Bringing Up Baby 9781838713393, 9781844570706

Citation preview

Swaab Prelims

11/8/10

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To Andrew McDonald © Peter Swaab 2010 All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. No portion of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, Saffron House, 6–10 Kirby Street, London EC1N 8TS. Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. The author has asserted his right to be identified as the author of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. First published in 2010 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN on behalf of the BRITISH FILM INSTITUTE 21 Stephen Street, London W1T 1LN www.bfi.org.uk There’s more to discover about film and television through the BFI. Our world-renowned archive, cinemas, festivals, films, publications and learning resources are here to inspire you. Palgrave Macmillan in the UK is an imprint of Macmillan Publishers Limited, registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS. Palgrave Macmillan in the US is a division of St Martin’s Press LLC, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010. Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies and has companies and representatives throughout the world. Palgrave® and Macmillan® are registered trademarks in the United States, the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries. Series cover design: Ashley Western Series text design: ketchup/SE14 Images from Bringing Up Baby, © RKO Radio Pictures; Ball of Fire, Samuel Goldwyn Inc.; She Married Her Boss, Columbia Pictures Corporation; The Philadelphia Story, © Leow’s Incorporated; To Have and Have Not, © Warner Bros.; His Girl Friday, © Columbia Pictures Corporation; Only Angels Have Wings, © Columbia Pictures Corporation; It Happened One Night, Columbia Pictures Corporated; The Mad Miss Manton, RKO Radio Pictures; My Man Godfrey, © Universal Productions; Hatari!, © Paramount Pictures Corporation/Malabar Productions; The Awful Truth, Columbia Pictures Corporation; Cat People, © RKO Radio Pictures; Libelled Lady, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Corporation; Theodora Goes Wild, © California Pictures Corporation of California; Trouble in Paradise, Paramount Publix Corporation; Sullivan’s Travels, Paramount Pictures; Holiday, © Columbia Pictures Corporation; I Was a Male War Bride, © Twentieth Century-Fox Film Corporation; I Love Lucy, Desilu Productions, Inc.; Bewitched, ABC Television/Columbia Pictures Television. Set by Cambrian Typesetters, Camberley, Surrey Printed in China This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. Logging, pulping and manufacturing processes are expected to conform to the environmental regulations of the country of origin. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 19 18 17 16 15 14 13 12 11 10 ISBN 978–1–84457–070–6

Contents Acknowledgments

6

Introduction

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1 In New York

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2 In Connecticut

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3 In New York

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Appendix: Bringing Up Baby at the box office 118 Notes

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Credits

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Select Bibliography

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Acknowledgments My thanks to friends and colleagues who have helped with conversation, support, suggestions, movie-watching and draftreading: Lesley Benjamin, Kasia Boddy, Elisabeth Bronfen, Jonathan Crewe, Leslie Felperin, Fiona Frost, Graeme Frost, Judith Hawley, Kevin Jackson, Danny Karlin, Allen Reddick, Hannah Slapper, Ian Smith, Adam Strevens, Rob White, Melissa Zeiger. I’m especially grateful to Philip Horne for loans of rarities and valuable comments on a draft. My greatest debt is to Andrew McDonald.

Swaab Introduction

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BRINGING UP BABY

Introduction

Critics don’t ever know when a thing’s funny, so they don’t want to talk about it. I don’t know why a thing is funny. It just happens to be funny, but the poor damn critic has to write about it. But, actually, very few critics, in my opinion, know what the hell it’s all about. (Howard Hawks, quoted in McBride, Hawks on Hawks, p. 148)

‘Bringing Up Baby is hardly a departure’, wrote Otis Ferguson in The New Republic (2 March 1938) when the film came out. Less temperately, Frank S. Nugent in the New York Times panned it for being an array of clichés: his review is worth quoting at some length: And the gags! Have you heard the one about the trained leopard and the wild leopard who get loose at the same time? Or the one about the shallow brook with the deep hole? Or the one about the man wearing a woman’s negligee? Or the one about the Irishman who drains his flask and sees a wild animal which really is a wild animal? You have? Surprising. … Well then, how about the one where the man slips and sits on his top hat? Or the one where the heroine is trying to arouse a sleeper by tossing pebbles at his window and, just as he pokes his head out, hits him neatly with a bit of cobblestone? Or, getting back to the leopard who is the ‘baby’ of the title, would you laugh madly if Charles Ruggles did a leopard-cry imitation as an after-dinner stunt and commented two minutes later upon the unusual echo?1

Well yes I would, and usually do. Even reading these scornful enumeratings I feel like laughing. It can’t entirely be a question of the novelty value of the gags, since I’ve seen the film dozens of times now and they haven’t stop working for me. I hope in my commentary that follows to bring out some of what makes me laugh every time I see

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the film, and perhaps in doing so will touch on why some others like Nugent find it so resistible. More than just making me laugh, though, Bringing Up Baby has a strange power to make me feel happy about the world. It takes such a positive view of human absurdity, gives such a welcome to trusting in luck, nerve and character, puts work and worry so decisively in their place, subordinate to vitality and what screwball comedy tends to call ‘fun’. Funny, certainly, but ‘fun’ too, in the cryptically value-laden sense which screwball gives to the idea of ‘fun’. The 1930s saw a ‘cycle’ of horror films and also of screwball comedies. Successful films in these fast-moving genres knew about their predecessors and often alluded to them or departed from them. Audiences were smart and informed about the themes and variations involved. I want to argue that Bringing Up Baby is – despite what Ferguson and Nugent say – in many ways a ‘departure’, and so in the pages that follow I make frequent reference to some of the other notable hits in the screwball cycle from which it departs. For Bringing Up Baby is both the epitome of screwball comedy and an exception to its rules. Its epitome, for chaos, wildness, a heroine who is far from subordinated, and gags with some comic tradition behind them, an exception in that it’s not moralistic or idealistic, not particularly interested in marriage or remarriage, and not interested in the meeting of wealth and poverty. American screwball comedy was a rich transient genre with a number of precursors. Many films (though not Baby) were adaptations of stage plays, and the genre owed something to two relatively recent and divergent theatrical traditions. In its more earnest character it was influenced by the social-problem drama coming down from Ibsen to such figures as G. B. Shaw, Harley Granville-Barker and later Clifford Odets. But on the other side lay the decadent drama of such figures as Arthur Schnitzler, Oscar Wilde and Noel Coward (plays by Wilde and Coward had already been filmed by Ernst Lubitsch in 1925 and 1933). Many of the most

BRINGING UP BABY

interesting screwball comedies stage a tussle between the two, between (schematically speaking) the first tradition’s concerns with social equity and decency and the second tradition’s sometimes anarchic scepticism about moral orthodoxies. Beyond the world of theatre the films also had a debt, naturally enough, to earlier cinema, above all to silent comedy and in particular to Charlie Chaplin’s marriage of slapstick anarchy with social awareness. But screwball is a headily verbal genre too, and its fast-talking and wise-cracking and crackling pace was made possible by the advent of sound. Screwball women frequently talk as fast as Groucho Marx, and the films are alive with fresh imaginations of adult relationships under a new banner of equality.2 The finest years of the genre come in the aftermath of the Great Depression, and most of the great films get an edge and urgency from that context, and an edifying sense that, for all the mayhem, these are stories engaging seriously with contemporary America. In the most frequent plot structures one or more of the protagonists is brought to recognise the reality of poverty or the need for money to take second place to love. Screwball masterpieces of this kind include the inaugurative It Happened One Night (1934), My Man Godfrey (1936) and Sullivan’s Travels (1941). But Bringing Up Baby – another screwball masterpiece – isn’t interested in the ideology of the politically responsible American couple, nor is the social inequality of the couple the grounding interest of their relationship. Pauline Kael has called Bringing Up Baby ‘an equivalent of Restoration comedy’, and Stanley Cavell’s important book on screwball comedy has invoked late Shakespeare.3 Both comparisons are well worth pondering, but the closest analogue to the film, to my mind, lies in the stories of P. G. Wodehouse. Think of the elements they share: a world blithely beyond real money troubles despite the plot turning on huge inheritances; animal-fancying eccentrics; specialists in mental disorder; farcical complications; family set-ups more dominated by aunts and uncles than parents; and the magical provision of an ending in which we can be confident the tangled webs

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the film, and perhaps in doing so will touch on why some others like Nugent find it so resistible. More than just making me laugh, though, Bringing Up Baby has a strange power to make me feel happy about the world. It takes such a positive view of human absurdity, gives such a welcome to trusting in luck, nerve and character, puts work and worry so decisively in their place, subordinate to vitality and what screwball comedy tends to call ‘fun’. Funny, certainly, but ‘fun’ too, in the cryptically value-laden sense which screwball gives to the idea of ‘fun’. The 1930s saw a ‘cycle’ of horror films and also of screwball comedies. Successful films in these fast-moving genres knew about their predecessors and often alluded to them or departed from them. Audiences were smart and informed about the themes and variations involved. I want to argue that Bringing Up Baby is – despite what Ferguson and Nugent say – in many ways a ‘departure’, and so in the pages that follow I make frequent reference to some of the other notable hits in the screwball cycle from which it departs. For Bringing Up Baby is both the epitome of screwball comedy and an exception to its rules. Its epitome, for chaos, wildness, a heroine who is far from subordinated, and gags with some comic tradition behind them, an exception in that it’s not moralistic or idealistic, not particularly interested in marriage or remarriage, and not interested in the meeting of wealth and poverty. American screwball comedy was a rich transient genre with a number of precursors. Many films (though not Baby) were adaptations of stage plays, and the genre owed something to two relatively recent and divergent theatrical traditions. In its more earnest character it was influenced by the social-problem drama coming down from Ibsen to such figures as G. B. Shaw, Harley Granville-Barker and later Clifford Odets. But on the other side lay the decadent drama of such figures as Arthur Schnitzler, Oscar Wilde and Noel Coward (plays by Wilde and Coward had already been filmed by Ernst Lubitsch in 1925 and 1933). Many of the most

BRINGING UP BABY

interesting screwball comedies stage a tussle between the two, between (schematically speaking) the first tradition’s concerns with social equity and decency and the second tradition’s sometimes anarchic scepticism about moral orthodoxies. Beyond the world of theatre the films also had a debt, naturally enough, to earlier cinema, above all to silent comedy and in particular to Charlie Chaplin’s marriage of slapstick anarchy with social awareness. But screwball is a headily verbal genre too, and its fast-talking and wise-cracking and crackling pace was made possible by the advent of sound. Screwball women frequently talk as fast as Groucho Marx, and the films are alive with fresh imaginations of adult relationships under a new banner of equality.2 The finest years of the genre come in the aftermath of the Great Depression, and most of the great films get an edge and urgency from that context, and an edifying sense that, for all the mayhem, these are stories engaging seriously with contemporary America. In the most frequent plot structures one or more of the protagonists is brought to recognise the reality of poverty or the need for money to take second place to love. Screwball masterpieces of this kind include the inaugurative It Happened One Night (1934), My Man Godfrey (1936) and Sullivan’s Travels (1941). But Bringing Up Baby – another screwball masterpiece – isn’t interested in the ideology of the politically responsible American couple, nor is the social inequality of the couple the grounding interest of their relationship. Pauline Kael has called Bringing Up Baby ‘an equivalent of Restoration comedy’, and Stanley Cavell’s important book on screwball comedy has invoked late Shakespeare.3 Both comparisons are well worth pondering, but the closest analogue to the film, to my mind, lies in the stories of P. G. Wodehouse. Think of the elements they share: a world blithely beyond real money troubles despite the plot turning on huge inheritances; animal-fancying eccentrics; specialists in mental disorder; farcical complications; family set-ups more dominated by aunts and uncles than parents; and the magical provision of an ending in which we can be confident the tangled webs

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will unravel. As with Wodehouse, the pleasure comes partly from the sense of how unlike our own world this one is. In comedy things work out more happily than they do in life, and one secret of comedy is to allow us self-consciously to relish the differences. But the crucial difference between Wodehouse and Hawks is that this is really a love story. What Dr Lehman, the film’s Germanic shrink, calls ‘the love impulse’ isn’t weightless in Bringing Up Baby as it is in Wodehouse, so there is a poignancy to the film that Wodehouse doesn’t reach to. The sense that in its crazy way the story is an allegory of a much more ordinary irrationality in the pursuit of love makes it one of the most romantic of Hollywood films. Susan is nothing if not brave in pursuing her unlikely love object, while David in the dénouement takes on a snarling leopard (not being Clark Gable or Spencer Tracy, he faints into female arms after his moment of big-game-hunterly virility). As in Hitchcock’s great comedythrillers, there is a connection between comedy and courage – a belief that though the world sometimes seems mad (whether through love

Susan catches David

BRINGING UP BABY

or espionage) a mettlesome hero or heroine can well enough cope with it. ‘Critics don’t ever know when a thing’s funny, so they don’t want to talk about it’, said Hawks. Well, that’s discouraging. Still, I’m pretty sure that I do know when this film is funny and I definitely do want to talk about it – and will try not to lose sight of ‘what the hell it’s all about’ in the more earnest passages of the pages that follow. Criticism has generally been more comfortable taking on tragedy or satire or even melodrama than comedy. But my own belief is that comedy wouldn’t be so funny unless it tapped into something deep and deeply interesting, and that the best comedies – including Bringing Up Baby and a dozen other screwballs – are greatly interesting and searching works of art. In the meantime, let’s begin where the film does, in a museum in New York.

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will unravel. As with Wodehouse, the pleasure comes partly from the sense of how unlike our own world this one is. In comedy things work out more happily than they do in life, and one secret of comedy is to allow us self-consciously to relish the differences. But the crucial difference between Wodehouse and Hawks is that this is really a love story. What Dr Lehman, the film’s Germanic shrink, calls ‘the love impulse’ isn’t weightless in Bringing Up Baby as it is in Wodehouse, so there is a poignancy to the film that Wodehouse doesn’t reach to. The sense that in its crazy way the story is an allegory of a much more ordinary irrationality in the pursuit of love makes it one of the most romantic of Hollywood films. Susan is nothing if not brave in pursuing her unlikely love object, while David in the dénouement takes on a snarling leopard (not being Clark Gable or Spencer Tracy, he faints into female arms after his moment of big-game-hunterly virility). As in Hitchcock’s great comedythrillers, there is a connection between comedy and courage – a belief that though the world sometimes seems mad (whether through love

Susan catches David

BRINGING UP BABY

or espionage) a mettlesome hero or heroine can well enough cope with it. ‘Critics don’t ever know when a thing’s funny, so they don’t want to talk about it’, said Hawks. Well, that’s discouraging. Still, I’m pretty sure that I do know when this film is funny and I definitely do want to talk about it – and will try not to lose sight of ‘what the hell it’s all about’ in the more earnest passages of the pages that follow. Criticism has generally been more comfortable taking on tragedy or satire or even melodrama than comedy. But my own belief is that comedy wouldn’t be so funny unless it tapped into something deep and deeply interesting, and that the best comedies – including Bringing Up Baby and a dozen other screwballs – are greatly interesting and searching works of art. In the meantime, let’s begin where the film does, in a museum in New York.

