Hawks’ Baby:
                                                                                          A Neglected Child and Proud Father
 
 
            When The Shawshank Redemption hit theatres it didn’t make much of a splash and certainly didn’t gross very much; now it is regarded as one of the greatest films of all time (IMDB). Likewise, in 2004 the total box-office gross of all five Best Picture nominees didn’t add up to that of Spider-Man 2, at least, not until after they’d been nominated for an Academy Award. Over the years audiences and critics alike have made their share of blunders, but few of them face such a collective reversal as the 1938 film Bringing Up Baby, which went from box-office calamity and critical censure to being held up as one of the pillars of the screwball comedy genre of the early twentieth century.
            By 1938 screwball comedy was already well into its short lifespan. Two of its greatest films had been seen in 1934 with Frank Capra’s It Happened One Night and Howard Hawks’ first screwball comedy, Twentieth Century. The genre was really, in the words of Duane Byrge and Robert Miller, a “fleeting subgenre” which “[began] just a few years after the birth of the sound film [and] less than a decade later… receded from the interests of film makers and the public alike” (1). But with two hits in 1934 the stage was set, however briefly, for further forays into this frenetic type of film. Capra, however, did not return to the screwball comedy until long past the genre’s days of glory, when he made his 1944 film Arsenic and Old Lace. Even Hawks worked on other things, cementing his reputation as “the greatest director of American genre films” (Mast) It wasn’t until 1938 that he revisited the genre he’d helped create for an encore with a script by Dudley Nichols and Hagar Wilde about a straight-laced paleontologist, a rich, eccentrically hyper heiress, and an endearing leopard. It was called Bringing Up Baby, and was produced by the now defunct RKO studios.
            Under contract with the studio at the time was a young and struggling actress named Katharine Hepburn who would play the role of the heiress, Susan Vance. Hepburn did not have any prior experience with screwball comedy and would not make her name there. The other star of the film, however, had a long history of comedy, having made a name for himself in such farcical outings as Sylvia Scarlett and The Awful Truth (also a screwball classic); he was Cary Grant, and he was the only one who would emerge unscathed from the film.
Baby was faced with production problems from the offset. The budget for the film was deemed too high to expect any great return, and only after making a great many cuts and changes could Hawks proceed (Jewell 80). But despite these cuts the film began to run above budget and, rather than lose everything by halting production, the studio gambled and allowed the film to run through to its eventual budget of over a million dollars, roughly 400,000 more than they’d originally intended (Jewell 80). No doubt it seemed like a good idea at the time. Screwball comedy was lucrative, with numerous films hitting screens that very year: Holiday (also starring Grant), Bluebeard’s Eighth Wife, and You Can’t Take It With You to name a few (La Screwball 1). It was a costly gamble, but made sense to the studio. Sadly, it didn’t pay off.
            Howard Hawks’ second screwball comedy, containing all the chaotic elements of the genre and marked with Hawks’ trademark rapid-fire dialogue, delivered with perfection by Grant and Hepburn, was not a success. It was, rather, a box-office debacle and grossed little more than half of what it cost to make. Despite having everything going for it, the film was hailed by the New York Times as “cliché” that was only good if you’d never seen another film before in your life (Nugent 17), Hepburn was dubbed fatal for the box-office and director Howard Hawks’ contract with RKO was terminated[1]. It was a unique position for Hawks, an artist who, in the words of film scholar David Boxwell, was typically “able to retain a great deal of autonomy in the studio system” (1). Rather than another outing with screwball comedy, Hawks spent the following years rebuilding his reputation, beginning with the drama Only Angels Have Wings. At the time the best thing that came out of the disaster of Baby was the partnership which developed between Hawks and leading man Grant. They did numerous films together and when Hawks finally revisited the screwball comedy in 1949, it was with Grant in I Was a Male War Bride and again with Grant in 1952 in Monkey Business. But by his third and fourth screwball comedies Baby was a distant memory as was the genre itself. But although the screwball comedy would never again be profitable enough for an entire film, Hawks would use elements of the genre in many of his films to come. In his western drama Rio Bravo (1958), for example, this scene between the hotel-keeper Carlos (Pedro Gonzalez) and the stressed town sheriff Chance (John Wayne) could easily have come straight from any Hawksian screwball:
 
Carlos: She told me not to wake you, senor.
Chance: Well you can tell her… Fool.
Carlos: Tell her she’s a fool?
Chance: No… I’ll tell her myself.
Carlos: You tell her she’s a fool?
Chance: I didn’t say I was!
 
