#88 ‘Bringing Up Baby’

Leopards, Lunacy, and the Screwball Gaslighting of a Paleontologist in a Bow Tie

Bringing Up Baby (1938) is the gold standard of screwball comedy—an unhinged ballet of chaos, courtship, and casual animal endangerment where Katherine Hepburn steamrolls Cary Grant with enough manic charm to flatten the entire Smithsonian. It’s fizzy, fast, and frequently hilarious. It’s also Exhibit A in the long history of Hollywood equating feminine agency with delightful insanity, and masculine boundaries with obstacles to be worn down like a shoe heel on Fifth Avenue.

Cary Grant plays David Huxley, a bespectacled, repressed paleontologist trying to secure a million-dollar museum donation and assemble a brontosaurus skeleton—because, sure, that’s what men did before therapy. Enter Susan Vance (Hepburn), a socialite hurricane who mistakes his life for a crossword puzzle and decides to solve him. Within minutes, she’s stolen his golf ball, crashed his date, borrowed his car, and kidnapped his entire trajectory with the wide-eyed conviction that chaos is courtship.

Susan doesn’t just pursue David—she derails him. And the film frames this as romance. Her love language is sabotage. She loses his bone (not a euphemism), convinces him to impersonate a big-game hunter, and drags him into the countryside with a leopard named Baby and a dog named George. Is she charming? Absolutely. Is she sociopathic? Also yes. But because she’s played by Hepburn—intelligent, luminous, and terrifying—we’re supposed to applaud her for showing David how to live.

And let’s be honest: David needs help. He’s so repressed he might fossilize mid-scene. But instead of encouraging emotional growth, the film insists the solution is for him to be abducted into a new life by a woman who never lets him finish a sentence. Hepburn’s Susan is smart and impulsive, but her intelligence is never allowed to stand alone—it must be filtered through kooky unpredictability, lest she seem too threatening. Classic.

The pacing is breathless, the dialogue stacked ten jokes deep. Howard Hawks directs like someone trying to outrun a fire, and the result is kinetic brilliance. The chemistry between Hepburn and Grant is combustible—less sexual tension than an ongoing custody battle over the script’s last shred of realism.

But beneath the comedy is a grim little truth about how women were allowed to exist on screen: either elegant objects of desire or batty forces of nature. Susan gets away with it because she’s beautiful. Because she’s rich. Because, ultimately, she wants what all 1930s heroines must want—a man, even if she has to flatten his professional life and skeletal legacy to get him.

4 out of 5 missing dinosaur bones
(One for Hepburn’s unrelenting brilliance. One for Grant’s pratfalling dignity. One for the sparkling script. One for the cinematic courage to let a woman be this extra. The missing star? Mauled by Baby the leopard, along with the idea that maybe, just maybe, a woman could be chaotic and introspective without the whole plot treating it like adorable pathology.)