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1 In New York The museum The opening shot of the film is in a pleasant park-like area, from which we track in to the plaque of the ‘Stuyvesant Natural History’ museum. The name could hardly take us further back in American history: Pietrus Stuyvesant was the Dutch Governor of New York back when it was New Amsterdam. Not quite back when dinosaurs roamed the earth, but back a good long way into colonial history.4 Stuyvesant had little success in quelling the rebellious spirits he met, and had to surrender New Amsterdam in 1664. He came back and lived his last years on Manhattan Island from 1665–72, and later became a brand of cigarettes in a little vignette of what time can do to the powers that be. The name brings with it a tinge of the long ago and far away. Perhaps this is why the film doesn’t start with the usual shots which would establish that it takes place in New York. There is no Statue of Liberty or Empire State Building, no Broadway or bustling crowds, no street scenes or traffic. The dialogue includes references to Park Avenue and 42nd Street, but Hawks deliberately takes the action away from any recognisable modern world, even as a starting point to be left behind. Many 1930s screwballs start in a formally similar way, with a shot of the city, then a closer one of a building, then an interior of the room or apartment where the story starts. The city shot is generally a street scene, as though to make it clear that this is in its way a story of the modern city. Even in Hawks’s own Ball of Fire (1941), in some ways a revisiting of Baby, the story starts with a walk in Central Park, and promenades across town to the masculine scholarly institute to which a female intruder brings her fearsome breath of fresh air. But the city here is represented by a green tranquil space and an ancestral foundation. Bringing Up Baby

BRINGING UP BABY

is further away from the modern world than most of its screwball contemporaries. Even the names of its settings are classically pastoral – Riverdale, Westlake and Bridgeport (this last a real place, of course). It’s only natural that one of the characters should be rustically called ‘Applegate’. What kind of museum is this? There’s no sign it’s open to the public. If it is, they aren’t flocking in. Nothing suggests that it’s short of money or that it has an exciting event in prospect. Why is it closed during the day? Why does the staff seem to number only three? It’s not the sort of place that one would imagine a benefactor singling out. The custodian of its spirit – the first person we see there – is not the ostensible boss, but the redoubtable Miss Swallow (Virginia Walker), fiancée to our hero, David Huxley (Cary Grant). She hushes the elderly Professor La Touche (D’Arcy Corrigan) in deference to Dr Huxley, whom we see ‘thinking’ aloft, on a platform at the top of a ladder. He is up in the air, and the story will bring him down to earth surely enough. The museum is shown not to be run by a

A house of bones

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1 In New York The museum The opening shot of the film is in a pleasant park-like area, from which we track in to the plaque of the ‘Stuyvesant Natural History’ museum. The name could hardly take us further back in American history: Pietrus Stuyvesant was the Dutch Governor of New York back when it was New Amsterdam. Not quite back when dinosaurs roamed the earth, but back a good long way into colonial history.4 Stuyvesant had little success in quelling the rebellious spirits he met, and had to surrender New Amsterdam in 1664. He came back and lived his last years on Manhattan Island from 1665–72, and later became a brand of cigarettes in a little vignette of what time can do to the powers that be. The name brings with it a tinge of the long ago and far away. Perhaps this is why the film doesn’t start with the usual shots which would establish that it takes place in New York. There is no Statue of Liberty or Empire State Building, no Broadway or bustling crowds, no street scenes or traffic. The dialogue includes references to Park Avenue and 42nd Street, but Hawks deliberately takes the action away from any recognisable modern world, even as a starting point to be left behind. Many 1930s screwballs start in a formally similar way, with a shot of the city, then a closer one of a building, then an interior of the room or apartment where the story starts. The city shot is generally a street scene, as though to make it clear that this is in its way a story of the modern city. Even in Hawks’s own Ball of Fire (1941), in some ways a revisiting of Baby, the story starts with a walk in Central Park, and promenades across town to the masculine scholarly institute to which a female intruder brings her fearsome breath of fresh air. But the city here is represented by a green tranquil space and an ancestral foundation. Bringing Up Baby

BRINGING UP BABY

is further away from the modern world than most of its screwball contemporaries. Even the names of its settings are classically pastoral – Riverdale, Westlake and Bridgeport (this last a real place, of course). It’s only natural that one of the characters should be rustically called ‘Applegate’. What kind of museum is this? There’s no sign it’s open to the public. If it is, they aren’t flocking in. Nothing suggests that it’s short of money or that it has an exciting event in prospect. Why is it closed during the day? Why does the staff seem to number only three? It’s not the sort of place that one would imagine a benefactor singling out. The custodian of its spirit – the first person we see there – is not the ostensible boss, but the redoubtable Miss Swallow (Virginia Walker), fiancée to our hero, David Huxley (Cary Grant). She hushes the elderly Professor La Touche (D’Arcy Corrigan) in deference to Dr Huxley, whom we see ‘thinking’ aloft, on a platform at the top of a ladder. He is up in the air, and the story will bring him down to earth surely enough. The museum is shown not to be run by a

A house of bones

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formidable male authority figure who needs to be obeyed, fooled or placated. The film stands aside from that recognisable comic predicament, and most of the ranking menfolk we meet are either bumbling, like the sheriff and Major Applegate (Charlie Ruggles), or rather mild-mannered, like the lawyer Mr Peabody (George Irving) on the golf course. Instead the museum first appears to represent David and Alice’s conjugal togetherness, far from cosily. Her first words (‘Dr Huxley’s thinking’) put her on ‘Dr Huxley’ terms with him, though they are due to marry the following day. The roof is very high, the sound sepulchral. The door dwarfs and diminishes its human entrants. The door in Ball of Fire is equally big, and underlines its anti-libidinal role with dodgy-looking phallic panelling worthy of Aubrey Beardsley. Perry Ferguson was the art designer responsible for both. (Van Nest Polglase, as Head of the RKO art

Ball of Fire (1941): Sugarpuss O’Shea (Barbara Stanwyck) brings something new to the scholarly domain of Professor Potts (Gary Cooper)

BRINGING UP BABY

department, received the official design credit for every RKO picture, including Bringing Up Baby, but the film was actually designed by his assistant, Ferguson.) We register that from our point of view, unlike David’s and Miss Swallow’s, nothing that matters is at stake in the question of the museum and its gift. We needn’t worry. David worries a good deal, but we don’t. The freedom from worry is one of the great gifts and pleasures of a comic plot such as this.5 From the moment when David, looking at his bone, says ‘This must go in the tail’, the film is a gleeful tissue of sexual innuendos which somehow got past the censors. They certainly didn’t get past the two leads, who were so broken up by laughter at some of the double-entendres about David’s bone and where it belonged that a simple scene could take all day to film.6 The start of the film is a deliciously blatant sketch of sexual repression, too blatant to be punitive: the generic world of the film is one of comic delight in folly, not satirical castigation of vice. If the film lends itself to Freudian unravelling – and we do, of course, have a fine Germanic shrink, complete with the mother of all hysterical symptoms, giving a not wholly inaccurate reading of what’s going on – then it’s the Freud of such works as Jokes and their Relation to the Unconscious, celebrating the creative ways the unconscious can liberate itself from social regulation in, for instance, innuendos and double-entendres. Incidentally, we never find out what becomes of this first bone. If the famous intercostal clavicle is the only bone needed to complete the bronto, then this mystery bone has no place either in the bronto or the plot. It’s a Maguffin bone. It tips us off that the anatomy of the plot won’t be too meticulously articulated. From the first the symbolism is cheerfully blatant. The museum is a house of bones, a place where the only animals are long-dead ones, except for the humans; and the human lives are far from free, seen as they are in cage-like framings. One offence against red-bloodedness comes in the weedy figure of Professor La Touche, who can’t even muster a masculine prefix, who doesn’t do

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formidable male authority figure who needs to be obeyed, fooled or placated. The film stands aside from that recognisable comic predicament, and most of the ranking menfolk we meet are either bumbling, like the sheriff and Major Applegate (Charlie Ruggles), or rather mild-mannered, like the lawyer Mr Peabody (George Irving) on the golf course. Instead the museum first appears to represent David and Alice’s conjugal togetherness, far from cosily. Her first words (‘Dr Huxley’s thinking’) put her on ‘Dr Huxley’ terms with him, though they are due to marry the following day. The roof is very high, the sound sepulchral. The door dwarfs and diminishes its human entrants. The door in Ball of Fire is equally big, and underlines its anti-libidinal role with dodgy-looking phallic panelling worthy of Aubrey Beardsley. Perry Ferguson was the art designer responsible for both. (Van Nest Polglase, as Head of the RKO art

Ball of Fire (1941): Sugarpuss O’Shea (Barbara Stanwyck) brings something new to the scholarly domain of Professor Potts (Gary Cooper)

BRINGING UP BABY

department, received the official design credit for every RKO picture, including Bringing Up Baby, but the film was actually designed by his assistant, Ferguson.) We register that from our point of view, unlike David’s and Miss Swallow’s, nothing that matters is at stake in the question of the museum and its gift. We needn’t worry. David worries a good deal, but we don’t. The freedom from worry is one of the great gifts and pleasures of a comic plot such as this.5 From the moment when David, looking at his bone, says ‘This must go in the tail’, the film is a gleeful tissue of sexual innuendos which somehow got past the censors. They certainly didn’t get past the two leads, who were so broken up by laughter at some of the double-entendres about David’s bone and where it belonged that a simple scene could take all day to film.6 The start of the film is a deliciously blatant sketch of sexual repression, too blatant to be punitive: the generic world of the film is one of comic delight in folly, not satirical castigation of vice. If the film lends itself to Freudian unravelling – and we do, of course, have a fine Germanic shrink, complete with the mother of all hysterical symptoms, giving a not wholly inaccurate reading of what’s going on – then it’s the Freud of such works as Jokes and their Relation to the Unconscious, celebrating the creative ways the unconscious can liberate itself from social regulation in, for instance, innuendos and double-entendres. Incidentally, we never find out what becomes of this first bone. If the famous intercostal clavicle is the only bone needed to complete the bronto, then this mystery bone has no place either in the bronto or the plot. It’s a Maguffin bone. It tips us off that the anatomy of the plot won’t be too meticulously articulated. From the first the symbolism is cheerfully blatant. The museum is a house of bones, a place where the only animals are long-dead ones, except for the humans; and the human lives are far from free, seen as they are in cage-like framings. One offence against red-bloodedness comes in the weedy figure of Professor La Touche, who can’t even muster a masculine prefix, who doesn’t do

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any touche-ing, who isn’t in charge of the fund-raising and whom David gender-bendingly mistakes for Alice in one of his many slips of the tongue. David starts off rather broadly in mad scientist mode, with professorial absentmindedness about his schedule and little ineffectual teacherly mutterings.7 (Would Ross in Friends, by the way, be a paleontologist if not for Bringing Up Baby?) Then, crucially, there is David’s fiancée, Alice Swallow, who makes it majestically clear that their marriage will be without ‘domestic entanglements of any kind’. In this film where nearly all the names are jokes, and mainly dirty jokes, the ‘Touche’ of ‘La Touche’ also sounds like ‘tush’, which is American slang for one of the parts of Alice’s body which she makes it clear David won’t be allowed to touche. When David hopefully raises the question of ‘children and all that sort of thing’, her reply is crushing: ‘This’, with a grand gesture at the bronto, ‘will be our child.’8 Here we have a sort of Frankenstein moment. Just as Victor Frankenstein fashions his creature without the help of a woman or any of what David calls ‘that sort of thing’, here too there is a suggestion of creation without procreation, a hubristic offence against nature. Even Professor La Touche turns to the camera, as if in emasculated sympathy, when Miss Swallow proclaims that nothing must interrupt her husband’s work. In the Gothic genre, as, for instance, James Whale’s Frankenstein films of 1931 and 1935, horror is the outcome of such repression of the natural, but comedy has a more optimistic sense of the natural world. In Baby the repressed doesn’t return with a vengeance, it comes cavorting back. The animal form it takes isn’t vampiric or monstrous but is instead a kind of animal life we may choose to let into the house – that is, a pet. The threat it brings is chaos, not violence. Bruce Babington and Peter William Evans, in a good book on screwball comedy, say that ‘Miss Swallow is not a woman; she is a doctoral thesis’.9 As somebody who once wrote one, I find this unfair to doctoral theses. But it is also unfair to Miss Swallow. Virginia Walker, who plays the part, was one of the first actresses Howard

BRINGING UP BABY

Hawks put under personal contract, and if that sounds like a euphemism, it frequently was. In this case, though, he probably didn’t have his way with her. But his brother did. William Hawks eloped to Mexico to marry Miss Walker in June 1938. The point in the film is that Miss Swallow is a real looker, and not at all the frump which stereotype would suggest. The idea in this Darwinian comedy is not that she is a loser in the game of natural selection, but that she has perversely sinned against the nature which endowed her with cheekbones and a figure to die for. Her hair, imprisoned in a mean bun, needs to be let down. As an emblem of the buttoned-up, she had a predecessor in Hawks’s Twentieth Century (1934), in which Oscar Jaffe’s secretary Miss Schulz (Gigi Parrish) was the figure whose professional severity belied her sexiness. If Miss Swallow is a refugee from ‘all that sort of thing’ in heterosexual marriage, she is also got up quite like a lesbian in the Hollywood imagining of the 1930s, mannishly suited and uncurvaceously severe. David’s escape from the marriage we glimpse is altogether a happy one. Miss Swallow, well buttoned-up

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any touche-ing, who isn’t in charge of the fund-raising and whom David gender-bendingly mistakes for Alice in one of his many slips of the tongue. David starts off rather broadly in mad scientist mode, with professorial absentmindedness about his schedule and little ineffectual teacherly mutterings.7 (Would Ross in Friends, by the way, be a paleontologist if not for Bringing Up Baby?) Then, crucially, there is David’s fiancée, Alice Swallow, who makes it majestically clear that their marriage will be without ‘domestic entanglements of any kind’. In this film where nearly all the names are jokes, and mainly dirty jokes, the ‘Touche’ of ‘La Touche’ also sounds like ‘tush’, which is American slang for one of the parts of Alice’s body which she makes it clear David won’t be allowed to touche. When David hopefully raises the question of ‘children and all that sort of thing’, her reply is crushing: ‘This’, with a grand gesture at the bronto, ‘will be our child.’8 Here we have a sort of Frankenstein moment. Just as Victor Frankenstein fashions his creature without the help of a woman or any of what David calls ‘that sort of thing’, here too there is a suggestion of creation without procreation, a hubristic offence against nature. Even Professor La Touche turns to the camera, as if in emasculated sympathy, when Miss Swallow proclaims that nothing must interrupt her husband’s work. In the Gothic genre, as, for instance, James Whale’s Frankenstein films of 1931 and 1935, horror is the outcome of such repression of the natural, but comedy has a more optimistic sense of the natural world. In Baby the repressed doesn’t return with a vengeance, it comes cavorting back. The animal form it takes isn’t vampiric or monstrous but is instead a kind of animal life we may choose to let into the house – that is, a pet. The threat it brings is chaos, not violence. Bruce Babington and Peter William Evans, in a good book on screwball comedy, say that ‘Miss Swallow is not a woman; she is a doctoral thesis’.9 As somebody who once wrote one, I find this unfair to doctoral theses. But it is also unfair to Miss Swallow. Virginia Walker, who plays the part, was one of the first actresses Howard

BRINGING UP BABY

Hawks put under personal contract, and if that sounds like a euphemism, it frequently was. In this case, though, he probably didn’t have his way with her. But his brother did. William Hawks eloped to Mexico to marry Miss Walker in June 1938. The point in the film is that Miss Swallow is a real looker, and not at all the frump which stereotype would suggest. The idea in this Darwinian comedy is not that she is a loser in the game of natural selection, but that she has perversely sinned against the nature which endowed her with cheekbones and a figure to die for. Her hair, imprisoned in a mean bun, needs to be let down. As an emblem of the buttoned-up, she had a predecessor in Hawks’s Twentieth Century (1934), in which Oscar Jaffe’s secretary Miss Schulz (Gigi Parrish) was the figure whose professional severity belied her sexiness. If Miss Swallow is a refugee from ‘all that sort of thing’ in heterosexual marriage, she is also got up quite like a lesbian in the Hollywood imagining of the 1930s, mannishly suited and uncurvaceously severe. David’s escape from the marriage we glimpse is altogether a happy one. Miss Swallow, well buttoned-up

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Sexless marriages From Lady Chatterley’s Lover (1928) to Brief Encounter (1945), stories of the period are full of unlibidinal marriages, with vistas of civilisation and its sexual discontents. They frequently look to settings with ‘normal desires being slowly strangled to death’, as the hero (Melvyn Douglas) describes Lynnfield in the underrated Theodora Goes Wild (directed by Richard Boleslawski, 1936) (he is determined to give it a hormonal wake-up call). One of screwball comedy’s most interesting visitings of the idea comes in Gregory La Cava’s 1935 comedy She Married Her Boss. Richard Barclay marries his super-secretary Julia Scott, but not in a red-blooded spirit; as Julia’s friend Martha remarks, ‘It doesn’t sound like a marriage to me. It sounds like an incorporation.’ Richard lives with his sister and his bratty daughter in a big dark gloomy house with all its blinds and curtains symbolically keeping the light out. Julia opens them up, like Pip pulling down the curtains in David Lean’s Great Expectations (1946), in the hope that her husband will ‘recover some normal instincts’. He’s very slow to do this, and the plot revolves around an unsatisfied Julia coming close to an affair with the store proprietor. ‘I’ve found someone who thinks of me as a woman,’ she tells her husband to explain why she’s drawn to him. The story is a warning against getting what we now call the work–life balance all wrong. ‘Don’t let a career fool you,’ Julia warns one of her admiring store assistants. ‘It’s something that sponges up your whole life and leaves you empty.’ If this sounds like a sexist warning against women in the workplace, the film doesn’t present it as that: Julia is a star both domestically and at work, and the film suggests that the same qualities make her good at both. The warning, as in Baby, is against a desertion of ‘normal instincts’. The dénouement of She Married Her Boss, a loud iconoclastic destruction of the work world, also resembles that of Baby. Richard’s recovery of his instincts is manifested when he gets roaring drunk and throws a brick through his own shop window. Behind the window lies a surrealist display

