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'''Bringing Up Baby''', starring 'Katharine Hepburn' and 'Cary Grant', is a 1938 screwball comedy telling the story of a scientist winding up in various predicaments involving a woman with a unique sense of logic and a leopard named Baby. The supporting cast includes Charles Ruggles, Barry Fitzgerald, Walter Catlett, and May Robson, and the movie was directed by Howard Hawks.
Adapted by Dudley Nichols and Hagar Wilde from a story by Hagar Wilde, ''Bringing Up Baby'' was an infamous box office catastrophe, causing Hawks to be fired from his next RKO film (''Gunga Din'', also starring Cary Grant) and forcing Hepburn to buy out her contract. As time went on, however, the movie gained more and more attention and is now revered as an almost surreally sophisticated classic widely noted for being decades ahead of its time, continuing to generate revenue for Hepburn's estate.
''Bringing up Baby'' is usually on the Internet Movie Database's list of top 250 films, was number ninety-seven on American Film Institute's 100 Years, 100 Movies, number fourteen on its 100 Years, 100 Laughs, and number fifty-one on its 100 Years, 100 Passions, and has been selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry. ''Entertainment Weekly'' also voted the film number twenty-four on its list of the Greatest Films. In 2000, readers of ''Total Film'' magazine voted it the forty-seventh greatest comedy film of all time. The 1987 movie ''Who's That Girl?'' starring Madonna is loosely based on this film, as is the 1972 Barbra Striesand classic ''What's Up, Doc?'', directed by Peter Bogdanovich.

Contents

Plot

Cast

Usage of the Word "Gay"

Footnote

External links

Plot

David Huxley (Cary Grant) is a mild-mannered paleontologist beleaguered by problems. For the past four years, he has been trying to assemble the skeleton of a Brontosaurus but is missing one bone (an "intercostal clavicle"). To add to the stress, he is about to get married to a dour woman with a severe personality and must make a favorable impression upon a Mrs. Random, a wealthy woman who is considering donating one million dollars to his museum. The day before his planned wedding, David meets Susan Vance (Katharine Hepburn) by chance. She is a free-spirited young lady and, unknown to him at first, happens to be Mrs. Random's niece.
Susan's brother (Mark) has sent her a tame leopard from Brazil, "Baby," which she is supposed to give to her aunt. Susan believes David is a zoologist rather than a paleontologist and she practically stalks him in order to get David to go to her country home in Connecticut to help her take care of Baby. Complications arise as Susan decides that she has fallen in love with David and she endeavors to keep him at her house for as long as possible to prevent him from marrying his colleague. At this point, the plot becomes further entangled as Susan's dog, George, steals and buries the last dinosaur bone that David needs to complete his brontosaurus skeleton at the museum. Susan's aunt Elizabeth (Mrs. Random) arrives. She is unaware of who David really is because Susan has introduced him as a man named "Mr. Bone". Baby runs off, as do George and a decidedly untame leopard from a nearby circus that Susan and David had inadvertently let loose from its cage, thinking it was Baby. Now Susan and David must find Baby, George the dog, and the dinosaur bone, while ensuring that Mrs. Random donates her million dollars to the museum. To accomplish this, they must first get out of the county jail, where they've been mistakenly locked up by a befuddled town constable.

Cast

'Katharine Hepburn' ... Susan Vance

'Cary Grant' ... Dr. David Huxley

'Charles Ruggles' ... Maj. Horace Applegate (as Charlie Ruggles)

'Walter Catlett' ... Constable Slocum

'Barry Fitzgerald' ... Mr. Gogarty

'May Robson' ... Aunt Elizabeth Random

'Fritz Feld' ... Dr. Fritz Lehman

'Leona Roberts' ... Mrs. Hannah Gogarty

'George Irving' ... Dr. Alexander Peabody

'Tala Birell' ... Mrs. Lehman

'Virginia Walker' ... Alice Swallow

'John Kelly' ... Elmer

'Asta' ... George, the Dog

'Nissa' ... Baby, the leopard

'Ward Bond' ... Motorcycle cop at jail (uncredited)

'Jack Carson' ... Circus Roustabout (uncredited)

'Karl 'Karchy' Kosiczky' ... Midget (uncredited)

Usage of the Word "Gay"

Arguably, this was the first film to use the word "''gay''" in a homosexual context. Robert Chapman's ''The Dictionary of American Slang'' reports that the adjective "gay" was used by homosexuals, among themselves, in this sense since at least 1920. Donald Webster Cory writes in ''The Homosexual in America'' (1951):
:"Psychoanalysts have informed me that their homosexual patients were calling themselves gay in the nineteen-twenties, and certainly by the nineteen-thirties it was the most common word in use by homosexuals themselves."
Donald Webster Cory wrote that it was such an insiders' term that "an advertisement for a roommate can actually ask for a gay youth, but could not possibly call for a homosexual." According to Vito Russo the script actually had David (Grant) saying, in an attempt to explain why he is wearing Susan's marabou-trimmed negligee, "I... I suppose you think its odd, my wearing this. I realize it looks odd... I don't usually... I mean, I don't own one of these." However Grant ad-libbed his own line, "Because I just went ''gay'' all of a sudden." Vito Russo had pointed out that this was an indication that people in Hollywood, at least in Grant's circles, were already familiar with the slang connotations of the word. However, neither Grant himself nor anyone involved in the film ever confirmed this. Of course Grant was speculated to have been bisexual, despite his denials, and may have avoided the question altogether. The question may have never been asked in the first place. The term "gay" did not become widely familiar to the general public until the Stonewall riots in 1969.^[1]

Footnote

1. Vito Russo, ''The Celluloid Closet: Homosexuality in the Movies'' [revised edition] Harrow & Row, 1987. p. 47

External links

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