An excerpt from "Dancing in the Dark: A Cultural History of the Great Depression" by Morris Dickstein.

This is an excerpt from Morris Dickstein's Dancing in the Dark: A Cultural History of the Great Depression, which will be published on Sept. 14, 2009.

If high spirits were what the Depression needed, at least occasionally, there was never a more manically high-spirited movie than Howard Hawks’ Bringing Up Baby, perhaps the definitive 1930s version of the daffy rich. The film failed with its original audience but has since become a favorite of film buffs and film scholars alike, in part because it’s such a cunningly constructed Freudian farce, with every detail contributing perfectly to the larger effect, which is very close to sheer madness. Hawks and his screenwriter, Dudley Nichols, were masterful at teasing and circumventing the Hollywood censors; there’s hardly a scene in Bringing Up Baby, beginning with Cary Grant’s conversation with his prudish fiancée, Miss Swallow, that isn’t full of double entendres, for this film is largely about libido itself, the usually unspoken but always implied energy that drives screwball comedy. It provides a lesson in how to make a movie about sex with no actual sex in it.

Hawks was the only one of the great male action directors who was also able to create strong, independent women and give them parity with men. As a woman who was clearly both strong-willed and distinctly upper class, Katharine Hepburn was a problematic actress for a period that also loved the unspoiled but cloying innocence of Shirley Temple and Deanna Durbin. She was at her best in roles crafted especially for her, as in Stage Door, but the commercial failure of Bringing Up Baby ended her long career with RKO. (She would recoup almost immediately with Holiday, The Philadelphia Story, and then her long collaboration with Spencer Tracy, which revived the “taming” motif that had been muted by the intuitive feminism of the late 1930s.) Vibrant but mannered, supremely confident in her athletic body and Brahmin speech patterns, radiating a cultivation that was light-years away from mass taste, the tomboyish Hepburn wasn’t an actress you’d immediately cast as a sex object. But this was exactly what the conventions of screwball comedy enabled Hawks and Nichols to bring off. Compared with Miss Swallow, who won’t allow Grant to take time off for a honeymoon, and for whom marriage will be just an extension of their scientific work on prehistoric fossils, Hepburn represents a life of giddiness and distraction, lived entirely on whim and caprice, the kind of thing the rich can afford more easily than anyone else.

Never has a film put anti-intellectualism to better use, not even in Hawks’ own later farce Ball of Fire (1941), about a nest of eggheads. We meet Grant in Bringing Up Baby as a researcher named David, the cartoon of a man of science, devoting his life to reassembling the bones of a dinosaur. Despite his halfhearted protests, his fiancée insists that their marriage will be all business—no babies, no honeymoon, no hanky-panky: The dinosaur will be their baby. By thoroughly disrupting his life with adventures too far-fetched to recount here, Susan (Hepburn) will enable him to put flesh on those ancient dry bones. With sublime lunacy, she compromises him in every way, breaking down his dignity with her daffiness as an instinctive method of opening him up. In place of his dinosaur bones she brings “Baby,” a pet leopard, into his life, but along the way they must also deal with another leopard, Baby’s savage but almost indistinguishable double, as if to remind us that such an anarchic life force can be threatening and destructive as well as life-enhancing. Yet Hepburn, too, is Baby; for David she is an exotic species from a different world.

Tags: Bringing Up Baby, Dancing in the Dark, Great Depression, Morris Dickstein, screwball comedy

Morris Dickstein is Distinguished Professor of English and Theatre at CUNY Graduate Center and the author of Gates of Eden and Leopards in the Temple, among other works. He lives with his wife in New York City.

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Why "Bringing Up Baby" is the Perfect Screwball Comedy