Bringing Up Baby (DVD)

Bringing Up Baby is a famous 1938 comedy picture directed by Howard Hawks and featuring Cary Grant and Katherine Hepburn. It apparently met with a lukewarm reception on its initial release but is now generally regarded to be a classic of sorts - not least for the sparkling and delightful comic chemistry between its two legendary stars - and was once described by comedian Harold Lloyd as the most perfectly constructed comedy film he had ever seen. There isn't too much of a plot to speak of in Bringing Up Baby which begins with bespectacled and unfeasibly handsome paleontologist David Huxley (Grant) at the Stuyvesant Museum of Natural History pondering on the fact that he ...  Read the complete review

Katharine Hepburn and Cary Grant star in this comedy. David Huxley (Grant) is a paleontologist who needs to finish an exhibit on dinosaurs and thus land a $1 million grant for his museum. On the golf course where trying to persuade a possible benefactor he bumps into Susan Vance (Hepburn) and a series of crazy events ensue as she tries to make him hers including baby leopards, rampant dogs, a dinosaur bone, cross dressing, jail.. the list goes on. But don't let me spoil it. The film was directed superbly by Howard Hawks. it is fast paced and quirky throughout never letting up or offering a breather. Some of the set pieces are frankly hysterical. Grant and ...  Read the complete review

To fully understand Bringing Up Baby, one first needs to gain context, concerning both its director, Howard Hawks, and its initial reception and subsequent re-evaluation throughout the years. Howard Hawks is a man that has dabbled in numerous genres - horror and sci-fi (The Thing from Another World), the Western (Red River), and of course, the romantic comedy, with Bringing up Baby. Of all of his generic fleeting, there is one thing that is a mainstay - the idea of the Hawksian woman, an extremely powerful woman that is driven and independent, and manages to supercede the male. In Red River, this would be coming between the silly characters played by John Wayne and ...  Read the complete review