BRINGING UP BABY

world of dummies and mannequins, akin to the dinosaur in Baby as a symbol of a world of lifeless bodies. Another film that takes sexlessness seriously is George Cukor’s The Philadelphia Story (1940). Its heroine Tracy Lord (Hepburn again) is alternately exalted and punished for being a kind of ‘virgin goddess’. The film suggests that she has somehow made herself untouchable, that despite her marriage she is a ‘married maiden’ and ‘perennial spinster’ and has ‘the withering look of the goddess’. This last phrase comes from her ex-husband (C. K. Dexter Haven, played by Grant), who we presume has experience of being thus withered. Whereas the wife was frustrated by the husband’s lack of libido in She Married Her Boss, the husband is here castrated by the emotional frigidity of the wife. The story, which is not without Lawrentian preachiness, teaches Tracy a lesson in embracing the world of sexuality and forgiving those men who have come a cropper doing so. There are male spokesmen in the film to articulate these lessons, and the comparison with Bringing Up Baby shows how anarchic Hawks’s film is and how little it believes in masculine authorities of the sort represented in The Philadelphia Story by Tracy’s ex-husband and eventually by her father too. In both these films, alcohol aids and abets the recovery of normal instincts. The Philadelphia Story reminisces about a party She Married Her Boss (1935): Julia (Claudette Colbert) and Lennie (Michael Bartlett) among the mannequins

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Sexless marriages From Lady Chatterley’s Lover (1928) to Brief Encounter (1945), stories of the period are full of unlibidinal marriages, with vistas of civilisation and its sexual discontents. They frequently look to settings with ‘normal desires being slowly strangled to death’, as the hero (Melvyn Douglas) describes Lynnfield in the underrated Theodora Goes Wild (directed by Richard Boleslawski, 1936) (he is determined to give it a hormonal wake-up call). One of screwball comedy’s most interesting visitings of the idea comes in Gregory La Cava’s 1935 comedy She Married Her Boss. Richard Barclay marries his super-secretary Julia Scott, but not in a red-blooded spirit; as Julia’s friend Martha remarks, ‘It doesn’t sound like a marriage to me. It sounds like an incorporation.’ Richard lives with his sister and his bratty daughter in a big dark gloomy house with all its blinds and curtains symbolically keeping the light out. Julia opens them up, like Pip pulling down the curtains in David Lean’s Great Expectations (1946), in the hope that her husband will ‘recover some normal instincts’. He’s very slow to do this, and the plot revolves around an unsatisfied Julia coming close to an affair with the store proprietor. ‘I’ve found someone who thinks of me as a woman,’ she tells her husband to explain why she’s drawn to him. The story is a warning against getting what we now call the work–life balance all wrong. ‘Don’t let a career fool you,’ Julia warns one of her admiring store assistants. ‘It’s something that sponges up your whole life and leaves you empty.’ If this sounds like a sexist warning against women in the workplace, the film doesn’t present it as that: Julia is a star both domestically and at work, and the film suggests that the same qualities make her good at both. The warning, as in Baby, is against a desertion of ‘normal instincts’. The dénouement of She Married Her Boss, a loud iconoclastic destruction of the work world, also resembles that of Baby. Richard’s recovery of his instincts is manifested when he gets roaring drunk and throws a brick through his own shop window. Behind the window lies a surrealist display

BRINGING UP BABY

world of dummies and mannequins, akin to the dinosaur in Baby as a symbol of a world of lifeless bodies. Another film that takes sexlessness seriously is George Cukor’s The Philadelphia Story (1940). Its heroine Tracy Lord (Hepburn again) is alternately exalted and punished for being a kind of ‘virgin goddess’. The film suggests that she has somehow made herself untouchable, that despite her marriage she is a ‘married maiden’ and ‘perennial spinster’ and has ‘the withering look of the goddess’. This last phrase comes from her ex-husband (C. K. Dexter Haven, played by Grant), who we presume has experience of being thus withered. Whereas the wife was frustrated by the husband’s lack of libido in She Married Her Boss, the husband is here castrated by the emotional frigidity of the wife. The story, which is not without Lawrentian preachiness, teaches Tracy a lesson in embracing the world of sexuality and forgiving those men who have come a cropper doing so. There are male spokesmen in the film to articulate these lessons, and the comparison with Bringing Up Baby shows how anarchic Hawks’s film is and how little it believes in masculine authorities of the sort represented in The Philadelphia Story by Tracy’s ex-husband and eventually by her father too. In both these films, alcohol aids and abets the recovery of normal instincts. The Philadelphia Story reminisces about a party She Married Her Boss (1935): Julia (Claudette Colbert) and Lennie (Michael Bartlett) among the mannequins

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where Tracy made a fine fool of herself, helped on by too much to drink, and the film fashions another magical occasion for her to find her senses when slightly off her head. Drink is often important in these comedies as a way of letting down the defences and admitting the truth. Baby seems such an intoxicated comedy that it can be hard to remember that nobody gets drunk except for the gardener Gogarty (Barry Fitzgerald). There is a little drinking in the hotel bar and round the dinner table, but for the most part, the intoxications of Baby don’t need alcohol to fuel them. At the country club The film moves from the museum to the golf course, where we discover David beginning a round with the banker Mr Peabody The Philadelphia Story (1940): Katharine Hepburn as Tracy Lord

BRINGING UP BABY

(whose name suggests we needn’t be impressed by the size of his endowment10). Mr Peabody is wearing a remarkable cravat, a sign that even he – top corporation lawyer though he is – is less in thrall to the world of work than poor David, who has a tie on. Structurally, Mr Peabody is the closest thing in the film to the forbidding ‘senex’ or old man of classical comedy, the authority figure whose prohibitions may keep the two lovers apart; if anybody in the film stands for normality and stability, it is probably him. So it is important that he is a reasonable and generally benign figure. His slight and understandable asperity at having the game interrupted by business talk is softened by the avuncular offer of conversation over a whisky-and-soda at the end of the round. We are shown the beginnings of a little idyll of country-club business negotiations and tax-deductible good works. Hawks, we might remember, used to play golf and talk shop with professional associates from Jesse Lasky to Howard Hughes.11 David’s caddy seems to realise that his charge hasn’t grasped the etiquette of the moment, and looks on with the sidelong scepticism which often belongs to shrewd menials and newspaper reporters in the screwball genre. Maybe he’s seen that David’s no golfer. We, however, don’t see David hit his ball, or even address it, a rather tasteful abstention on the director’s part from the easy laugh we could have had: the comic point of the scene is not that David is a poor sportsman but that he has no idea how to engage in sports at all. It’s on the course that we first encounter the glorious figure of Susan Vance (Katharine Hepburn), a sort of anti-type of the baleful Miss Swallow. Susan is playing golf, and naturally she has a caddy, but she’s not playing with anyone. It’s a tribute to her performance that this self-sufficiency about her game is not likely to occur to us. Whereas David was holding his bone and wondering what to do with it, Susan is playing golf on her own. The opening of this film of courtship shows two protagonists playing with themselves. Ten years later we see Hepburn on the golf course again at the start of Pat and Mike (1949), which includes this piece of dialogue:

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where Tracy made a fine fool of herself, helped on by too much to drink, and the film fashions another magical occasion for her to find her senses when slightly off her head. Drink is often important in these comedies as a way of letting down the defences and admitting the truth. Baby seems such an intoxicated comedy that it can be hard to remember that nobody gets drunk except for the gardener Gogarty (Barry Fitzgerald). There is a little drinking in the hotel bar and round the dinner table, but for the most part, the intoxications of Baby don’t need alcohol to fuel them. At the country club The film moves from the museum to the golf course, where we discover David beginning a round with the banker Mr Peabody The Philadelphia Story (1940): Katharine Hepburn as Tracy Lord

BRINGING UP BABY

(whose name suggests we needn’t be impressed by the size of his endowment10). Mr Peabody is wearing a remarkable cravat, a sign that even he – top corporation lawyer though he is – is less in thrall to the world of work than poor David, who has a tie on. Structurally, Mr Peabody is the closest thing in the film to the forbidding ‘senex’ or old man of classical comedy, the authority figure whose prohibitions may keep the two lovers apart; if anybody in the film stands for normality and stability, it is probably him. So it is important that he is a reasonable and generally benign figure. His slight and understandable asperity at having the game interrupted by business talk is softened by the avuncular offer of conversation over a whisky-and-soda at the end of the round. We are shown the beginnings of a little idyll of country-club business negotiations and tax-deductible good works. Hawks, we might remember, used to play golf and talk shop with professional associates from Jesse Lasky to Howard Hughes.11 David’s caddy seems to realise that his charge hasn’t grasped the etiquette of the moment, and looks on with the sidelong scepticism which often belongs to shrewd menials and newspaper reporters in the screwball genre. Maybe he’s seen that David’s no golfer. We, however, don’t see David hit his ball, or even address it, a rather tasteful abstention on the director’s part from the easy laugh we could have had: the comic point of the scene is not that David is a poor sportsman but that he has no idea how to engage in sports at all. It’s on the course that we first encounter the glorious figure of Susan Vance (Katharine Hepburn), a sort of anti-type of the baleful Miss Swallow. Susan is playing golf, and naturally she has a caddy, but she’s not playing with anyone. It’s a tribute to her performance that this self-sufficiency about her game is not likely to occur to us. Whereas David was holding his bone and wondering what to do with it, Susan is playing golf on her own. The opening of this film of courtship shows two protagonists playing with themselves. Ten years later we see Hepburn on the golf course again at the start of Pat and Mike (1949), which includes this piece of dialogue:

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MIKE (SPENCER TRACY)

I don’t think you’ve ever been handled properly.

PAT (HEPBURN)

That’s right. Not even by myself.

Such jokes about masturbation are smutty fun, but also work in a rather more sophisticated way to concede that people really can’t avoid some sort of sex life, even if only with themselves. This is one reason that celibacy has little dignity in screwball comedy (and may be another reason for the phallic door panels in Ball of Fire). Susan must be on the eighteenth hole as David is on the first. It’s an odd though perhaps not impossible geography that brings the car park quite so close to the course in this scene. Mr Peabody’s golf party also seems implausibly close to the car park exit lane later in the scene. But the golf course geography isn’t constrained by the normal rules any more than Susan is (though we can see she is a proper player from her low swing with plenty of hip and shoulder swivel). She offers to let David play through, as a well-bred solo golfer should do, but she misappropriates his ball, as any golfer shouldn’t, and quite refuses to apologise or quarrel, which puts her well outside the usual laws of polite intercourse. Though close to her record score, she is not unduly bothered about it (and never does retrieve her actual ball), letting herself be distracted by the more interesting novelty that’s come her way. If something pleasing lies in her path, she will take advantage of it. She seems to have plenty of time, although at the end of the scene she says she’s in a hurry: her sense of time is at the service of her interest in pleasure. We meet her as a figure of free and opportunistic play of impulse. We see her first from behind, a radiant mass of sunlit hair, before she turns to David and us. Her first words articulate what we may have been thinking about everything David has been involved in so far: ‘You shouldn’t have done that, you know.’ Like a good muse of comedy, she adds ‘But I forgive you because I got a good shot.’ Things turn out happily in comedy, and the happy ending is part of the atmosphere in which faults are forgiven; we all have them, and forbearance not punishment is the order of the genre. Susan, for instance, is

BRINGING UP BABY

unpunished for playing David’s ball: no eagle-eyed club secretary is watching from the clubhouse. Does she get her record score? Strictly speaking, no: it wasn’t her ball, and she’d have penalty shots at best or be disqualified. Hawks was keen on all sports and would have known these things. But in terms of what we see her game is triumphant. On the last green the camera is positioned behind the hole, so that we see the ball cross the screen and pop in. She walks four paces and two shorter ones, in elevated shoes, so it’s probably about a fourteen-footer, but the camera positioning behind the hole adds value to the shot, with the ball having to traverse the diagonal of the screen. This captivating miniature of athletic skill and success swiftly evokes somebody naturally at ease in her body and the physical world. Hawks made his admiration clear in an interview with Peter Bogdanovich: She has an amazing body – like a boxer. It’s hard for her to make a wrong turn. She’s always in perfect balance … This gives her an amazing sense of timing, I’ve never seen a girl that had that odd rhythm and control.12

This striking tribute has an aptness beyond physique. Susan’s ‘perfect balance’ means she keeps a poise even in pratfalls, and looks graceful even when performing awkwardness, like the figure of the clown invoked by several of her outfits. Her ‘odd rhythm and control’ – her unique quality as an actress – is the dynamic of her pursuit, and David is duly puzzled by its oddity and compelled by its control. The Ritz Plaza This is the first of the night-time scenes, and from now on the film will more or less alternate day and night sections. Grant manages to make David no less awkwardly attired in his tails than his golf-wear. A bit of business with his top hat follows his arrival at the hotel. Like the bone at the museum, the hat is an appendage he doesn’t know what to do with. Like his other problems, it will return to trip him up

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MIKE (SPENCER TRACY)

I don’t think you’ve ever been handled properly.

PAT (HEPBURN)

That’s right. Not even by myself.

