Bringing Up Baby

Bringing Up Baby (1938) is the essence of thirties screwball comedy. It is also quintessential Howard Hawks, treating many of the director's favorite themes, particularly the loving war between the sexes. Bringing Up Baby features Katharine Hepburn as a flaky heiress and Cary Grant as an absentminded paleontologist, roles in which they come into their own as stars and deliver particularly fine comic performances. Pauline Kael has called the film the "American movies' closest equivalent to Restoration comedy." The comparison is based on the quick repartee and witty dialogue, a hallmark of Hawks's work and well conveyed here by Gerald Mast's transcription from the screen.

GERALD MAST was Professor of English at the University of Chicago. He was the author of The Comic Mind: Comedy and the Movies; Film/Cinema/Movie: A Theory of Experience; Howard Hawks, Storyteller; A Short History of the Movies and Can't Help Singin': The American Musical on Stage and Screen. 

Linda Avanzino and Robert Lyons now get the royalties