Bringing Up Baby

GREAT comic plots, whatever the media, employ a superstructure of sometimes infinite complexity resting on a few simple premises and motivations. Through an induced preoccupation with the superstructure rather than the foundation, consequences many times removed from their causes are made to combine almost chemically into a facade which distracts from and undercuts the basic confict, ultimately vanishing with great speed and leaving the conflict solved. The effect is that of an unforgivably mixed metaphor which on second glance--and, therefore, also on the glance of the subconscious--reduces itself to a gut consistency. Hence satisfaction.

If the links between premises and complications are logical, one is thankful. If the premises themselves are logical, one has every right to be delirious.

Seeing Bringing Up Baby, one has every right to be delirious. Among devotees of its director, Howard Hawks, are those who consider Baby very serious both as a romance and as a treatment of the theme of emasculation. How serious may be arguable, but such an interpreation is admissible precisely because the two main characters, played by Cary Grant and Katharine Hepburn, are drawn neatly and adhered to unflaggingly. Grant is a man torn between dignity and free expression; Hepburn is a woman who expresses herself.

The essential simplicity of construction underlying Bringing Up Baby seems the more remarkable when you consider that it belongs to that class of movies known as "screwball comedies." Theoretically Baby is closer in genre to the Marx Bros. Pictures than to high comedies on the order of The Philadelphia Story. In practice, the presence of Grant and Hepburn, stars of great craft and surprising versatility, defines the tone of Baby as much as its insane story-line. When Grant says, "It isn't that I don't like you, Susan, because in moments of quiet I feel strangely drawn to you ... only there haven't been any quiet moments," genuine pathos is evoked.

The supporting cast is equally worthy. Charles Ruggles, as a big-game hunter, stumbles over his own name convincingly; May Robson plays the dowager matron with a haughtiness that is classic; George, the dog, comes across as throughly repellent; and the two leopards--there are two leopards--achieve the remarkable feat of defining characters distinct from each other, a tribute to professional animals of uncommon talent or to the director who knows his way around them.