Such jokes about masturbation are smutty fun, but also work in a rather more sophisticated way to concede that people really can’t avoid some sort of sex life, even if only with themselves. This is one reason that celibacy has little dignity in screwball comedy (and may be another reason for the phallic door panels in Ball of Fire). Susan must be on the eighteenth hole as David is on the first. It’s an odd though perhaps not impossible geography that brings the car park quite so close to the course in this scene. Mr Peabody’s golf party also seems implausibly close to the car park exit lane later in the scene. But the golf course geography isn’t constrained by the normal rules any more than Susan is (though we can see she is a proper player from her low swing with plenty of hip and shoulder swivel). She offers to let David play through, as a well-bred solo golfer should do, but she misappropriates his ball, as any golfer shouldn’t, and quite refuses to apologise or quarrel, which puts her well outside the usual laws of polite intercourse. Though close to her record score, she is not unduly bothered about it (and never does retrieve her actual ball), letting herself be distracted by the more interesting novelty that’s come her way. If something pleasing lies in her path, she will take advantage of it. She seems to have plenty of time, although at the end of the scene she says she’s in a hurry: her sense of time is at the service of her interest in pleasure. We meet her as a figure of free and opportunistic play of impulse. We see her first from behind, a radiant mass of sunlit hair, before she turns to David and us. Her first words articulate what we may have been thinking about everything David has been involved in so far: ‘You shouldn’t have done that, you know.’ Like a good muse of comedy, she adds ‘But I forgive you because I got a good shot.’ Things turn out happily in comedy, and the happy ending is part of the atmosphere in which faults are forgiven; we all have them, and forbearance not punishment is the order of the genre. Susan, for instance, is

BRINGING UP BABY

unpunished for playing David’s ball: no eagle-eyed club secretary is watching from the clubhouse. Does she get her record score? Strictly speaking, no: it wasn’t her ball, and she’d have penalty shots at best or be disqualified. Hawks was keen on all sports and would have known these things. But in terms of what we see her game is triumphant. On the last green the camera is positioned behind the hole, so that we see the ball cross the screen and pop in. She walks four paces and two shorter ones, in elevated shoes, so it’s probably about a fourteen-footer, but the camera positioning behind the hole adds value to the shot, with the ball having to traverse the diagonal of the screen. This captivating miniature of athletic skill and success swiftly evokes somebody naturally at ease in her body and the physical world. Hawks made his admiration clear in an interview with Peter Bogdanovich: She has an amazing body – like a boxer. It’s hard for her to make a wrong turn. She’s always in perfect balance … This gives her an amazing sense of timing, I’ve never seen a girl that had that odd rhythm and control.12

This striking tribute has an aptness beyond physique. Susan’s ‘perfect balance’ means she keeps a poise even in pratfalls, and looks graceful even when performing awkwardness, like the figure of the clown invoked by several of her outfits. Her ‘odd rhythm and control’ – her unique quality as an actress – is the dynamic of her pursuit, and David is duly puzzled by its oddity and compelled by its control. The Ritz Plaza This is the first of the night-time scenes, and from now on the film will more or less alternate day and night sections. Grant manages to make David no less awkwardly attired in his tails than his golf-wear. A bit of business with his top hat follows his arrival at the hotel. Like the bone at the museum, the hat is an appendage he doesn’t know what to do with. Like his other problems, it will return to trip him up

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again later. The hat-check girl and her friend look David up and down and take him in. They seem to be amused by him and to fancy him, as would a large part of the audience, though few would be as beautiful as these particular cloakroom attendants. This is the only scene in the film with a musical accompaniment other than the theme tune. It tells us that David and Susan are in the same place, an evidently demure ambience, and as a continuous background to what will turn out to be a series of virtuoso comic routines it brings with it a suggestion of the world of silent-film comedy. Where David has been distant and correct with the head waiter and the hat-check girl, Susan has cut through all that when we see her in the bar, ravishingly dressed in one of her most eccentric outfits. She is wearing an ensemble of lamé skirt and full-length wrapover gown with three-quarter-length sleeves, with strong references to the orientalist fashions of the time. She also wears an extremely strange head-dress a little like a bridal veil, probably made of silk tulle and edged with wired ribbon which seems to curl around her head. This is the most extravagantly unusual of her many high-couture outfits in the film, and it signals her evident wealth and flagrant selfpossession. For whom is she dressed in this way? Was she meeting someone? Dining out? Already she transcends the world of plans and appointments. (We discover later on that she was to have dined with Mr Peabody – ‘Boopie’ to her.) The barman Joe (Ernest Cossant) has or makes plenty of time for her, because time is at Susan’s disposal and her charm and wealth disarm him. He is teaching her skills with olives, throwing them into cocktail glasses and snapping them up off his knuckles into his mouth. Susan watches carefully, delighted by the new games and entirely absorbed by them. Though so posh, she isn’t stuck up and gets on happily with the barman; in fact, she has a kind of respect for him as a pro. She has a go at the olive trick, and is very good at the olive-throwing bit and then not at all put out by missing her target when she tries to catch one. The game wouldn’t be fun if it was too easy, and she is confident that she’ll get it right – being so

BRINGING UP BABY

well coordinated is part of how the world has been good to her. ‘That’s wonderful,’ she tells Joe, ‘only you cheated.’ You have to play a game well to cheat skilfully, so this is a compliment of sorts. Likewise, you have to be an athlete to take a tumble with comic aplomb, and this is what Cary Grant will do next, as Susan’s third olive misses its target (her mouth) but hits an even better one as the entering David slips on it and manages to land on his hat. ‘Oh, hello. You’re sitting on your hat,’ says Susan blithely. We don’t know how they got from the vehicle exiting the car park to this point,13 but the olive testifies they’re meant to be together and he’s not meant to be upright. She apologises really quite nicely in her most New England manner, but explains that the olive trick takes practice so he’ll understand that she’s hardly to blame from that point of view. David walks away and Susan follows. We see her look at him and decide to follow. This is another absorbing game, with his shooing her away adding to its pleasure. For the first time she becomes the stalker, a role which with varying guile and transparency she inhabits for the rest of the story. She pauses at another table to pick up olives and demonstrate the value of practice by catching them successfully. That they are somebody else’s olives really doesn’t matter in the pleasure of the new game. And indeed their owner, Dr Lehman (Fritz Feld), whom we now meet, doesn’t mind at all. (Indeed, later in the scene we see he’s been seduced into giving it a go himself.) She treats everyone like members of the family, the world as her front room, with sublime insouciance. Susan thinks they may have met before and his face is familiar. He introduces himself and says ‘Lehman’ so quickly so that it can be misheard (by me at least and a couple of friends I’ve asked) as Ling. I wonder if this is because he resembles Fritz Lang, monocle and all, in appearance as well as name. Todd McCarthy’s biography doesn’t record any meetings between Hawks and Lang, but Lang was working in Hollywood in 1936–7, so an in-joke may have been possible here. If Lehman does start as a bit of a Lang he soon turns into a cosily familiar shrink figure, with full Germanic accent.

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again later. The hat-check girl and her friend look David up and down and take him in. They seem to be amused by him and to fancy him, as would a large part of the audience, though few would be as beautiful as these particular cloakroom attendants. This is the only scene in the film with a musical accompaniment other than the theme tune. It tells us that David and Susan are in the same place, an evidently demure ambience, and as a continuous background to what will turn out to be a series of virtuoso comic routines it brings with it a suggestion of the world of silent-film comedy. Where David has been distant and correct with the head waiter and the hat-check girl, Susan has cut through all that when we see her in the bar, ravishingly dressed in one of her most eccentric outfits. She is wearing an ensemble of lamé skirt and full-length wrapover gown with three-quarter-length sleeves, with strong references to the orientalist fashions of the time. She also wears an extremely strange head-dress a little like a bridal veil, probably made of silk tulle and edged with wired ribbon which seems to curl around her head. This is the most extravagantly unusual of her many high-couture outfits in the film, and it signals her evident wealth and flagrant selfpossession. For whom is she dressed in this way? Was she meeting someone? Dining out? Already she transcends the world of plans and appointments. (We discover later on that she was to have dined with Mr Peabody – ‘Boopie’ to her.) The barman Joe (Ernest Cossant) has or makes plenty of time for her, because time is at Susan’s disposal and her charm and wealth disarm him. He is teaching her skills with olives, throwing them into cocktail glasses and snapping them up off his knuckles into his mouth. Susan watches carefully, delighted by the new games and entirely absorbed by them. Though so posh, she isn’t stuck up and gets on happily with the barman; in fact, she has a kind of respect for him as a pro. She has a go at the olive trick, and is very good at the olive-throwing bit and then not at all put out by missing her target when she tries to catch one. The game wouldn’t be fun if it was too easy, and she is confident that she’ll get it right – being so

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well coordinated is part of how the world has been good to her. ‘That’s wonderful,’ she tells Joe, ‘only you cheated.’ You have to play a game well to cheat skilfully, so this is a compliment of sorts. Likewise, you have to be an athlete to take a tumble with comic aplomb, and this is what Cary Grant will do next, as Susan’s third olive misses its target (her mouth) but hits an even better one as the entering David slips on it and manages to land on his hat. ‘Oh, hello. You’re sitting on your hat,’ says Susan blithely. We don’t know how they got from the vehicle exiting the car park to this point,13 but the olive testifies they’re meant to be together and he’s not meant to be upright. She apologises really quite nicely in her most New England manner, but explains that the olive trick takes practice so he’ll understand that she’s hardly to blame from that point of view. David walks away and Susan follows. We see her look at him and decide to follow. This is another absorbing game, with his shooing her away adding to its pleasure. For the first time she becomes the stalker, a role which with varying guile and transparency she inhabits for the rest of the story. She pauses at another table to pick up olives and demonstrate the value of practice by catching them successfully. That they are somebody else’s olives really doesn’t matter in the pleasure of the new game. And indeed their owner, Dr Lehman (Fritz Feld), whom we now meet, doesn’t mind at all. (Indeed, later in the scene we see he’s been seduced into giving it a go himself.) She treats everyone like members of the family, the world as her front room, with sublime insouciance. Susan thinks they may have met before and his face is familiar. He introduces himself and says ‘Lehman’ so quickly so that it can be misheard (by me at least and a couple of friends I’ve asked) as Ling. I wonder if this is because he resembles Fritz Lang, monocle and all, in appearance as well as name. Todd McCarthy’s biography doesn’t record any meetings between Hawks and Lang, but Lang was working in Hollywood in 1936–7, so an in-joke may have been possible here. If Lehman does start as a bit of a Lang he soon turns into a cosily familiar shrink figure, with full Germanic accent.

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Four Howard Hawks heroines in masculine domains: Katharine Hepburn in Bringing Up Baby, Lauren Bacall in To Have and Have Not (1944), Rosalind Russell in His Girl Friday (1940), Jean Arthur in Only Angels Have Wings (1939)

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Four Howard Hawks heroines in masculine domains: Katharine Hepburn in Bringing Up Baby, Lauren Bacall in To Have and Have Not (1944), Rosalind Russell in His Girl Friday (1940), Jean Arthur in Only Angels Have Wings (1939)

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Susan is no less interested in Dr Lehman’s professionalism than that of the barman Joe. Her ingénue curiosity about people who actually work is still sweetly in place in the final scene of the film (in the first cut – it was omitted from the released version): ‘So this is your brontosaurus – I don’t know much about them, but it seems like a lovely one – (Stretches out her hand to touch it.) What do you do, David? String them up?’14 Dr Lehman specialises, he says, in ‘nervous disorders’. Susan is evidently on familiar terms with the idea of ‘crazy people’,15 and her aunt will later express anxieties about Susan continuing the long line of lunatics in the family. When Dr Lehman

explains that the love impulse in man frequently reveals itself in conflict, the camera pulls back slightly towards David, as though encouraging Susan to follow him. She delivers her discovery about the love impulse to David with plenty of pleasure – it’s another new acquisition, like the olive trick – and some eyelash-batting. ‘You’re angry, aren’t you?’ she asks tolerantly, rising above any idea that this is her fault to a confirmation of his love impulse (without which, perhaps, she wouldn’t pursue him as she does: the psychiatrist may rather unusually take the credit or some of it for the happy ending). The last part of this quite lengthy dialogue between Fritz Feld’s psychiatrist and Susan all takes place in a single shot, covering a full twenty-seven lines on the page. Hawks often uses unusually prolonged shots of this kind, with an immobile or relatively immobile Dr Lehman and his glittering eye

Fritz Lang and his monocle

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Susan is no less interested in Dr Lehman’s professionalism than that of the barman Joe. Her ingénue curiosity about people who actually work is still sweetly in place in the final scene of the film (in the first cut – it was omitted from the released version): ‘So this is your brontosaurus – I don’t know much about them, but it seems like a lovely one – (Stretches out her hand to touch it.) What do you do, David? String them up?’14 Dr Lehman specialises, he says, in ‘nervous disorders’. Susan is evidently on familiar terms with the idea of ‘crazy people’,15 and her aunt will later express anxieties about Susan continuing the long line of lunatics in the family. When Dr Lehman

explains that the love impulse in man frequently reveals itself in conflict, the camera pulls back slightly towards David, as though encouraging Susan to follow him. She delivers her discovery about the love impulse to David with plenty of pleasure – it’s another new acquisition, like the olive trick – and some eyelash-batting. ‘You’re angry, aren’t you?’ she asks tolerantly, rising above any idea that this is her fault to a confirmation of his love impulse (without which, perhaps, she wouldn’t pursue him as she does: the psychiatrist may rather unusually take the credit or some of it for the happy ending). The last part of this quite lengthy dialogue between Fritz Feld’s psychiatrist and Susan all takes place in a single shot, covering a full twenty-seven lines on the page. Hawks often uses unusually prolonged shots of this kind, with an immobile or relatively immobile Dr Lehman and his glittering eye

Fritz Lang and his monocle

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camera: in the Westlake jail, for instance, the camera remains still for no fewer than forty-seven lines of dialogue between the sheriff, Susan and David. Shortly afterwards, again, there is a certain amount of panning but no cut during forty lines of dialogue in which David walks out of his cell, escorts Slocum (Walter Catlett) back in with him until Slocum panics and exits and then, when reminded to do so by David, locks the cell door. In other lengthy shots the camera dollies or tracks more dynamically in order to let the central couple do their dynamic stuff together. When David and Susan go through the garage door into Aunt Elizabeth’s (May Robson’s) garden, for Slocum (Walter Catlett) and Gogarty (Barry Fitzgerald)

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example, the camera registers their crossing of a threshold by panning back with them as they walk together with their very different gaits down the garden path. The best instance of all comes at the end of this scene at the Ritz Plaza, where a single prolonged shot observes the wonderful choreography of David’s attempts to preserve Susan’s modesty as he trails and circles her, top hat in hand, trying to hide her exposed lingerie from public view when the backpanel of her dress rips off.16 Part of the film’s affection for its characters is expressed by this willingness to give them space to show their skills. The camera often just follows or frames the action, as if confident that the performers will give us plenty to enjoy. Hawks liked, so he said, to do single takes of a scene. That helped to keep the spontaneity and edge for the actors, and if the first take wasn’t good enough, then very likely the scene wasn’t ever going to work, in which case something else could be written in later on to supply narrative continuity, insofar as that was a concern. Hawks tended to play up his own magisterial nonchalance and no doubt he exaggerated his reluctance to do retakes, but Bringing Up Baby is a triumphant vindication of the director’s trust in his performers and his eye for what they could do without any help from the direction. It makes the film an exceptional showcase for the comic skills of the performers, a seasoned ensemble of comedy veterans each given space to do their thing – Charles Ruggles as the Major impersonating a leopard’s cry, Walter Catlett as Constable Slocum hemming and hawing his way through his arrests and misapprehensions, Barry Fitzgerald as Irish Gogarty delivering an exasperated drunken monologue (‘And then they say “Gogarty, you mustn’t drink” …’). ‘Here, hold this,’ Susan tells David, handing him a purloined handbag with a sense that she’s used to people doing her bidding. This film is unusual in the screwball genre in enjoying and indulging Susan’s heiressy sense of entitlement. We could compare other screwball heiresses who have to learn democratically better, headed by Claudette Colbert on the road with Clark Gable in Frank Capra’s

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camera: in the Westlake jail, for instance, the camera remains still for no fewer than forty-seven lines of dialogue between the sheriff, Susan and David. Shortly afterwards, again, there is a certain amount of panning but no cut during forty lines of dialogue in which David walks out of his cell, escorts Slocum (Walter Catlett) back in with him until Slocum panics and exits and then, when reminded to do so by David, locks the cell door. In other lengthy shots the camera dollies or tracks more dynamically in order to let the central couple do their dynamic stuff together. When David and Susan go through the garage door into Aunt Elizabeth’s (May Robson’s) garden, for Slocum (Walter Catlett) and Gogarty (Barry Fitzgerald)

BRINGING UP BABY

example, the camera registers their crossing of a threshold by panning back with them as they walk together with their very different gaits down the garden path. The best instance of all comes at the end of this scene at the Ritz Plaza, where a single prolonged shot observes the wonderful choreography of David’s attempts to preserve Susan’s modesty as he trails and circles her, top hat in hand, trying to hide her exposed lingerie from public view when the backpanel of her dress rips off.16 Part of the film’s affection for its characters is expressed by this willingness to give them space to show their skills. The camera often just follows or frames the action, as if confident that the performers will give us plenty to enjoy. Hawks liked, so he said, to do single takes of a scene. That helped to keep the spontaneity and edge for the actors, and if the first take wasn’t good enough, then very likely the scene wasn’t ever going to work, in which case something else could be written in later on to supply narrative continuity, insofar as that was a concern. Hawks tended to play up his own magisterial nonchalance and no doubt he exaggerated his reluctance to do retakes, but Bringing Up Baby is a triumphant vindication of the director’s trust in his performers and his eye for what they could do without any help from the direction. It makes the film an exceptional showcase for the comic skills of the performers, a seasoned ensemble of comedy veterans each given space to do their thing – Charles Ruggles as the Major impersonating a leopard’s cry, Walter Catlett as Constable Slocum hemming and hawing his way through his arrests and misapprehensions, Barry Fitzgerald as Irish Gogarty delivering an exasperated drunken monologue (‘And then they say “Gogarty, you mustn’t drink” …’). ‘Here, hold this,’ Susan tells David, handing him a purloined handbag with a sense that she’s used to people doing her bidding. This film is unusual in the screwball genre in enjoying and indulging Susan’s heiressy sense of entitlement. We could compare other screwball heiresses who have to learn democratically better, headed by Claudette Colbert on the road with Clark Gable in Frank Capra’s

