Howard Hawks’s farce is fast, funny and unusually ruthless about romantic pursuit. Cary Grant and Katharine Hepburn make the confusion precise, though the film gives us less breathing space than their performances occasionally deserve.
Bringing Up Baby is a fine farce, provided we are ready for a romance in which getting a word in counts as a considerable achievement. Howard Hawks sends a mild-mannered scientist into the company of an heiress whose leopard is only one of his difficulties. The aim is to keep a courtship moving through interruptions, misunderstandings and physical mishaps without stopping to explain why these people belong together. The film is sufficiently funny to get away with that, although its refusal to pause becomes wearing.
Cary Grant plays David as a man still expecting a reasonable explanation after reasonable explanations have stopped being useful. His attempts to finish a sentence are funny because he keeps treating interruption as an accident that can be corrected. The physical mishaps disturb that composure without making David seem too foolish to care about. We laughed at his bafflement, then felt rather sorry for him: Susan’s confidence leaves him so little room to say what he wants.
Katharine Hepburn does not ask us to find Susan considerate. She plays the heiress’s certainty without softening it into a charming little eccentricity, and that makes the pursuit funny and faintly alarming. The speed with which the two actors respond to each other makes the attraction credible, even when Susan’s behaviour ought to end the conversation. Much of the comedy depends on her continuing to talk when David needs her to stop.
The screenplay by Hagar Wilde and Dudley Nichols gives those interruptions a clear purpose. Each exchange makes it harder for David to regain control, so the fast talking does more than advertise how clever the writers are. George Hively’s editing preserves the actors’ timing while maintaining a pace that gives us little opportunity to settle. Crucially, the physical comedy remains legible beside the overlapping dialogue. We can follow the mishaps and still catch the innuendo, which is a good deal more difficult to arrange than the film makes it look.
Russell Metty’s photography has more shadow than this much comic bustle might lead us to expect. The darker areas of the image give the romance a faintly troubling look, and stop the leopard business feeling entirely harmless. We scarcely notice Roy Webb’s music beside the overlapping voices, which seems right for a film so dependent on people failing to listen. The photography and cutting do their work without asking the actors to slow down and let us admire it.
At 102 minutes, the film could afford to lose a little of its repeated confusion. Once another sensible exchange has become impossible, we occasionally want the next scene to offer something other than a further interruption. That is a real limitation, though it hardly cancels the precision of the performances. As screwball comedy, it asks us to accept people behaving badly and then earns that permission through timing and physical invention. Choose it when fast talk sounds like pleasure; a need for peace and quiet is a good reason to leave it for another evening.
