Bringing Up Baby

Why it matters

• Bringing Up Baby stands as one of the defining achievements of screwball comedy, pushing speed, chaos, and romantic antagonism to an almost musical level of precision.
• Its reversal of gender expectations—making the male lead flustered, passive, and outmatched while the female lead drives the action—helped shape the modern romantic comedy’s comic dynamic.
• Though initially a commercial disappointment, the film became enormously influential as later critics and filmmakers recognized its radical comic rhythm, formal control, and anarchic wit.

Watch for

• Cary Grant’s physical and verbal comedy, especially the way David’s dignity disintegrates scene by scene into panic, confusion, and helpless attraction.
• Katharine Hepburn’s performance as Susan, whose relentless confidence and cheerful unpredictability make her both the engine of the farce and the film’s comic destabilizer.
• How Hawks sustains escalating chaos through pacing, overlapping complications, and perfectly timed entrances, exits, and reversals.
• The contrast between David’s world of scientific order and Susan’s world of impulse and disruption, which turns romance into a battle between control and surrender.

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