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seminal hit It Happened One Night. Colbert as the millionaire’s daughter Ellie Andrews has to find out that bus drivers can’t be treated like chauffeurs and you can’t queue-jump on your way to a communal shower, and it is part of the charm of the film that she learns quickly and enjoys doing so. Wealth is a kind of malaise, Capra suggests – and the unaffluent can have a chip on their shoulder too – but basic human decency and shared moral energy can overcome class divisions. Still, the scions of the rich need to be taught a civic lesson. Bringing Up Baby rises blithely above such Depression Era concerns, with a calculated obliviousness which matches the naive obliviousness of Susan’s charmed life. Once the business of the stolen handbags has been disentangled, Susan follows David out, still perhaps continuing her game of pursuit. As he walks away she grabs him by his tails, one of several moments in the scene where a bawdy pun seems to be lurking. His coat tears, or as she puts it ‘You’ve torn your coat.’ (In Susan’s mind her mistakes are nothing to do with her, as in a later scene when she It Happened One Night (1934): Ellie Andrews (Claudette Colbert, second from left) learning about queues

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seminal hit It Happened One Night. Colbert as the millionaire’s daughter Ellie Andrews has to find out that bus drivers can’t be treated like chauffeurs and you can’t queue-jump on your way to a communal shower, and it is part of the charm of the film that she learns quickly and enjoys doing so. Wealth is a kind of malaise, Capra suggests – and the unaffluent can have a chip on their shoulder too – but basic human decency and shared moral energy can overcome class divisions. Still, the scions of the rich need to be taught a civic lesson. Bringing Up Baby rises blithely above such Depression Era concerns, with a calculated obliviousness which matches the naive obliviousness of Susan’s charmed life. Once the business of the stolen handbags has been disentangled, Susan follows David out, still perhaps continuing her game of pursuit. As he walks away she grabs him by his tails, one of several moments in the scene where a bawdy pun seems to be lurking. His coat tears, or as she puts it ‘You’ve torn your coat.’ (In Susan’s mind her mistakes are nothing to do with her, as in a later scene when she It Happened One Night (1934): Ellie Andrews (Claudette Colbert, second from left) learning about queues

BRINGING UP BABY

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overdries his sock over the campfire and laments, ‘Your sock’s on fire.’) This is a scene, we may notice, in which the two leads are tearing each other’s clothes off, ever so respectably and accidentally. At some level this is what they want to do, and the plot therefore encourages them as a good comedy anti-secretively should. Susan’s dress tears when David involuntarily detains her. His gentlemanly instincts now require him to be the stalker, pursuing her as, riled, she attempts to leave him (the only occasion in the film when she will do so). He manoeuvres round her desperately in the interests of pudeur. But does he really imagine that clapping his hat on her behind will help keep things respectable? ‘Will you please stop doing that with your hat,’ she protests. What can she think he’s doing? They lockstep out in a perfect image of the love impulse, at once beautifully synchronised and at an impossible disadvantage.17 We’re given a point-of-view shot from David and Susan’s perspective as we reverse-track away from the arriving Peabody party, the timing again perfectly cooperating with David’s frustration as his sense of duty (to public decency) again carries him away from his desires (to meet Mr Peabody). The whole sequence in the restaurant lasts only five minutes or so, but is one of the most delicious parts of the film. Hawks once said that a good film needed three good scenes, and with five you’d have a hit. Only ten minutes in we’ve already had two, on the golf course and here, and the film never lets up, with one great scene after another. The scene at the Ritz Plaza takes David and Susan out into a social world, albeit a very narrowly configured one. (As in Wodehouse’s stories, the film puts aside any sense of the world beyond its own fictional parameters: this is one reason it lacks the newspapermen and newspaper montages common in the genre, even though the narrative has its possibilities of spice and scandal.) The sense that the romance is in its early stages is very well paced. David stands at this stage between calling her ‘My dear young lady’ (on the golf course) and ‘Miss Vance’ (in her apartment), with the vocative ‘Susan’ to follow 168 times after that. At this point she is following him whimsically, not yet in full pursuit. His flight is solemn but you

BRINGING UP BABY

can see he’s intrigued as well as exasperated. They’re sizing each other up, finding each other rather interesting, in their movements which bring them together even while other forces push them apart. In screwball comedies we may often ask where the protagonists fall in love. Recent films have had a convention of a sort of pop-video montage of smily moments to tell us, none too subtly, that the couple are now a couple, but these films tend to be more elusive. The very romantic Sullivan’s Travels, for instance, has no scene of wooing and doesn’t include a single kiss: Sullivan and the (unnamed) girl fall in love through what they see and share on the road; likewise in It

My Man Godfrey (1936): ‘You look so cute in your apron’ – Irene (Carole Lombard) and Godfrey (William Powell)

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overdries his sock over the campfire and laments, ‘Your sock’s on fire.’) This is a scene, we may notice, in which the two leads are tearing each other’s clothes off, ever so respectably and accidentally. At some level this is what they want to do, and the plot therefore encourages them as a good comedy anti-secretively should. Susan’s dress tears when David involuntarily detains her. His gentlemanly instincts now require him to be the stalker, pursuing her as, riled, she attempts to leave him (the only occasion in the film when she will do so). He manoeuvres round her desperately in the interests of pudeur. But does he really imagine that clapping his hat on her behind will help keep things respectable? ‘Will you please stop doing that with your hat,’ she protests. What can she think he’s doing? They lockstep out in a perfect image of the love impulse, at once beautifully synchronised and at an impossible disadvantage.17 We’re given a point-of-view shot from David and Susan’s perspective as we reverse-track away from the arriving Peabody party, the timing again perfectly cooperating with David’s frustration as his sense of duty (to public decency) again carries him away from his desires (to meet Mr Peabody). The whole sequence in the restaurant lasts only five minutes or so, but is one of the most delicious parts of the film. Hawks once said that a good film needed three good scenes, and with five you’d have a hit. Only ten minutes in we’ve already had two, on the golf course and here, and the film never lets up, with one great scene after another. The scene at the Ritz Plaza takes David and Susan out into a social world, albeit a very narrowly configured one. (As in Wodehouse’s stories, the film puts aside any sense of the world beyond its own fictional parameters: this is one reason it lacks the newspapermen and newspaper montages common in the genre, even though the narrative has its possibilities of spice and scandal.) The sense that the romance is in its early stages is very well paced. David stands at this stage between calling her ‘My dear young lady’ (on the golf course) and ‘Miss Vance’ (in her apartment), with the vocative ‘Susan’ to follow 168 times after that. At this point she is following him whimsically, not yet in full pursuit. His flight is solemn but you

BRINGING UP BABY

can see he’s intrigued as well as exasperated. They’re sizing each other up, finding each other rather interesting, in their movements which bring them together even while other forces push them apart. In screwball comedies we may often ask where the protagonists fall in love. Recent films have had a convention of a sort of pop-video montage of smily moments to tell us, none too subtly, that the couple are now a couple, but these films tend to be more elusive. The very romantic Sullivan’s Travels, for instance, has no scene of wooing and doesn’t include a single kiss: Sullivan and the (unnamed) girl fall in love through what they see and share on the road; likewise in It

My Man Godfrey (1936): ‘You look so cute in your apron’ – Irene (Carole Lombard) and Godfrey (William Powell)

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Happened One Night, especially in the shared play-acting by which Peter and Ellie throw the detectives off their trail. In My Man Godfrey, Irene seems to have fallen for Godfrey when she irrelevantly praises his ‘wonderful sense of humour’, and the bond is symbolically confirmed in a little scene near the end when they harmoniously do the dishes together (‘You look so cute in your apron,’ she says). Bringing Up Baby hasn’t yet signalled that the love impulse might be at work, though it will do so in the next scene, with a big close-up of Susan taking in the news that David is engaged. But it will be a long time before David comes to the realisation (or conjecture) that ‘I think I’m in love with you.’ Society girls Susan is called ‘A society girl’ in various sources (such as the filmography of McBride, Hawks on Hawks), but is she one? Where’s the society? Earlier films with heiresses, including Libelled Lady (1936), It Happened One Night and My Man Godfrey, had tended to show them in action at a cocktail party. This might be seen as a nightmarish merry-go-round (It Happened One Night), a wild and whirling cacophony (My Man Godfrey), or later as a stuffed-shirt stultification (Holiday (1938)) or an amiable craziness (The Mad Miss Manton (1938)). The cocktail party convention gave these films a chance to decide on their view of the rich and to depict the world from which the story might well liberate or uproot its heroine. That would generally involve gauging how far the malaise of wealth has estranged her from real friendship and connection. But Bringing Up Baby has no cocktail party. Susan Vance carries her world with her, unsupported by friends and unencumbered by relatives except for her barking-worse-than-biting aunt. Hawks likes his heroines to arrive in this way, without emotional complications or social networks. It is part of his fantasy of the availability of desirable womankind. Susan tells her aunt that David is ‘the only man I’ve ever loved’. We are inclined to believe her because she announces this breathlessly and without a pause, not with the air of one arriving at a realisation or

making a revelation but as one saying an obvious thing which she knows very well and clearly. But the absence of a previous love life isn’t what you would expect of such a romantic and confident and impulsive figure, one who looks and dresses like a film star. Some of the heiress films give their heroine a sister or a group of friends. But Susan’s brother remains well off-screen (hunting in Brazil) and we never see any of her friends, even though she has such a gift for getting on with people. By contrast, the title figure has a group of six girl-friends in The Mad Miss Manton, a film designed as It Happened One Night: party time

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Happened One Night, especially in the shared play-acting by which Peter and Ellie throw the detectives off their trail. In My Man Godfrey, Irene seems to have fallen for Godfrey when she irrelevantly praises his ‘wonderful sense of humour’, and the bond is symbolically confirmed in a little scene near the end when they harmoniously do the dishes together (‘You look so cute in your apron,’ she says). Bringing Up Baby hasn’t yet signalled that the love impulse might be at work, though it will do so in the next scene, with a big close-up of Susan taking in the news that David is engaged. But it will be a long time before David comes to the realisation (or conjecture) that ‘I think I’m in love with you.’ Society girls Susan is called ‘A society girl’ in various sources (such as the filmography of McBride, Hawks on Hawks), but is she one? Where’s the society? Earlier films with heiresses, including Libelled Lady (1936), It Happened One Night and My Man Godfrey, had tended to show them in action at a cocktail party. This might be seen as a nightmarish merry-go-round (It Happened One Night), a wild and whirling cacophony (My Man Godfrey), or later as a stuffed-shirt stultification (Holiday (1938)) or an amiable craziness (The Mad Miss Manton (1938)). The cocktail party convention gave these films a chance to decide on their view of the rich and to depict the world from which the story might well liberate or uproot its heroine. That would generally involve gauging how far the malaise of wealth has estranged her from real friendship and connection. But Bringing Up Baby has no cocktail party. Susan Vance carries her world with her, unsupported by friends and unencumbered by relatives except for her barking-worse-than-biting aunt. Hawks likes his heroines to arrive in this way, without emotional complications or social networks. It is part of his fantasy of the availability of desirable womankind. Susan tells her aunt that David is ‘the only man I’ve ever loved’. We are inclined to believe her because she announces this breathlessly and without a pause, not with the air of one arriving at a realisation or

making a revelation but as one saying an obvious thing which she knows very well and clearly. But the absence of a previous love life isn’t what you would expect of such a romantic and confident and impulsive figure, one who looks and dresses like a film star. Some of the heiress films give their heroine a sister or a group of friends. But Susan’s brother remains well off-screen (hunting in Brazil) and we never see any of her friends, even though she has such a gift for getting on with people. By contrast, the title figure has a group of six girl-friends in The Mad Miss Manton, a film designed as It Happened One Night: party time

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MISS MANTON

Oh yes but it was a treasure-hunt for charity. We run a TB clinic.

The Mad Miss Manton is a lively film which remains enjoyable today, but – as these two exchanges show – it sweetens the tradition of heiress stories and takes much of the threat away. Our heroine may be irresponsible, but she cares for sick animals and her pranks are linked to good causes. We can trust her – or rather we no longer need to trust her because trust implies the possibility of doubt and we have been offered something like guarantees of her good character. Despite the title, Miss Manton is a long way from madness. But in Baby there is much madness in Susan’s method even when we realise that she has a method (the not very methodical one of doing ‘the first thing that came into my head’). Social good works are far from its scene. Miss Manton’s ‘treasure-hunt for charity’ probably remembers the astonishing opening scenes of My Man Godfrey, in which the babbling feral crowds of idle rich are engaged in a scavenger hunt, a reprise of Bringing Up Baby (the dialogue includes such direct echoes as ‘You know psychiatrists say that hate is just a step from love’). The role of Miss Manton was intended for Hepburn, but following the disappointing box-office returns of Baby she was replaced by Barbara Stanwyck.18 Miss Manton’s way with blithe non-sequiturs marks her clearly as a descendant of Susan Vance. POLICE LIEUTENANT BRENT

Aren’t you the dame who got an ambulance from Bellevue because one of your dogs had distemper?

MISS MANTON

Well it was very sick and the veterinary was out of town.

Or again: POLICE LIEUTENANT BRENT

Aren’t you one of the bunch that held a treasurehunt last week and stole a traffic light?

The Mad Miss Manton (1938): Miss Manton (Barbara Stanwyck, in furs) and friends

My Man Godfrey: the scavenger hunt, with Mrs Bullock (Alice Brady, agape, centre) staking her claim to a prize

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BRINGING UP BABY

MISS MANTON

Oh yes but it was a treasure-hunt for charity. We run a TB clinic.

The Mad Miss Manton is a lively film which remains enjoyable today, but – as these two exchanges show – it sweetens the tradition of heiress stories and takes much of the threat away. Our heroine may be irresponsible, but she cares for sick animals and her pranks are linked to good causes. We can trust her – or rather we no longer need to trust her because trust implies the possibility of doubt and we have been offered something like guarantees of her good character. Despite the title, Miss Manton is a long way from madness. But in Baby there is much madness in Susan’s method even when we realise that she has a method (the not very methodical one of doing ‘the first thing that came into my head’). Social good works are far from its scene. Miss Manton’s ‘treasure-hunt for charity’ probably remembers the astonishing opening scenes of My Man Godfrey, in which the babbling feral crowds of idle rich are engaged in a scavenger hunt, a reprise of Bringing Up Baby (the dialogue includes such direct echoes as ‘You know psychiatrists say that hate is just a step from love’). The role of Miss Manton was intended for Hepburn, but following the disappointing box-office returns of Baby she was replaced by Barbara Stanwyck.18 Miss Manton’s way with blithe non-sequiturs marks her clearly as a descendant of Susan Vance. POLICE LIEUTENANT BRENT

Aren’t you the dame who got an ambulance from Bellevue because one of your dogs had distemper?

MISS MANTON

Well it was very sick and the veterinary was out of town.

Or again: POLICE LIEUTENANT BRENT

Aren’t you one of the bunch that held a treasurehunt last week and stole a traffic light?

