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EHealth - Bringing Along Baby article featuring Itsy Bitsy Yoga for babies itsybitsyyoga.com | Optimum Wellness | Bringing Up Baby, Naturally optimumwellness.com | Bringing Home Baby - CompletePregnany.com completepregnancy.com |
For the 2007 British TV series, see Bringing Up Baby (TV programme).
Bringing Up Baby is a 1938 American screwball comedy film directed by Howard Hawks and starring Katharine Hepburn and Cary Grant. The movie tells the story of a scientist winding up in various predicaments involving a woman with a unique sense of logic and a leopard named Baby. The supporting cast includes Charles Ruggles, Barry Fitzgerald, Walter Catlett, and May Robson. Adapted by Dudley Nichols and Hagar Wilde from a story by Wilde, Bringing Up Baby was an infamous box office catastrophe, causing Hawks to be fired from his next RKO film (Gunga Din, also starring Cary Grant) and forcing Hepburn to buy out her contract. As time went on, however, the movie gained more and more attention[citation needed] and is now revered as a sophisticated classic decades ahead of its time[clarification needed], and it continues to generate revenue for Hepburn's estate[citation needed].
[edit] SourceBringing Up Baby is an adaptation of a short story by Hagar Wilde that originally appeared in Collier's Weekly magazine on April 10, 1937.[1] Wilde and Dudley Nichols adapted the screenplay. [edit] PlotDavid Huxley (Cary Grant) is a mild-mannered paleontologist beleaguered by problems. For the past four years, he has been trying to assemble the skeleton of a Brontosaurus but is missing one bone (an "intercostal clavicle"). To add to the stress, he is about to get married to a dour woman, Alice Swallow (Virginia Walker) with a severe personality and must make a favorable impression upon a Mrs. Random (May Robson), a wealthy woman who is considering donating one million dollars to his museum. The day before his planned wedding, David meets Susan Vance (Katharine Hepburn) by chance on a golf course. She is a free-spirited young lady and, unknown to him at first, happens to be Mrs. Random's niece. Susan's brother Mark has sent her a tame leopard from Brazil[2] named "Baby", which she is supposed to give to her aunt. Susan believes David is a zoologist rather than a paleontologist and she practically stalks him in order to get David to go to her country home in Connecticut to help her take care of Baby. Complications arise as Susan decides that she has fallen in love with David and she endeavors to keep him at her house for as long as possible to prevent him from marrying his colleague. While David is there, Susan's dog George (Asta) steals and buries the last dinosaur bone that David needs to complete his Brontosaurus skeleton at the museum. Susan's aunt, Mrs. Elizabeth Random arrives. She is unaware of who David really is because Susan has introduced him as a man named "Mr. Bone". Baby runs off, as do George and a decidedly untame leopard from a nearby circus that Susan and David had inadvertently let loose from its cage, thinking it was Baby. Now Susan and David must find Baby, George, and the dinosaur bone, while ensuring that Mrs. Random donates her million dollars to the museum. To accomplish this, they must first get out of the county jail, where they have been mistakenly locked up by a befuddled town constable, Constable Slocum (Walter Catlett) for breaking into the house of Dr. Fritz Lehman (Fritz Feld).[3] Susan tells the constable that they are all gangsters in "The Leopard Gang"; she refers to herself as "Swingin' Door Susie" and David as "Jerry the Nipper" (a name Cary Grant's character was called by Irene Dunn in the movie The Awful Truth, also starring Asta). David then tells the constable that she is making up everything "from motion pictures she's seen." Eventually, Alexander Peabody (George Irving) shows up to verify everyone's identity, and after Baby and George stroll into the station, Susan, who has sneaked out of a window, unwittingly captures the circus leopard, although David saves her (by using a chair to shoo the leopard into a jail cell and then locking it inside). A few weeks later, Susan finds David, who has been jilted by Alice and his donation to the museum been rejected, working on his brontosaurus reconstruction at the museum. After presenting him with his bone, which George finally had returned, Susan informs David that she is donating a million dollars that Elizabeth has given to her to the museum. Then while perched on a tall ladder that scales the dinosaur, she extracts a confession of love from David. Although the excited Susan causes the one-of-a-kind reconstruction to collapse in a heap, David laughs at his misfortune and embraces his bride-to-be.[4] [edit] Cast
[edit] Use of word "gay"It is debated whether Bringing Up Baby is the first work of fiction, aside from pornography, to use the word "gay" in a homosexual context.[5][6] In the scene in question, Cary Grant's character is wearing a woman's marabou-trimmed negligee, and when asked why replies, in an exasperated tone, "Because I just went gay all of a sudden!", leaping into the air on the word "gay". It is not certain whether the word is being used in its older sense of "happy", or whether it was intentionally a joking reference to homosexuality. According to Robert Chapman's The Dictionary of American Slang, the adjective "gay" was used by homosexuals, among themselves, in this sense since at least 1920. Donald Webster Cory writes in The Homosexual in America (1951) that "Psychoanalysts have informed me that their homosexual patients were calling themselves gay in the nineteen-twenties, and certainly by the nineteen-thirties it was the most common word in use by homosexuals themselves." It was not, however, in common usage. Cory continues that it was such an insiders' term that "an advertisement for a roommate can actually ask for a gay youth, but could not possibly call for a homosexual."[7][8] The term "gay" did not become widely familiar to the general public until the Stonewall riots in 1969.[9] In the film, the word "gay" was apparently an ad-lib by Grant. According to Vito Russo, the script originally had Grant's character say "I... I suppose you think its odd, my wearing this. I realize it looks odd... I don't usually... I mean, I don't own one of these." Russo suggests that this indicates that people in Hollywood, at least in Grant's circles, were already familiar with the slang connotations of the word. However, neither Grant himself nor anyone involved in the film ever suggested this.[10] [edit] Legacy[edit] Awards and honorsIn 1990, Bringing Up Baby was selected for preservation in the National Film Registry by the Library of Congress as being "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant", the second year that the registry started preserving films. Entertainment Weekly voted the film number twenty-four on its list of the greatest films. In 2000, readers of Total Film magazine voted it the forty-seventh greatest comedy film of all time. It is also consistently on the Internet Movie Database's list of top 250 films. Premiere ranked Cary Grant's performance as Dr. David Huxley #68 on their list of The 100 Greatest Performances of All Time.[11] They also ranked the character of Susan Vance #21 on their list of The 100 Greatest Movie Characters of All Time.[12] American Film Institute recognition
[edit] AdaptationsBringing Up Baby has been adapted several different times. Hawks himself recycled the nightclub scene in which Hepburn's dress is torn and Grant walks behind her in his 1964 comedy Man's Favorite Sport. In 1972, Peter Bogdanovich adapted the film as What's Up, Doc?, starring Barbra Streisand; in his commentary track for Bringing Up Baby, Bogdanovich discusses how the coat ripping scene in What's Up, Doc? was based directly on the scene in which Grant's coat (and then Hepburn's dress) is torn in Baby. The 1987 movie Who's That Girl?, starring Madonna, is also loosely based on Bringing Up Baby. [edit] References
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