 
Even Hawks’ Oscar nominated drama Sergeant York wasn’t without its lighter moments; although few, if any of Hawks’ other films matched the madcap intensity of the failed Bringing Up Baby.
            Why Bringing Up Baby failed is a difficult question. The plot, though varying in the specifics, was no different from other such comedies. It is arguably the degree to which Hawks took the film that turned off audiences, namely with Katharine Hepburn, whose “uninhibitedly aggressive, female prankster-pursuer proved to be too extreme in its liberated looniness for contemporary tastes” (Byrge and Miller 6). For example, the scene on the golf course where a befuddled Cary Grant tries desperately to explain that the balls she’s playing is his; she pays him no heed at all whist giving him a great deal of attention in her own lively way. Byrge and Miller laud the same qualities for the film overall: “Coupled with a spiraling plot web of improbable complications and embarrassments, [Bringing Up Baby] may have been too extreme for the contemporary audience, already surfeited by a barrage of screwball predecessors on their screens” (33). Indeed, the world of Baby is a frenzied one, with twists at every corner, switcheroos and wacky supporting characters. Howard Hawks himself admitted that he might have gone a bit too far, saying he, “Regarded it as a mistake that he didn’t include a single voice of sanity among this collection of crazies” (Hawks qtd in Calhoun 71). Yet it is the sheer extent to which Hawks took the film that set Baby apart from the other screwball comedies of the time; both then at the box-office and now in the history of cinema.
            On May 7, 1989, 51 years after The New York times panned Brining Up Baby, Vincent Canby wrote glowingly that Baby had “more pratfalls than Abbott and Costello” and was “the film that most clearly demonstrates Cary Grant’s sublime comic gifts” (H32). More than eight decades after the film was released, it has entered cinematic history as one of Howard Hawks’ finest and one of the cornerstones of screwball comedy. Whereas most films soon fade into a drab periphery, Bringing Up Baby has gained momentum, passing through its own generation to one more ready to accept its excessive energy level. No longer is a female character with such aggressive gusto as Katharine Hepburn’s Susan Vance so deplorable to the public. In a society that is used to such dominant female characters as the hardened Ridley (Sigourney Weaver) in Alien or the effervescent Elle (Reese Witherspoon) of Legally Blonde. Bringing Up Baby was a screwball comedy, yes, but one ahead of its time. This spelled doom for its original release, but means it has ultimately fared better than most of its contemporaries. There are some who even go so far as to claim that it transcends the genre, saying that “the only rivals to Bringing Up Baby in the talking comedy stratosphere are Duck Soup and Some Like It Hot” (Calhoun 71). But though varying in degree, it is generally acknowledge that Bringing Up Baby is a classic film, one of Hawks’ finest, and a milestone of cinema.
            The exact elements that make a film a bomb one moment and a hit the next are utterly mysterious. In the case of most films that make that transition from box-office disaster to endearing classic the turnaround is quick, often only as long as it takes for a film to arrive on DVD. In the case of Baby, however, it took decades and was long considered a mark against both leading lady Hepburn and director Hawks. But now, in great part due to the film’s DVD release, a much more appreciative public can enjoy the landmark screwball comedy that is Bringing Up Baby, and we can simply scratch our heads and wonder “why?” at the critics who insisted that the film was lamentable “cliché.
 
Works Cited
 
 
 
Boxwell, David. “Howard Hawks.” Senses of Cinema (May 2002) 3 April 2007
http://www.sensesofcinema.com/contents/directors/02/hawks.html
 
Bringing Up Baby, Dir. Howard Hawks. Perf. Cary Grant, Katherine Hepburn, Charles
Ruggles, and Barry Fitzgerald. 1938. DVD. Turner Home Entertainment, 2005.
 
Byrge, Duane, and Robert Milton Miller. The Screwball Comedy Films: A History and
Filmography. McFarland Inc, 1991.
 
Calhoun, John. “Bringing Up Baby.” Cineaste (2005) 3 April 2007 30.3:70-71
 
Canby, Vincent. “Pratfalls and Nitwits, Leopards and Hawks; Critics’ Choice.” New
York Times May 7, 1989: H32.
 
Mast, Gerald “Howard Hawks.” International Dictionary of Films and Filmmakers. Ed. Tom Pendergast. St. James Press: 2000.
 
Internet Movie Database. “Top 250 Films” 7 April 2007, http://imdb.com/chart/top
 
Jewell, Richard B. “How Howard Hawks Brought Baby Up: An Apologia for the Studio
System.” Journal of Popular Film and Television. 11.4 (1984): 158-165
 
Nugent, Frank S. “The Screen: Cliché Expert Encounters Bringing Up Baby At Music
Hall.” New York Times Mar 4, 1938: 17.
 
Rickman, Gregg. “Screwball Comedy.” GreenCine (2005) 3 April 2007
http://www.greencine.com/static/primers/screwball.jsp
 
Rio Bravo. Dir. Howard Hawks. Perf. John Wayne, Dean Martin, Ricky Nelson, Angie
Dickinson, and Walter Brennan. 1959. DVD. Warner Home Video, 2001.
 
La Screwball Comedy, 8 April 2007
http://cinemaclassic.free.fr/hollywood/comedy/screwball_comedy.html
 
Sergeant York. Dir. Howard Hawks. Perf. Gary Cooper, Walter Brennan, Joan Leslie,
and George Tobias. 1941. VHS. Warner Home Video, 2001.
 

[1] At the time Hawks wanted to direct Gunga Din, which had been a pet project of his before being shelved by the studio earlier. Hawks was set to direct Gunga Din but after Bringing Up Baby tanked and Hawks was let go, the film was turned over to George Stevens to direct.