking care of a leopard, they sacrificed reasonable characters and realness.
I just could not wai...