my favorite movie of 1938:

Bringing up Baby

(Katharine Hepburn, Cary Grant, Charlie Ruggles, May Robson, Walter Catlett, Nissa the leopard, Skippy the dog. Directed by Howard Hawks.)

When you look up “screwball comedy” on Wikipedia, the first image you see is a poster for Bringing up Baby. In a screwball comedy, love doesn’t bloom in the openly romantic and sensual way we expect to see in movies, but secretly builds up through wild adventures — as Cary Grant hints when he says to Katharine Hepburn:

It isn’t that I don’t like you. … In moments of quiet, I’m strangely drawn toward you. But, well, there haven’t been any quiet moments.

No, there isn’t much “quiet” about Bringing Up Baby. The movie seems to be in a mad rush to give us as many memorable lines and scenes as possible, some of which were surprisingly risque in 1938. Katharine Hepburn accidentally tears the back of her dress at a classy outing and needs Cary Grant to protect her exposed underwear. Later, Grant wears a woman’s nightgown while leaping into the air and exclaiming that he “just went gay all of a sudden!”

“Baby” of the title is a leopard, which is only one of the animals in this movie: there’s also the dog, and the dinosaur …

Stream Bringing up Baby on these sites.

Click here for the full list of my favorite movie(s) of each year from 1920 to 2020.