Bringing Up Baby

Directed by Howard Hawks for RKO Radio Pictures and released in February 1938, Bringing Up Baby was written by Dudley Nichols and Hagar Wilde, based on Wilde's short story. Hawks, working with Hepburn for the first time, reportedly coached her toward a looser, more instinctive comic style, and Grant drew on his vaudeville and acrobatic background, including a nod to his idol Harold Lloyd, to shape David's fussy, bespectacled physical comedy. The production was notoriously overbudget and overschedule, contributing to a box-office disappointment on first release, and it followed Grant's similarly structured work in Topper and The Awful Truth the previous year, cementing his shift into screwball comedy.

On its February 1938 release, Bringing Up Baby was, by most contemporary accounts, a disappointment. It arrived forty days behind schedule and roughly $330,000 over its original budget, and despite strong preview scores it failed to recoup its cost on first run, contributing to the Independent Theatre Owners of America's notorious labeling of Katharine Hepburn as "box office poison." For Grant, however, the film consolidated a shift already underway with The Awful Truth the previous year: from leading man in dramas and star vehicles built around others to a comic performer capable of carrying farce through sustained physical and verbal invention. His round Harold Lloyd-style glasses, his controlled hysteria opposite Hepburn's heiress, and his willingness to be humiliated, chased and outwitted for two hours established a template — the graceful man undone by chaos he cannot control — that would recur throughout his subsequent comic work.

Bringing Up Baby's reputation reversed dramatically after its release, rebuilding through television broadcasts in the 1950s until it came to be regarded as one of the defining achievements of American screwball comedy. Selected for the National Film Registry in 1990 and a fixture of the American Film Institute's 100 Years...100 Movies list, it is now studied as a nearly perfect demonstration of the genre's mechanics: escalating misunderstanding, a leopard loose in Connecticut, a torn dress, a collapsing dinosaur skeleton, all sustained by the friction between Grant's fussy paleontologist and Hepburn's oblivious heiress. Modern critics and historians treat the pairing of Grant and Hepburn here as one of the emblematic partnerships of the studio era, and Grant's performance as David Huxley remains a touchstone for the "reactive" comic hero, a man whose stability is the joke precisely because the world refuses to let him keep it.