Bringing Up Baby movie storyline. Mild mannered zoology professor Dr. David Huxley is excited by the news that an intercostal clavicle bone has been found to complete his brontosaurus skeleton, a project four years in the construction. He is equally excited about his imminent marriage to his assistant, the officious Alice Swallow, who is interested in him more for his work than for him as a person. David needs the $1 million endowment of wealthy dowager Mrs. Carleton Random to complete the project.
Her lawyer, Alexander Peabody, will make the decision on her behalf, so David needs to get in his favor. However, whenever David tries to make a good impression on Peabody, the same young woman always seems to do something to make him look bad. She is the flighty heiress Susan Vance. The more David wants Susan to go away, the more Susan seems not to want or be able to. But David eventually learns that Alexander Peabody is her good friend, who she calls Boopy, and Susan’s Aunt Elizabeth, with whom David has also made a bad impression without her knowing who he is, is Mrs. Carleton Random.
However getting in Aunt Elizabeth and Boopy’s good graces is not as easy as Susan smoothing the waters with them. Throw into the mix a tame pet leopard named Baby that Susan’s brother Mark inexplicably sends her from Brazil, Aunt Elizabeth’s big game hunting friend Major Horace Applegate, Aunt Elizabeth’s pet terrier George who has a penchant for burying bones and other things, and a traveling circus passing through town and David may never be able to finish his project or make it to his wedding. But David may come to the realization that there is something more important in his life.
Bringing Up Baby (1938) is a versatile director Howard Hawks comedy funny and more often regarded as the definitive movie crazy. It is also one of the funniest, oddest movies and most inspired of all time with its breathless pace characteristically zany antics and pratfalls, absurd situations and misunderstandings, the perfect sense of comic timing, cast completely screwball series of mishaps and wacky crazy, disasters, surprises and light romantic comedy. The non-stop, crackpot farce skewers many institutions, including psychiatry, the sterile field of science, the classes of the police and upper-class upper. At the time of its release, has failed miserably at the box office and was quickly forgotten until revived years later.
As is the case for many of Howard Hawks’ finest films (including the movie Scarface Crime (1932) Twentieth Century (1934), His Girl Friday (1940), To Have or not (1944), the thriller The Big Sleep (1946), Monkey Business (1952) and Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (1953)), this masterpiece has not been nominated for an Academy Award unique. Director Peter Bogdanovich has paid tribute to the Hollywood screwball comedy genre with a loose remake titled What’s Up, Doc (1972) with Barbra Streisand and Ryan O’Neal.
The fast-paced film is about the relationship of two unlikely people, played by actress Katharine Hepburn and Cary Grant actor playing against type in a classic “conflict” between the sexes: a madcap, scheming, aggressive, impulsive, prone to accidents and heir of the company Daffy, and a clumsy, awkward, distracted paleontologist, right, corny and stifling a natural history museum. This was the second of four films co-starring Hepburn and Grant [the others were Sylvia Scarlett (1936), Holiday (1938), and The Philadelphia Story (1940)]. Other characters are a sheriff in a small town, a drunken Irish gardener, a hunter of big game, and two leopards in Brazil.
Bringing Up Baby (1938)
Directed by: Howard Hawks
Starring: Katharine Hepburn, Cary Grant, Charles Ruggles, Walter Catlett, Barry Fitzgerald, May Robson, Fritz Feld, Leona Roberts, George Irving, Tala Birell, Virginia Walker, John Kelly
Screenplay by: Dudley Nichols, Hagar Wilde
Cinematography by: Russell Metty
Film Editing by: George Hively
Costume Design by: Howard Greer
Art Direction by: Van Nest Polglase
Music by: Roy Webb
Distributed by: RKO Radio Pictures
Release Date: February 16, 1938
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