Bringing Up Baby Review
"Bringing Up Baby" is a screwball comedy that features Cary Grant and Katherine Hepburn. Screwball comedies thrive on situational and physical comedy, a quality which has endeared me to the genre since I first came into contact with it. Mistaken identities, ridiculous chase scenes, and outrageous characters are all a staple.
That's no less the case here. Cary Grant plays a timid and nerdy scientist, David, who has spent the last four years working on the reconstruction of a brontosaurus skeleton and is engaged to his co-worker (who views their future marriage as an extension of David's committment to his work).
Katherine Hepburn plays an eccentric woman, Susan, who always seems to mistake other people's things for her own. She and Grant meet in a hilarious manner on a golf course and soon enough they're both entangled in a situation with a tame leapord named "baby". This all leads to a highly entertaining and ridiculous moment in the city jail that involves a hilarious exchange of misinformation.
Grant does a good job of playing the straightman. Hepburn however, steals the show. She expertly deals out fast paced dialogue and double entendre's with a crazy sense of charm that seems uncharacteristic of other more glamerous roles I've seen her in.
Despite the skill displayed by the actors the romantic ending seems far too contrived. In the superior, "It Happened One Night", sexual tension was a major underlying factor in much of the conflict. That's not the case in "Baby". Rather, David spends most of the picture irritated and annoyed with Susan, which causes his declarations of love at the end of the picture to seem tacked on rather than a natural result of the preceding events. Indeed I feel that the film would have been stronger had it ended with Susan's infatuation being unreciprocated.
Despite this major fault in the picture, it's still well worth seeing just for Hepburn's performance and the great use of situational and physical comedy. Just don't expect it to stick.
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z5Q17fepYdU&feature=related]