The Mad Miss Manton (1938): Miss Manton (Barbara Stanwyck, in furs) and friends

My Man Godfrey: the scavenger hunt, with Mrs Bullock (Alice Brady, agape, centre) staking her claim to a prize

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also for charity. But in La Cava’s film the unreachably batty mother cheerfully says that there’s never any money left for the charity once the partying is over. The mood is close to Evelyn Waugh, at once appalled and delighted at the irresponsible fatuity on display. In My Man Godfrey we hear not of a stolen traffic light but of a horse being ridden into the library, a Dada-like intrusion of the animal into the home of culture. That’s partly to say that My Man Godfrey is one of Baby’s influences and precursors, while Miss Manton dilutes Hawks’s film for wider consumption. Apartments and animals This film, like others of its time (Cat People (1942) and The Leopard Man (1943) among the feline others), wonders why, and how far, we want animals in our lives and we are animals in our lives. Why does anyone want a pet? Why does Aunt Elizabeth want a leopard, of all things? Why, for that matter, do people hunt, including perhaps unexpected types like Horace? What draws people to see animal acts at the circus, another place (like the theatre, like the cinema) where temporary departure from human control is staged and enjoyed? How far should a human being behave like an animal and how far can we avoid doing so? Bringing Up Baby visits these questions, with cool comic nerve, three times over, with three animals more or less suited to the human project of their adaptation to our plans. Of the three a maximum of two are cut out for domestic life. George, the terrier, may be ‘a perfect fiend’, but is unequivocally a pet; the escaped leopard has clawed two circus-handlers and unequivocally isn’t one; and Baby may or may not be one, depending whether we agree with Major Applegate that ‘there’s no such thing as a tame leopard’. Having a pet in the home is one way of allowing the animal into the domestic, a way of letting a bit of chaos intrude. We can be sure that Miss Swallow would not have countenanced domestic pets. Psychological health might be defined as having the right amount of the animal in our psyches: too much and we run amok (like Susan?),

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too little and we succumb to what Freud called civilisation and its discontents (repressed like David, with his buried bone).19 Welcoming the animal into our lives always entails a danger of excess and disruption. If a domestic animal behaves too much like an animal, ripping the curtains and using the living-room as a lavatory, then it won’t remain welcome for long, it’ll be put down or at least neutered. Baby’s leopard double, who claws two of the circus-handlers, is a case in point, and is off to the gas chamber before David and Susan intervene. Many of the visual jokes in the film come from the entry of the animal into the human world. Whenever possible, Hawks films animal and human to show them in the frame together. Sometimes the effect comes from a skilful use of split frames, for instance when Baby is in the back of Susan’s car, or placidly returning Gogarty’s stare on Aunt Elizabeth’s porch. But the first time we see Baby20 is a visual coup because transparently not any kind of special effect. Susan is on the phone to David when Baby wanders nonchalantly into frame from the left, then sidles up to Susan, rubs against her knee, gets patted and strolls off to the bathroom. We are as surprised as David will be, and more delighted. The animal invasion of the domestic world likewise comes alive when we see Baby trot out of Susan’s apartment door and down the stairs into the street. Man and beast later share the frame in extended shots showing Susan, David and the terrier George, with the two principals skilfully arranging their lines and movements around the dog’s. Hawks liked to include such moments of unfakeable spectacle: John Wayne wrestling a rhino in Hatari! (1962) and the plane landing on a terrifyingly small mountain landing-strip in Only Angels Have Wings (1939) are two examples. One of the things we have lost with computer-generated images is the shocking guarantee that what we see on screen has a close relation to what was actually there. The tigers in Gladiator (2000), for instance, are very good tigers: they roar loudly, and bare their fangs fiercely; but never for a moment do we suppose they’re anywhere near Russell Crowe. We just think what

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also for charity. But in La Cava’s film the unreachably batty mother cheerfully says that there’s never any money left for the charity once the partying is over. The mood is close to Evelyn Waugh, at once appalled and delighted at the irresponsible fatuity on display. In My Man Godfrey we hear not of a stolen traffic light but of a horse being ridden into the library, a Dada-like intrusion of the animal into the home of culture. That’s partly to say that My Man Godfrey is one of Baby’s influences and precursors, while Miss Manton dilutes Hawks’s film for wider consumption. Apartments and animals This film, like others of its time (Cat People (1942) and The Leopard Man (1943) among the feline others), wonders why, and how far, we want animals in our lives and we are animals in our lives. Why does anyone want a pet? Why does Aunt Elizabeth want a leopard, of all things? Why, for that matter, do people hunt, including perhaps unexpected types like Horace? What draws people to see animal acts at the circus, another place (like the theatre, like the cinema) where temporary departure from human control is staged and enjoyed? How far should a human being behave like an animal and how far can we avoid doing so? Bringing Up Baby visits these questions, with cool comic nerve, three times over, with three animals more or less suited to the human project of their adaptation to our plans. Of the three a maximum of two are cut out for domestic life. George, the terrier, may be ‘a perfect fiend’, but is unequivocally a pet; the escaped leopard has clawed two circus-handlers and unequivocally isn’t one; and Baby may or may not be one, depending whether we agree with Major Applegate that ‘there’s no such thing as a tame leopard’. Having a pet in the home is one way of allowing the animal into the domestic, a way of letting a bit of chaos intrude. We can be sure that Miss Swallow would not have countenanced domestic pets. Psychological health might be defined as having the right amount of the animal in our psyches: too much and we run amok (like Susan?),

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too little and we succumb to what Freud called civilisation and its discontents (repressed like David, with his buried bone).19 Welcoming the animal into our lives always entails a danger of excess and disruption. If a domestic animal behaves too much like an animal, ripping the curtains and using the living-room as a lavatory, then it won’t remain welcome for long, it’ll be put down or at least neutered. Baby’s leopard double, who claws two of the circus-handlers, is a case in point, and is off to the gas chamber before David and Susan intervene. Many of the visual jokes in the film come from the entry of the animal into the human world. Whenever possible, Hawks films animal and human to show them in the frame together. Sometimes the effect comes from a skilful use of split frames, for instance when Baby is in the back of Susan’s car, or placidly returning Gogarty’s stare on Aunt Elizabeth’s porch. But the first time we see Baby20 is a visual coup because transparently not any kind of special effect. Susan is on the phone to David when Baby wanders nonchalantly into frame from the left, then sidles up to Susan, rubs against her knee, gets patted and strolls off to the bathroom. We are as surprised as David will be, and more delighted. The animal invasion of the domestic world likewise comes alive when we see Baby trot out of Susan’s apartment door and down the stairs into the street. Man and beast later share the frame in extended shots showing Susan, David and the terrier George, with the two principals skilfully arranging their lines and movements around the dog’s. Hawks liked to include such moments of unfakeable spectacle: John Wayne wrestling a rhino in Hatari! (1962) and the plane landing on a terrifyingly small mountain landing-strip in Only Angels Have Wings (1939) are two examples. One of the things we have lost with computer-generated images is the shocking guarantee that what we see on screen has a close relation to what was actually there. The tigers in Gladiator (2000), for instance, are very good tigers: they roar loudly, and bare their fangs fiercely; but never for a moment do we suppose they’re anywhere near Russell Crowe. We just think what

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Close encounters: Gogarty and Baby, Susan and Baby, Pockets and Anna Maria (Red Buttons and Elsa Martinelli) and intruder in Hawks’s Hatari! (1962), John Wayne and friend on location in Hatari!

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Close encounters: Gogarty and Baby, Susan and Baby, Pockets and Anna Maria (Red Buttons and Elsa Martinelli) and intruder in Hawks’s Hatari! (1962), John Wayne and friend on location in Hatari!

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through the ceiling of his dressing-room. But there was an alarm on set one day when Susan’s twirling around in her weighted dress alarmed Nissa, who moved to claw her until Madame Olga intervened with whip in hand.21 After that, Nissa was given less freedom. The terrier George was played by ‘Asta’, previously the ‘Mr Smith’ whose custody is disputed by the divorcing Cary Grant and Irene Dunne in The Awful Truth (1937). Before that Asta had been Nick and Nora Charles’s dog in the first two Thin Man films (1934 and 1936) (whose speed of thought and mix of idyll and sleaze make it a notable influence on both screwball comedy and The Big Sleep (1946)). a good job the boys with the pixels have done. But when George tussles with Baby in what looks like it might either end in true love or perhaps lunch, the dog and leopard actually were tussling, an amorous couple as conflicted and mismatched as David and Susan. The insurance companies for both animals probably knew nothing of this piece of breathtaking action. Otis Ferguson reviewing the film for The New Republic (2 March 1938) praised the cast, but added ‘the leopard was better than any of them, but is it art?’ Well yes, the leopard is integral to the art of Baby, because the story is so much about the risks and comedy of possessing a body and occupying a physical world with other ones, living not skeletal. Filming animals, like falling in love, always involves getting on terms with something you can’t entirely control. Nissa the leopard had appeared in several films, but even so she wasn’t the most biddable member of the cast. At first she was allowed to wander freely on the set, with her handler, the splendidly named Olga Celeste, never far away. (Olga was born in Sweden in 1889, played a slave girl in Cleopatra (1963) at the not unripe age of forty-five, and in spite of being a leopard-handler lived to the riper one of eighty.) Grant was terrified of Nissa, and is seen with her in a minimum of shots, while Hepburn (who wore a heavy scent designed to dope any leopard into drowsy good-nature) didn’t mind her at all, and teased her co-star for his fears by dropping a model leopard George and Baby in action

The Awful Truth (1937): Cary Grant, Irene Dunne (with hat) and Asta (with hat)

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through the ceiling of his dressing-room. But there was an alarm on set one day when Susan’s twirling around in her weighted dress alarmed Nissa, who moved to claw her until Madame Olga intervened with whip in hand.21 After that, Nissa was given less freedom. The terrier George was played by ‘Asta’, previously the ‘Mr Smith’ whose custody is disputed by the divorcing Cary Grant and Irene Dunne in The Awful Truth (1937). Before that Asta had been Nick and Nora Charles’s dog in the first two Thin Man films (1934 and 1936) (whose speed of thought and mix of idyll and sleaze make it a notable influence on both screwball comedy and The Big Sleep (1946)). a good job the boys with the pixels have done. But when George tussles with Baby in what looks like it might either end in true love or perhaps lunch, the dog and leopard actually were tussling, an amorous couple as conflicted and mismatched as David and Susan. The insurance companies for both animals probably knew nothing of this piece of breathtaking action. Otis Ferguson reviewing the film for The New Republic (2 March 1938) praised the cast, but added ‘the leopard was better than any of them, but is it art?’ Well yes, the leopard is integral to the art of Baby, because the story is so much about the risks and comedy of possessing a body and occupying a physical world with other ones, living not skeletal. Filming animals, like falling in love, always involves getting on terms with something you can’t entirely control. Nissa the leopard had appeared in several films, but even so she wasn’t the most biddable member of the cast. At first she was allowed to wander freely on the set, with her handler, the splendidly named Olga Celeste, never far away. (Olga was born in Sweden in 1889, played a slave girl in Cleopatra (1963) at the not unripe age of forty-five, and in spite of being a leopard-handler lived to the riper one of eighty.) Grant was terrified of Nissa, and is seen with her in a minimum of shots, while Hepburn (who wore a heavy scent designed to dope any leopard into drowsy good-nature) didn’t mind her at all, and teased her co-star for his fears by dropping a model leopard George and Baby in action

The Awful Truth (1937): Cary Grant, Irene Dunne (with hat) and Asta (with hat)

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How far should we see Susan as one of the cat people? She is sartorially feline in her apartment, at first in a trouser suit with small polka-dots, and later in a chiffon housecoat with big leopard-like polka-dots and a huge pussycat bow. After phoning David she purrs on the rug like Simone Simon in Cat People – her most feline moment. Like Baby, she is a sleek and gorgeous creature, responsive to serenades of love. Outside on Park Avenue, Baby clearly resembles Susan, attaching herself to David as he struggles to escape. The three of them are filmed side by side by side, Susan in her car to the left of the frame, Baby in the middle, David in one of his upright moments to the right. But the plot and Hawks’s intellectual tact soon overtake anything so schematic, and Susan isn’t much like Baby except in that early section. Indeed, in the famous image of the two leads on their

Catwomen: Simone Simon in Cat People (1942) and Katharine Hepburn in Bringing Up Baby

BRINGING UP BABY

backsides after a fall, with her butterfly-net over his head, she has become the hunter while he’s the big game. Later on the analogies between people and other animals diversify and multiply. David as ‘Mr Bone’ goes canine, trotting along behind George in quest of the bone which belongs to them both. Likewise at one point Susan trots along behind David, dogging his steps and parroting his cries. Both of them get on their hands and knees following George. The dog, seen from behind, is entirely unresponsive, in a visual emblem of the folly of trying to get on rational terms with the animal world. At the dinner table George is framed as the apex of a visual triangle – like Baby in the car on the way to Connecticut – and the pet not only enters the dining-room but sets the terms of the meal. Horace wishes to imitate the animal world to the extent that he performs very skilful leopard cries between courses. Later, he and Aunt Elizabeth continue the leopard imitations on the lawn, sounding like loons, so that the gardener Gogarty deplores their ‘howling and roaring at each other like a lot of ban-shees’. Everyone has a bit of the creature in them, and the analogies broaden and become burlesque instead of homing in on a decisive affinity as they might do in (for instance) a werewolf story. In the end, people are just as strikingly different from animals as similar to them. Leopards, for instance, don’t wear evening dresses with leopard pattern, and they don’t have other leopards as pets. David and Baby, seen alongside from Susan’s car

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How far should we see Susan as one of the cat people? She is sartorially feline in her apartment, at first in a trouser suit with small polka-dots, and later in a chiffon housecoat with big leopard-like polka-dots and a huge pussycat bow. After phoning David she purrs on the rug like Simone Simon in Cat People – her most feline moment. Like Baby, she is a sleek and gorgeous creature, responsive to serenades of love. Outside on Park Avenue, Baby clearly resembles Susan, attaching herself to David as he struggles to escape. The three of them are filmed side by side by side, Susan in her car to the left of the frame, Baby in the middle, David in one of his upright moments to the right. But the plot and Hawks’s intellectual tact soon overtake anything so schematic, and Susan isn’t much like Baby except in that early section. Indeed, in the famous image of the two leads on their

Catwomen: Simone Simon in Cat People (1942) and Katharine Hepburn in Bringing Up Baby

BRINGING UP BABY

backsides after a fall, with her butterfly-net over his head, she has become the hunter while he’s the big game. Later on the analogies between people and other animals diversify and multiply. David as ‘Mr Bone’ goes canine, trotting along behind George in quest of the bone which belongs to them both. Likewise at one point Susan trots along behind David, dogging his steps and parroting his cries. Both of them get on their hands and knees following George. The dog, seen from behind, is entirely unresponsive, in a visual emblem of the folly of trying to get on rational terms with the animal world. At the dinner table George is framed as the apex of a visual triangle – like Baby in the car on the way to Connecticut – and the pet not only enters the dining-room but sets the terms of the meal. Horace wishes to imitate the animal world to the extent that he performs very skilful leopard cries between courses. Later, he and Aunt Elizabeth continue the leopard imitations on the lawn, sounding like loons, so that the gardener Gogarty deplores their ‘howling and roaring at each other like a lot of ban-shees’. Everyone has a bit of the creature in them, and the analogies broaden and become burlesque instead of homing in on a decisive affinity as they might do in (for instance) a werewolf story. In the end, people are just as strikingly different from animals as similar to them. Leopards, for instance, don’t wear evening dresses with leopard pattern, and they don’t have other leopards as pets. David and Baby, seen alongside from Susan’s car

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Netted: David caught in Susan’s net, echoed in Hatari! (1962) (John Wayne and Elsa Martinelli) and prefigured in the net sports in Libelled Lady (1936) (Walter Connolly, Myrna Loy and William Powell) and Theodora Goes Wild (1936) (Melvyn Douglas and Irene Dunne)

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Netted: David caught in Susan’s net, echoed in Hatari! (1962) (John Wayne and Elsa Martinelli) and prefigured in the net sports in Libelled Lady (1936) (Walter Connolly, Myrna Loy and William Powell) and Theodora Goes Wild (1936) (Melvyn Douglas and Irene Dunne)

BRINGING UP BABY

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Triangulating the human and animal worlds

The critic Ross Chambers once suggested in that pets in homes are like digressions in narrative, limiting and complementing our human control.22 Bringing Up Baby, which is full of pets, is a story about the joys and problems of digression. For David the whole story is a digression, a diversion from his aim. In a digression we ‘lose the plot’, as we say in English in an idiom which also suggests madness. But losing the plot can also be freedom, a way of escaping from plot, of not wanting to be guided or tied by the foreordained story of our lives. If plot represents necessity, digression can be freedom – hence the exhilarating effect of films like The Thin Man and The Big Sleep which digress their way through mires of sleaze. Like a venal cabbie, Susan drives round and round town to avoid taking David straight to Mr Peabody’s house, but rises above the need for apology by explaining to him that it’s a lovely evening for a drive. She makes him take her time. The Shakespearean comedy we might think of here is As You Like It, in which just about nothing happens, but that partial suspension of time in the forest is the condition for the discovery of romance. Digression prolongs the pleasures of the ride and postpones the arrival at its end. How do we imagine this story will end? Perhaps, as the title suggests, with a baby. Susan, after all, looks at David with decisive ardour when he says he wants to get married, and she concurs that ‘every man should get married’. And David doesn’t seem the kind of married man to fool around. Yet if the outcome of the story promises to be marriage, still it has been structured like an affair. ‘I don’t want any woman interfering in my affairs,’ David has said to Alice on the phone, his unconscious playing its part in the innuendo, which the overhearing delivery man is quick to pick up on: ‘That’s the stuff, buddy,’ he agrees. ‘I’m going to be married this afternoon,’ David tells him, and the answer – ‘Don’t let it throw you, buddy’ – calls up with stoical aplomb a background of placid misogyny, knowing that dames can be trouble for men and their affairs. (Hagar Wilde’s short story has many such rueful quips about women winding men round their little fingers.23)

