Bringing Up Baby 1938
I borrowed this movie using a Screen Pass. With Cary Grant and Katharine Hepburn and a 94% fresh rating on Rotten Tomatoes and spots on both of the AFI Top 100 lists it seemed like a good bet. However, right off the bat I realized this would be a struggle. In the opening scene Cary Grant, playing a paleontologist, acts like a goofy nerd, waving maybe a cow femur around and saying it is a dinosaur’s tail bone. This is not a role that fits him and he plays it terribly. Once Hepburn shows up, it gets even worse. Supposedly a screwball comedy, the dialogue isn’t that sharp, mostly Hepburn saying and doing a bunch of ridiculous things and Cary Grant acting flumoxed and trying to get away from her. This continues endlessly. It is really more of a zany madcap movie that feels very improvised and neither actor does a good job with the material. Side characters are added with the same sort of result. Hepburn and Grant should have been great in this, made only two years before the vastly superior The Philadelphia Story, so I have to blame the script and director Howard Hawks for letting his actors go. Hepburn has some flashes of her usual charm, but it is hidden by this obnoxious character. Cary Grant seems out of his element doing this type of comedy, particularly trying to be stammering and it is never believable that he would fall for this person who does nothing but torment him. In the final scene he is still scared of Hepburn, but then just before she ruins his life’s work, he says he has had a great time with her and declares his love for her despite an absence of romantic sparks the entire movie. Some of the plot twists involving a leopard are sort of okay, but not enough to build a plot around and I worry how a leopard might have been treated in 1938. This is a terrible misfire of a movie.
Written: 21 Oct 2021
Owned on: Digital