Screwball comedy, classic Hollywood’s most inspired invention, came of age in the years immediately after the Great Depression had turned everything topsy-turvy; consequently, everything feels backward. The rich are boobs, the butlers went to Harvard, dying girls get socked on the jaw, Cary Grant’s a nerd. Screwball inverts the accepted class structure of American society and turns gender roles inside out; it rockets along with a cynicism that feels both liberating and earned. And Bringing Up Baby is the most extreme and extremely funny example of the form.
Few films so well illustrate director Howard Hawks’s belief that men spend their lives holding dignity together while women are dedicated to blowing it all apart. Katharine Hepburn plays a series of widening disasters that happen to a fuddy-duddy paleontologist (Grant) who just wants to get married and locate his bone, not necessarily in that order. (The bone belongs to a dinosaur and at one point gets buried by a dog; even a child can look at the brontosaurus skeleton in the opening sequence and know it’s going to come crashing down before the end credits.)
The movie’s this close to Seussian anarchy, with characters talking the way we all wish we could talk: twice as fast and thrice as sharp. The story line’s ridiculous: two escaped leopards, Grant in a negligee yelping “I just went gay all of a sudden!,” Hepburn losing a heel and teetering on a midnight hillside in delight. The film is graceful enough to turn the woods of Greenwich, Connecticut, into Shakespeare’s Forest of Arden,and demonic enough to let Hepburn sink a ten-foot putt. Hawks understood that screwball is life with the disorder magnified, then gloriously ignored, and no more recklessly than here.