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BRINGING UP BABY

Triangulating the human and animal worlds

The critic Ross Chambers once suggested in that pets in homes are like digressions in narrative, limiting and complementing our human control.22 Bringing Up Baby, which is full of pets, is a story about the joys and problems of digression. For David the whole story is a digression, a diversion from his aim. In a digression we ‘lose the plot’, as we say in English in an idiom which also suggests madness. But losing the plot can also be freedom, a way of escaping from plot, of not wanting to be guided or tied by the foreordained story of our lives. If plot represents necessity, digression can be freedom – hence the exhilarating effect of films like The Thin Man and The Big Sleep which digress their way through mires of sleaze. Like a venal cabbie, Susan drives round and round town to avoid taking David straight to Mr Peabody’s house, but rises above the need for apology by explaining to him that it’s a lovely evening for a drive. She makes him take her time. The Shakespearean comedy we might think of here is As You Like It, in which just about nothing happens, but that partial suspension of time in the forest is the condition for the discovery of romance. Digression prolongs the pleasures of the ride and postpones the arrival at its end. How do we imagine this story will end? Perhaps, as the title suggests, with a baby. Susan, after all, looks at David with decisive ardour when he says he wants to get married, and she concurs that ‘every man should get married’. And David doesn’t seem the kind of married man to fool around. Yet if the outcome of the story promises to be marriage, still it has been structured like an affair. ‘I don’t want any woman interfering in my affairs,’ David has said to Alice on the phone, his unconscious playing its part in the innuendo, which the overhearing delivery man is quick to pick up on: ‘That’s the stuff, buddy,’ he agrees. ‘I’m going to be married this afternoon,’ David tells him, and the answer – ‘Don’t let it throw you, buddy’ – calls up with stoical aplomb a background of placid misogyny, knowing that dames can be trouble for men and their affairs. (Hagar Wilde’s short story has many such rueful quips about women winding men round their little fingers.23)

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But this story really is about not letting your relationship get in the way of your affairs. Susan lures and seduces David away from his almost-marital ties, and he was quite right to be enchanted away – he has the best day of his life. And Susan was right too: it can be quite right to play dirty, the film suggests, in certain circumstances, if perhaps you’re ‘good enough’, to give a female twist to Hawks’s famous criterion of men’s professional quality. In the final scene of the first cut of the film David tells Alice that ‘I couldn’t marry her. Multiply one day with her by three hundred and sixty-five and the result is unthinkable.’24 Perhaps that idea needed to be silenced, but it is one that is bound to occur to us. What would marriage to Susan be like? The film doesn’t really have an answer, though it has its qualms, and its ending will be poised, with David on top of the world but his world in ruins below. But although the story moves us towards the ordained nuptial conclusion of comedy, it takes place in the blissful space between commitments – between the old fiancée and the new one, insofar as Susan’s endowing David with a big portion of her worldly goods seems to confirm her in that position. That’s why, uniquely among screwball comedies, it seems to me a story in praise of love affairs, with only the most token interest in the experience of marriage.

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2 In Connecticut Stealing things How are you going to say what stealing is? I steal as much as anybody, so I can’t blame them. (Hawks on The Godfather’s debt to Scarface, McBride, Hawks on Hawks, p. 152)

‘Your golf ball? Your car? Is there anything in the world that doesn’t belong to you?’ Susan asks David as she prepares to drive off in it. Her exasperation is, of course, totally unreasonable, but it has a kind of idiot-savant point as a protest against the meanness and narrowness of ideas of exclusive ownership. Nobody takes anything that belongs to Susan, so her light-mindedness about possessions isn’t put to the test, but she doesn’t seem to give a second thought to sharing her wealth with the less moneyed David, so there is no reason to suspect her of double standards. Her insouciance about property may come across as a utopian unworldliness or a maddening irresponsibility, depending on your taste and point of view. Most of us are probably all too souciant about property, and to that extent it may be a breath of fresh air. Her way with others’ possessions puts her outside and above the usual rules of what belongs to whom. By the time she and David arrive at Aunt Elizabeth’s, for instance, she has commandeered Dr Lehman’s car as well as David’s. She doesn’t really seem to have a conception of stealing. The absence of such a burdensome thing is part of what this story sees as the heiress position, part of what Otis Ferguson called ‘that bounding brassy nerve possible only to the very well bred’.25 (Or, we might add, to the truly criminal, like the professional thieves in Lubitsch’s Trouble in Paradise (1932), for whom impersonating the aristocracy – they don the identities of the ‘Count’ and the ‘Countess’ – is part and parcel of the art of larceny.)

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At any rate, Susan is an accomplished misappropriator. She makes free with David’s golf ball, David’s car, Mrs Lehmann’s (Tala Birell’s) handbag and Dr Lehmann’s cigarette case, and would have been happy to let Baby make free with a truckload of poultry if David had sensibly run away instead of paying something over the market rate for the casualties. She steals Dr Lehman’s car twice – she is an expert in joyriding. Above all, she steals David from Miss Swallow. So it isn’t a surprise that the role of gangster’s moll comes naturally to her in Westlake Jail. But are any of Susan’s misappropriations really theft? Theft is generally defined as misappropriation with intent permanently to keep, and Susan takes things only for as long as she needs them for her pleasure or purpose. The most revealing comparison, again, is with It Happened One Night. The possibility of theft is never far from the needy setting of this story, with, for instance, Ellie’s luggage getting stolen twice. People’s probity with money is seen as a genuine index of their moral Trouble In Paradise (1932): the ‘Count’ and ‘Countess’ (Miriam Hopkins and Herbert Marshall)

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worth. Peter Warne seems at one point to have dishonestly taken his editor’s money, but he returns it: the film can admire Peter for sometimes being insubordinate to his boss, but to swindle him would be another matter. In the end Peter decisively proves his worth to Ellie’s millionaire father by submitting a meticulous schedule of accounts for his time with Ellie. His strictness about money matters – he isn’t on the make. Most strikingly, Peter is outraged by the idea that Ellie would accept the charitable offer of ten cents for a meal. ‘You do, and I’ll break your neck,’ he says, exaggerating of course, but Capra’s film seems to admire his exertion of patriarchal authority in matters of honour on the road. (Although the film is ambivalent about the rights and wrongs of Ellie’s father slapping her at the beginning – the slap prompts her escape – it seems to endorse the views of Ellie’s father and future husband at the end when they concur that what she needs is ‘a man who’ll take a sock at her once a day, whether she’s got it coming or not’.) Sullivan’s Travels, by contrast, doesn’t find anything disreputable in accepting ten cents for a meal when people of either gender are down on their luck. It is part of Capra’s old-fashionedness in gender terms so strictly to connect the possession and regulation of money with masculine empowerment. It Happened One Night portrays male psychology as bossy, boozy, ready for aggression and irascible when sexually frustrated. A man needs money to make himself a worthy husband in this story (its magical figure is a thousand dollars, whereas in Baby it is a million), and Peter Warne’s outbursts of anger in the film express his jealousy and frustration. The film is manifestly about ‘the education of a woman’, as Cavell shows, or about ‘redefining the inferiority of women’, as Babington and Evans more sourly have it, and we might question whether Capra presents his hero as equally needing an opportunity for some education.26 At any rate, to be skint here is to be unmanned, and the film eloquently shows economically disenfranchised men on the road deprived of purpose and self-belief. Money really matters in It Happened One Night. The moneyed fiction of Bringing Up Baby is that it really doesn’t.

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At any rate, Susan is an accomplished misappropriator. She makes free with David’s golf ball, David’s car, Mrs Lehmann’s (Tala Birell’s) handbag and Dr Lehmann’s cigarette case, and would have been happy to let Baby make free with a truckload of poultry if David had sensibly run away instead of paying something over the market rate for the casualties. She steals Dr Lehman’s car twice – she is an expert in joyriding. Above all, she steals David from Miss Swallow. So it isn’t a surprise that the role of gangster’s moll comes naturally to her in Westlake Jail. But are any of Susan’s misappropriations really theft? Theft is generally defined as misappropriation with intent permanently to keep, and Susan takes things only for as long as she needs them for her pleasure or purpose. The most revealing comparison, again, is with It Happened One Night. The possibility of theft is never far from the needy setting of this story, with, for instance, Ellie’s luggage getting stolen twice. People’s probity with money is seen as a genuine index of their moral Trouble In Paradise (1932): the ‘Count’ and ‘Countess’ (Miriam Hopkins and Herbert Marshall)

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worth. Peter Warne seems at one point to have dishonestly taken his editor’s money, but he returns it: the film can admire Peter for sometimes being insubordinate to his boss, but to swindle him would be another matter. In the end Peter decisively proves his worth to Ellie’s millionaire father by submitting a meticulous schedule of accounts for his time with Ellie. His strictness about money matters – he isn’t on the make. Most strikingly, Peter is outraged by the idea that Ellie would accept the charitable offer of ten cents for a meal. ‘You do, and I’ll break your neck,’ he says, exaggerating of course, but Capra’s film seems to admire his exertion of patriarchal authority in matters of honour on the road. (Although the film is ambivalent about the rights and wrongs of Ellie’s father slapping her at the beginning – the slap prompts her escape – it seems to endorse the views of Ellie’s father and future husband at the end when they concur that what she needs is ‘a man who’ll take a sock at her once a day, whether she’s got it coming or not’.) Sullivan’s Travels, by contrast, doesn’t find anything disreputable in accepting ten cents for a meal when people of either gender are down on their luck. It is part of Capra’s old-fashionedness in gender terms so strictly to connect the possession and regulation of money with masculine empowerment. It Happened One Night portrays male psychology as bossy, boozy, ready for aggression and irascible when sexually frustrated. A man needs money to make himself a worthy husband in this story (its magical figure is a thousand dollars, whereas in Baby it is a million), and Peter Warne’s outbursts of anger in the film express his jealousy and frustration. The film is manifestly about ‘the education of a woman’, as Cavell shows, or about ‘redefining the inferiority of women’, as Babington and Evans more sourly have it, and we might question whether Capra presents his hero as equally needing an opportunity for some education.26 At any rate, to be skint here is to be unmanned, and the film eloquently shows economically disenfranchised men on the road deprived of purpose and self-belief. Money really matters in It Happened One Night. The moneyed fiction of Bringing Up Baby is that it really doesn’t.

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A taste for misappropriation is one of the many ways in which Howard Hawks is reflected more in Susan than David. Others include her lack of scruple, her pleasure in improvising a way out of a tight corner and her lack of respect for social morality. He even shares her verbal habit of saying ‘I know it’.27 If Susan steals things as a form of creative opportunism when this will help her games or plans, she is in a way like an artist, and in particular like the artist Howard Hawks. There is a great deal about ‘stealing’ in Hawks’s interviews. He regularly connected theft and creativity. There are It Happened One Night: Peter and Ellie not seeing eye to eye (Clark Gable and Claudette Colbert)

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numerous instances in the book of interviews with Joseph McBride: he says, for instance, he stole from himself, that Hemingway did the same, that he and Ford stole from each other, that the composer Dmitri Tiomkin stole, that The Godfather (1972) stole from Scarface (1932), that Peter Bogdanovich shouldn’t have come clean about how much he stole from Baby in What’s Up Doc? (1972).28 Moreover, Hawks seems to have been light-fingered himself. In his days as a production assistant, Todd McCarthy relates, he had a ‘reputation for “borrowing” props and never returning them’.29 He borrowed money, too, and tended not to return it on time, or often at all. Hawks was also a compulsive gambler and frequently in debt, which led to the one of the intriguing biographical backgrounds to Baby. Throughout the making of the film from September 1937 to January 1938 Hawks was being pursued for a $9,000 gambling debt dating from summer 1937. Charges were filed against him in April 1938, but he eluded summons. The case dragged on but was eventually dropped a year later, for what reason we do not know. The sum of money was a relatively insignificant one for Hawks, but his intransigent refusal to settle the case suggests that a great deal was at stake for him in leading his financial life on his own terms, even when those terms seemed to others to fall outside the law. The director’s life was beset by crises during the making of this breathtakingly nonchalant sunny film: as well as the lawsuit against him for unpaid debt, he was in serious enough trouble with the studio to get him replaced as director of the big-budget epic Gunga Din (1939), and his wife Athole’s chronic struggles with mental health had led to her complete breakdown in 1936. Baby takes problems like these (money, work, madness) and gets them to evaporate. We might think of other comedies which make mention of troubles by which they refuse to be oppressed, such as The Importance of Being Earnest (debt, scandal, marital unhappiness) and the stories of P. G. Wodehouse (lunacy, disinheritance, scandal again). The lightness wouldn’t be so exhilarating if it weren’t a triumph over gravity.

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A taste for misappropriation is one of the many ways in which Howard Hawks is reflected more in Susan than David. Others include her lack of scruple, her pleasure in improvising a way out of a tight corner and her lack of respect for social morality. He even shares her verbal habit of saying ‘I know it’.27 If Susan steals things as a form of creative opportunism when this will help her games or plans, she is in a way like an artist, and in particular like the artist Howard Hawks. There is a great deal about ‘stealing’ in Hawks’s interviews. He regularly connected theft and creativity. There are It Happened One Night: Peter and Ellie not seeing eye to eye (Clark Gable and Claudette Colbert)

BRINGING UP BABY

numerous instances in the book of interviews with Joseph McBride: he says, for instance, he stole from himself, that Hemingway did the same, that he and Ford stole from each other, that the composer Dmitri Tiomkin stole, that The Godfather (1972) stole from Scarface (1932), that Peter Bogdanovich shouldn’t have come clean about how much he stole from Baby in What’s Up Doc? (1972).28 Moreover, Hawks seems to have been light-fingered himself. In his days as a production assistant, Todd McCarthy relates, he had a ‘reputation for “borrowing” props and never returning them’.29 He borrowed money, too, and tended not to return it on time, or often at all. Hawks was also a compulsive gambler and frequently in debt, which led to the one of the intriguing biographical backgrounds to Baby. Throughout the making of the film from September 1937 to January 1938 Hawks was being pursued for a $9,000 gambling debt dating from summer 1937. Charges were filed against him in April 1938, but he eluded summons. The case dragged on but was eventually dropped a year later, for what reason we do not know. The sum of money was a relatively insignificant one for Hawks, but his intransigent refusal to settle the case suggests that a great deal was at stake for him in leading his financial life on his own terms, even when those terms seemed to others to fall outside the law. The director’s life was beset by crises during the making of this breathtakingly nonchalant sunny film: as well as the lawsuit against him for unpaid debt, he was in serious enough trouble with the studio to get him replaced as director of the big-budget epic Gunga Din (1939), and his wife Athole’s chronic struggles with mental health had led to her complete breakdown in 1936. Baby takes problems like these (money, work, madness) and gets them to evaporate. We might think of other comedies which make mention of troubles by which they refuse to be oppressed, such as The Importance of Being Earnest (debt, scandal, marital unhappiness) and the stories of P. G. Wodehouse (lunacy, disinheritance, scandal again). The lightness wouldn’t be so exhilarating if it weren’t a triumph over gravity.

