Bringing Up Baby

Bringing Up Baby

Release Date

1938

Director

  • Howard Hawkes

Cast

  • Katharine Hepburn
  • Cary Grant
  • Charles Ruggles

While trying to secure a $1 million donation for his museum, a befuddled paleontologist is pursued by a flighty and infuriating heiress and her pet leopard, Baby.

Screwball sparks fly when Cary Grant and Katharine Hepburn let loose in one of the fastest and funniest films ever made—a high-wire act of invention that took American screen comedy to new heights of absurdity. Hoping to procure a million-dollar endowment from a wealthy society matron for his museum, a hapless paleontologist (Grant) finds himself entangled with a dizzy heiress (Hepburn) as the manic misadventures pile up—a missing dinosaur bone, a leopard on the loose, and plenty of gender-bending mayhem among them. Bringing Up Baby’s sophisticated dialogue, spontaneous performances, and giddy innuendo come together in a whirlwind of comic chaos captured with lightning-in-a-bottle brio by director Howard Hawks. [Criterion Collection]



Banner image courtesy of RKO Radio Pictures/Photofest