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Rating: 
Summary: The best comedy of a lifetime. Perhaps of all time.
Review: "Bringing Up Baby" is one of my all time favorite comedies. Cary Grant and Katherine Hepburn are perfect in this fast paced slapstick involving a leopard, a difficult dog and a valuable dinosaur bone. Grant and Hepburn are naturally funny together, and in this film it's one hilarious misadventure after another for them. There are added bonuses in this movie with the excellent performaces of May Robson as the rich Aunt Elizabeth, and Charlie Ruggles as Major Horace Applegate. I thought it was especially funny while Major Applegate imitated the leopard's mating cry at the dinner table, the real leopard answered it outside in which Susan explained, "It was probably an echo." I couldn't stop laughing at the scene where Charlie Ruggles tried to put a rope around the wild leopard's neck while calling it like a tame housecat! "Here, kitty kitty kitty kitty kitty!" It's a priceless film worth seeing over and over again!
Rating:
Summary: One of the greatest screwball comedies of all time
Review: BRINGING UP BABY hits the ground running and then never lets up. Director Howard Hawks is generally credited with inventing the screwball comedy with TWENTIETH CENTURY. He then went on later to direct two of the greatest screwball comedies every made, HIS GIRL FRIDAY and this film. All these films are remarkable for their frenetic pace, rapid fire, overlapping dialog, and air of surreality. People in these films don't reason like people in the world we know. Labeling it Screwball was merely an accident of history. It could just as easily, and perhaps more accurately, have been described as Cinema of the Absurd. Cary Grant, bearing a strong resemblance to Harold Lloyd, plays David Huxley a.k.a. (by the end of the picture) David Bone a.k.a. Jerry the Nipster. One of the delights of the film is witnessing the way in which this bland, unexciting scientist is gradually pulled deeper and deeper into the life of nutty heiress Katherine Hepburn (Susan). Grant does a great job of portraying someone who is utterly befuddled and way, way over his head. And the helpless way he constantly holds up his finger and opens his mouth, foolishly hoping to get a word or two into the conversation, is wonderful. All things considered, Cary Grant was probably the greatest screwball comedy actor we have ever had. Katherine Hepburn, while arguably our greatest screen actress, is not the greatest screwball actress. That distinction clearly belongs to the incomparable Carole Lombard. But she is probably our second greatest. Absolutely nothing in her prior screen career could have led anyone to suspect that she was capable of a performance like she managed in BRINGING UP BABY. She had made her reputation as a dramatic actress, and as an actress who didn't always guarantee success in a film. In fact, BRINGING UP BABY was one of several box office disasters in which Hepburn appeared, and actually temporarily ended her career. Part of the fault lay with William Randolph Hearst, who hated Hepburn. The Hearst papers consistently criticized her, and labeled her "Box Office Poison." At any rate, the performance is one of Hepburn's greatest, and is probably her greatest comic performance. She was never nuttier or more anarchic than she was in this film. The supporting cast is just stunning, with such stalwarts as Charlie Ruggles and Barry Fitzgerald doing their usual great turn. The most surprising performance (apart from what was, at the time, the amazing revelation that Hepburn excelled in comedy) was by Walter Catlett, who was remarkable as Slocum, the town constable. His "investigation" of the "Leopard Gang" is one of the highlights of the film. His performance meshes precisely with that of Grant and Hepburn. The one thing that has always baffled me about this film is that "Baby," the leopard, is said to have been shipped to Susan from her brother who is in Brazil. The only spotted cat in South America is the jaguar, which is much stockier than a leopard, and as far as I know, not capable of being tamed. Leopards come from Africa. I am not sure why they had Baby coming from Brazil. I believe that there had been no interruption of international shipping in 1938. In THE LADY EVE in 1940, the ocean liner upon which Barbara Stanwyck meets Henry Fonda is sailing from South America. But in 1938, it should have been possible to have a ship come from Africa. Probably, this was just a goof in the script. BRINGING UP BABY may have been the earliest film to use the word "gay" to refer to being effeminate or gay.
Rating:
Summary: Kate the Great goes screwball!
Review: It's hard to believe that when "Bringing Up Baby" was first released in early 1938, it was a flop at the box-office, no doubt due to Katharine Hepburn being branded "box-office poison". However, with the passage of time as well as frequent showings on TV & video, this film has been judged to be the supreme example of the popular 1930's genre known as "screwball" comedy involving zany humor & seemingly implausible situations that the characters involved get themselves into & out of - so much so that "Bringing Up Baby" is now listed on the National Film Registry of the Library of Congress as being among a select group of American movies to be preserved for posterity. Kate the Great shines brightly in this, her first & only foray into slapstick humor, as she & Cary Grant progress from one disaster to another. Grant plays the role of David Huxley, a somewhat stuffy paleontologist trying to complete a dinosaur skeleton he's been working on for four years by obtaining the final fossilized bone - an "intercostal clavicle". Hepburn is Susan Vance, a wealthy heiress who plays a free-spirited counterpoint to Huxley's primness. Needless to say, the sparks start to fly after David & Susan first come into contact with each other. The screwball ride "Bringing Up Baby" takes the viewer on begins when Kate & Cary meet at a golf course where she plays his ball that was hooked off the first tee back to the 18th fairway, then starts to escalate when Hepburn drives off in Grant's car while he's riding on the running board. From there one must hang on for the even wilder ride that follows which includes a pet leopard named Baby (the film's namesake), a yappy wire-haired terrier named George (Asta from the "Thin Man" series) who steals the priceless dinosaur bone, a pompous big-game hunter who can't tell the sound of a leopard from that of a loon, and a second vicious leopard that escapes from a circus truck as it is taken to be destroyed. "Bringing Up Baby" is also strengthened by a solid supporting cast that includes Virginia Walker (a former Boston socialite in her first film) as David Huxley's prudish fiancee Alice Swallow, May Robson as Susan Vance's aunt Elizabeth, Barry Fitzgerald as a temperamental Irish gardener, Charlie Ruggles as the big-game hunter, and - my personal favorite - Walter Catlett as a gesturing, posturing town constable. As an example of this movie's timelessness, an acquaintance told me of how they recently watched "Bringing Up Baby" with a group of teenagers who were literally rolling on the floor laughing at the on-screen antics. I'd be rather surprised if anyone watching this film for the first time wouldn't be doing the same thing.
Rating:
Summary: 5 stars for the movie, but 0 for its absence on DVD
Review: No plot review here--- it's been adequately done by plenty of viewers before me--- but just an urgent plea to the studio to PLEASE release this on DVD! This is THE classic screwball comedy, and how much better can it get than this? Cary Grant (with whom I fell in love at age 10 and never stopped), Katharine Hepburn (I just wanted to BE her since I was 10), and a couple of leopards, orchestrated into a symphony of hilarity by Howard Hawks. Nothing short of wonderful (bested, in my opinion, ONLY by The Philadelphia Story). So please please PLEASE let us have this timeless classic on DVD. And soon!
Rating:
Summary: I can't give you anything but love, Baby!
Review: Number 19 on AFI's Top 100 Comedies?? Are you joking? This is the best screwball comedy in the history of film. The dialogue is amazingly fast; the movie demands multiple viewings to get all of the jokes. Of course, Cary Grant and Katherine Hepburn are very nice to look at and play their parts perfectly (Hepburn's voice and LAUGH did annoy me the first time I watched it, but she grows on you). The supporting characters are hilarious - they're all old pros, and you can tell. Walter Catlett, who taught Hepburn slapstick timing, especially stands out as Constable Slocum. Buy or rent this movie to experience the perfect screwball comedy.
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