Bringing Up Baby

A 102-minute black-and-white farce: a strait-laced paleontologist, days from completing a museum brontosaurus skeleton and days from his wedding, is hijacked by a heedless, fabulously wealthy heiress, her pet leopard Baby, and a fox terrier with a talent for burying things that matter. What follows is the era's definitive screwball comedy — a breathless, near-musical cascade of rapid-fire dialogue and physical gags orchestrated by a director at the peak of his control. Critics are effectively unanimous that the film's timing is flawless and its two leads form one of the great comic partnerships of the sound era: Grant, masterfully undone as the perpetually flummoxed straight man, and Hepburn, radiant and unstoppable as the human hurricane who dismantles his ordered life. The craft — Hawks' pacing, the razor-sharp ensemble work, the startlingly convincing animal interplay — is the kind that makes the film look effortless, and it still does.

The film's style is also its liability. Hawks works a "more is more" strategy, cramming a verbal or visual gag into nearly every second, and the plot is gloriously, defiantly thin — held together, as some critics have noted, more by momentum than by rhyme or reason. A sustained stretch in a jail cell is the most commonly cited sag, and there is a vocal minority, both now and then, who find the relentless zaniness exhausting rather than delightful, with Hepburn's Susan Vance reading to some as shrill and irritating rather than charming. Detractors call it lightweight; the single most frequent complaint is simply too much, too fast, for too long.

Underneath the chaos, the film plays the battle of the sexes as sustained psychological warfare with the era's gender roles neatly inverted: a strong, predatory woman pursues a weak, distracted man who spends the picture being progressively stripped of dignity, clothes, and composure. What's genuinely interesting about the critical record is how sharply reception has split over time. At release in 1938 it drew largely good reviews but flopped commercially — audiences reportedly couldn't find anyone to root for — and it helped earn Hepburn her infamous "box office poison" label. Its canonization came later, via television rediscovery and re-release, into near-unanimous modern reverence: today it is repeatedly named the quintessential screwball comedy, is preserved in the U.S. National Film Registry, and ranks among the American Film Institute's greatest and funniest American films. The disagreement now is less about quality than about taste — whether its manic register is comedy at its purest or one note too loud.