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Bringing Up Baby is a story about managing not to worry – not worrying, for instance, about being a bit of a kleptomaniac. Movement and speed I can make things go fast. (Hawks to William Wellman Jr, cited in McBride, Focus on Howard Hawks, p. 9) Jim Cagney worked with movement. He didn’t work with lines. (Hawks, cited in McBride, Hawks on Hawks, p. 54)

Susan’s fast free walk on the golf course sets a pace which David tries to keep up with, and the film takes its own pace from Susan’s. The tempo of the film is in sympathy with her and she is its moving force, so that the audience is swept along by the romantic freedoms and compulsions she embodies. ‘Shall we run?’ the Major asks Aunt Elizabeth (and they do). The action moves on before we finish laughing, and we are helpless in its hands as David is in Susan’s. The passage between scenes is often abrupt and rapid and the film doesn’t allow us to pause for breath or take stock. In New York, for instance, scenes repeatedly end with people in hurried motion, as when Susan and David exit Mr Peabody’s grounds running, quite sensibly in the circumstances, after conking him on the head with a rock. When the two of them are on the phone in their respective apartments (Susan using a long lead which lets her move around, David static and seated), the scene ends with David running out screen left (at the second try – first tripped by the phone lead). The following scene then starts with his arrival running in from the right, and he runs up against Susan who is hurrying out towards the door where he entered. This scene in its turn ends with them both in motion, exiting screen right. Once in Connecticut, the dynamism continues. Arriving at the garage they sing and walk and talk at the same time. When they emerge into the garden the camera tracks with them down the garden path, and they continue the dialogue on the move. Then,

when Susan steals David’s clothes, she has to go quite a long way from his room to the kitchen and back, running across from the bottom left of the frame out through the top right and back again the same way. As befits her thoroughbred stock, Susan is well exercised and gives graceful physical expression to the dynamic world of her plans and schemes. This is one of several diagonal traversings of the frame at Aunt Elizabeth’s, generally frantic. They go outside searching for George into a sunlit outdoors, with the camera backtracking as they search. The long take allows them to move in ‘Shall we run?’ Hawks often choreographs David and Susan running and skipping diagonally across the frame

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Bringing Up Baby is a story about managing not to worry – not worrying, for instance, about being a bit of a kleptomaniac. Movement and speed I can make things go fast. (Hawks to William Wellman Jr, cited in McBride, Focus on Howard Hawks, p. 9) Jim Cagney worked with movement. He didn’t work with lines. (Hawks, cited in McBride, Hawks on Hawks, p. 54)

Susan’s fast free walk on the golf course sets a pace which David tries to keep up with, and the film takes its own pace from Susan’s. The tempo of the film is in sympathy with her and she is its moving force, so that the audience is swept along by the romantic freedoms and compulsions she embodies. ‘Shall we run?’ the Major asks Aunt Elizabeth (and they do). The action moves on before we finish laughing, and we are helpless in its hands as David is in Susan’s. The passage between scenes is often abrupt and rapid and the film doesn’t allow us to pause for breath or take stock. In New York, for instance, scenes repeatedly end with people in hurried motion, as when Susan and David exit Mr Peabody’s grounds running, quite sensibly in the circumstances, after conking him on the head with a rock. When the two of them are on the phone in their respective apartments (Susan using a long lead which lets her move around, David static and seated), the scene ends with David running out screen left (at the second try – first tripped by the phone lead). The following scene then starts with his arrival running in from the right, and he runs up against Susan who is hurrying out towards the door where he entered. This scene in its turn ends with them both in motion, exiting screen right. Once in Connecticut, the dynamism continues. Arriving at the garage they sing and walk and talk at the same time. When they emerge into the garden the camera tracks with them down the garden path, and they continue the dialogue on the move. Then,

when Susan steals David’s clothes, she has to go quite a long way from his room to the kitchen and back, running across from the bottom left of the frame out through the top right and back again the same way. As befits her thoroughbred stock, Susan is well exercised and gives graceful physical expression to the dynamic world of her plans and schemes. This is one of several diagonal traversings of the frame at Aunt Elizabeth’s, generally frantic. They go outside searching for George into a sunlit outdoors, with the camera backtracking as they search. The long take allows them to move in ‘Shall we run?’ Hawks often choreographs David and Susan running and skipping diagonally across the frame

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their own ways. Susan, as Hawks noticed, is always balanced and graceful, while David’s trot-run is upright and inhibited and ungainly. They have twenty-six acres to move about in. For David this is a nightmarish expanse where his bone may be buried but the camerawork tells us the mobility Susan inspires is idyllic and sunny. Returning to the house, David is stationary on the phone to Alice, in one of his brief recoveries of poise and bearings, when Susan enters from the right running as usual. Another source of speed comes from Susan’s constant changes of outfit, each one visually moving us through time. The fashion parade of her clothes is the film’s main way of conveying Susan’s wealth, and it also suggests the passage of aristocratic time, with different outfits being called for at different times of day. She has eight changes of clothes during the thirty-six hours of the main action followed by a ninth for the final scene. On the large scale she has to rush to get David before he can marry Miss Swallow, but more locally she always seems to be in a rush because she’s changing her In search of David’s bone

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clothes all the time. This dynamism is crucial in keeping Susan’s distance from the femme fatale figure that her designs on David would make her in a film noir:30 she has to rush to keep up with the events rather than patiently weaving a spider’s web to entrap him. The pace and energy is dazzling and breathless, in some respects like a musical – and the next collaboration of the screenwriters Dudley Nichols and Hagar Wilde was the Fred Astaire musical Carefree (1938). But a number of other screwballs also move at breakneck speed, most brilliantly Hawks’s own His Girl Friday (1940), with Cary Grant as the newspaper editor Walter Burns trying to win back his divorced wife Hildy Johnson (Rosalind Russell) for the paper and for remarriage to himself. That film’s speed of delivery is astonishing and dazzling, with a word count that has been estimated at 250 per minute as against the contemporary industry average of 100–150. Walter Burns, like Susan Vance, is an impresario of speed, seeing deadlines as the spur to improvisation. In both films the speed is a form of seduction. Like Susan, Walter does whatever he can think of to keep his co-star around: by fair means and mainly foul ones he lures Hildy back into a world of flair and anarchy and away from the tame marital alternative. But His Girl Friday is a darker and grittier film. It’s clear that Walter Burns is himself mainly pretty foul and moreover quite unreformable,31 whereas Susan is never worse than heedless and some of her wilder ways are down to the temporary needs of pursuing David. Hawks himself was always keen on speed. The heroine of his first screenplay, The Road to Glory (1926), was ‘a speed-mad nymph’. The screenplay grandly proclaimed that ‘Without coincidence, life would move in a preordained groove destroying genius and blasting ambition,’32 which states the Bringing Up Baby theme in other terms. Speed was an aesthetic principle as well as a personal taste. Manny Farber paid tribute to Hawks for ‘a maximum speed, inner life, and view, with the least amount of flat feet’.33 Hawks’s own criticism of Brando’s One-Eyed Jacks (1961) was that ‘You take much too long to do a scene,’ and of Peckinpah that ‘I can

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their own ways. Susan, as Hawks noticed, is always balanced and graceful, while David’s trot-run is upright and inhibited and ungainly. They have twenty-six acres to move about in. For David this is a nightmarish expanse where his bone may be buried but the camerawork tells us the mobility Susan inspires is idyllic and sunny. Returning to the house, David is stationary on the phone to Alice, in one of his brief recoveries of poise and bearings, when Susan enters from the right running as usual. Another source of speed comes from Susan’s constant changes of outfit, each one visually moving us through time. The fashion parade of her clothes is the film’s main way of conveying Susan’s wealth, and it also suggests the passage of aristocratic time, with different outfits being called for at different times of day. She has eight changes of clothes during the thirty-six hours of the main action followed by a ninth for the final scene. On the large scale she has to rush to get David before he can marry Miss Swallow, but more locally she always seems to be in a rush because she’s changing her In search of David’s bone

BRINGING UP BABY

clothes all the time. This dynamism is crucial in keeping Susan’s distance from the femme fatale figure that her designs on David would make her in a film noir:30 she has to rush to keep up with the events rather than patiently weaving a spider’s web to entrap him. The pace and energy is dazzling and breathless, in some respects like a musical – and the next collaboration of the screenwriters Dudley Nichols and Hagar Wilde was the Fred Astaire musical Carefree (1938). But a number of other screwballs also move at breakneck speed, most brilliantly Hawks’s own His Girl Friday (1940), with Cary Grant as the newspaper editor Walter Burns trying to win back his divorced wife Hildy Johnson (Rosalind Russell) for the paper and for remarriage to himself. That film’s speed of delivery is astonishing and dazzling, with a word count that has been estimated at 250 per minute as against the contemporary industry average of 100–150. Walter Burns, like Susan Vance, is an impresario of speed, seeing deadlines as the spur to improvisation. In both films the speed is a form of seduction. Like Susan, Walter does whatever he can think of to keep his co-star around: by fair means and mainly foul ones he lures Hildy back into a world of flair and anarchy and away from the tame marital alternative. But His Girl Friday is a darker and grittier film. It’s clear that Walter Burns is himself mainly pretty foul and moreover quite unreformable,31 whereas Susan is never worse than heedless and some of her wilder ways are down to the temporary needs of pursuing David. Hawks himself was always keen on speed. The heroine of his first screenplay, The Road to Glory (1926), was ‘a speed-mad nymph’. The screenplay grandly proclaimed that ‘Without coincidence, life would move in a preordained groove destroying genius and blasting ambition,’32 which states the Bringing Up Baby theme in other terms. Speed was an aesthetic principle as well as a personal taste. Manny Farber paid tribute to Hawks for ‘a maximum speed, inner life, and view, with the least amount of flat feet’.33 Hawks’s own criticism of Brando’s One-Eyed Jacks (1961) was that ‘You take much too long to do a scene,’ and of Peckinpah that ‘I can

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Styles of wealth ‘Where’s the swimming pool? You must have a swimming pool,’ says Veronica Lake in Sullivan’s Travels. Sullivan does, and she falls in it, twice. The Philadelphia Story has its pool too. As a cinematic signifier of wealth the swimming pool has

the advantages of getting the actors alluringly out of their clothes or getting them comically drenched if they stay in them. It also makes for a handy threshold without a total shift of location. There’s no swimming pool at Aunt Elizabeth’s, even though as Jacques Tourneur was memorably to show in Cat People, the combination of killer cat and damp sanctuary could be filmed to great effect. Her house, it turns out, has plenty of room and is handsomely appointed, but it isn’t built showily on the grand scale. Aunt Elizabeth’s dinner-party takes place in a comfortable but far from

Howard Greer was responsible for the film’s sophisticated language of costume. Susan’s outfits characterise her swiftly and variously …

… as idiosyncratic, volatile, clownish at times, capable of both outlandish and conventional elegance, a wooable debutante and a fast woman

kill and bury ten guys in the time it takes him to kill one.’34 And we shouldn’t forget how much Hawks was into fast cars and planes and racing throughout his life. Speed really mattered to him. It embodied risk, adventure, a challenge to nerve and expertise.

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Styles of wealth ‘Where’s the swimming pool? You must have a swimming pool,’ says Veronica Lake in Sullivan’s Travels. Sullivan does, and she falls in it, twice. The Philadelphia Story has its pool too. As a cinematic signifier of wealth the swimming pool has

the advantages of getting the actors alluringly out of their clothes or getting them comically drenched if they stay in them. It also makes for a handy threshold without a total shift of location. There’s no swimming pool at Aunt Elizabeth’s, even though as Jacques Tourneur was memorably to show in Cat People, the combination of killer cat and damp sanctuary could be filmed to great effect. Her house, it turns out, has plenty of room and is handsomely appointed, but it isn’t built showily on the grand scale. Aunt Elizabeth’s dinner-party takes place in a comfortable but far from

Howard Greer was responsible for the film’s sophisticated language of costume. Susan’s outfits characterise her swiftly and variously …

… as idiosyncratic, volatile, clownish at times, capable of both outlandish and conventional elegance, a wooable debutante and a fast woman

kill and bury ten guys in the time it takes him to kill one.’34 And we shouldn’t forget how much Hawks was into fast cars and planes and racing throughout his life. Speed really mattered to him. It embodied risk, adventure, a challenge to nerve and expertise.

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grand or formal room near the back door. The domestic staff amounts to only two. The garage is neither enormous nor modern and looks like a bit of a storeroom, full of haybales and tailor’s dummies with crinolines; Susan drives there not in a luxury motor but in a modest enough rural-gentry station-wagon. The interiors, too, are those of an open-plan country residence, which works well for the rapid to-and-fro of the action indoors (it was actually the Arthur Ranch an hour from Los Angeles). The setting is a marked contrast with the big doors and enclosed space of the museum, or for that matter with the opulent townhouse of My Man Godfrey and the ostentatious country seat in The Philadelphia Story. There’s nothing here to prompt Grant to say ‘You must all be so rich,’ as he does in Holiday, his next film with Hepburn, when he first sees the spacious hall and vast winding stairway of the family residence (it reminds him of ‘a museum’). Commentary on Bringing Up Baby has focused on the love story, and hasn’t said much about money, but this is a story in quest His Girl Friday: Walter Burns (Cary Grant) and Hildy Johnson (Rosalind Russell)

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of a million dollars. That’s the sum which David needs to get for the museum – or rather wants to, since there is no sign that he will be disgraced or lose his job if he doesn’t land the bequest. (The different situation in the original short story has Susan and David, who are already engaged, trying to make sure that her aunt will leave them her money so that they can get married.) We are far here from the scenes of real financial struggle which mark many of the great screwball comedies in the genre’s most brilliant period in and after the Great Depression, roughly between 1934 and 1942. Most of these films have a serious concern with money and class as well as love, the majority dealing with love affairs which cross boundaries of class and wealth: one of the couple is rich, the other isn’t. The films generally have faith that love can cross these divides, but usually there has to be a scene in which the suitor proves that he or she isn’t Sullivan’s Travels (1941): ‘You must have a swimming pool’ – Joel McCrea and Veronica Lake

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grand or formal room near the back door. The domestic staff amounts to only two. The garage is neither enormous nor modern and looks like a bit of a storeroom, full of haybales and tailor’s dummies with crinolines; Susan drives there not in a luxury motor but in a modest enough rural-gentry station-wagon. The interiors, too, are those of an open-plan country residence, which works well for the rapid to-and-fro of the action indoors (it was actually the Arthur Ranch an hour from Los Angeles). The setting is a marked contrast with the big doors and enclosed space of the museum, or for that matter with the opulent townhouse of My Man Godfrey and the ostentatious country seat in The Philadelphia Story. There’s nothing here to prompt Grant to say ‘You must all be so rich,’ as he does in Holiday, his next film with Hepburn, when he first sees the spacious hall and vast winding stairway of the family residence (it reminds him of ‘a museum’). Commentary on Bringing Up Baby has focused on the love story, and hasn’t said much about money, but this is a story in quest His Girl Friday: Walter Burns (Cary Grant) and Hildy Johnson (Rosalind Russell)

BRINGING UP BABY

of a million dollars. That’s the sum which David needs to get for the museum – or rather wants to, since there is no sign that he will be disgraced or lose his job if he doesn’t land the bequest. (The different situation in the original short story has Susan and David, who are already engaged, trying to make sure that her aunt will leave them her money so that they can get married.) We are far here from the scenes of real financial struggle which mark many of the great screwball comedies in the genre’s most brilliant period in and after the Great Depression, roughly between 1934 and 1942. Most of these films have a serious concern with money and class as well as love, the majority dealing with love affairs which cross boundaries of class and wealth: one of the couple is rich, the other isn’t. The films generally have faith that love can cross these divides, but usually there has to be a scene in which the suitor proves that he or she isn’t Sullivan’s Travels (1941): ‘You must have a swimming pool’ – Joel McCrea and Veronica Lake

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marrying for money (as notably in It Happened One Night and The Lady Eve (1941)). Marriage is allowed to be a beneficial transaction as long as it proves that this isn’t its primary purpose. In a number of screwball comedies the rich are seen as a kind of ethnic group with social codes of their own, and they are often shadowed by a Darwinian sense that the clan has declined since its vigorous pioneer days; this would be true, for instance, of It Happened One Night and the adaptation of Philip Barry’s stage play Holiday. Some new democratic blood is needed to keep the moneyed classes from getting degenerate, to keep up, in fact, the pioneering American values. As part of that, the heiresses need to be taught a class lesson and to marry outside the enfeebled caste. But the situation is rather different in Bringing Up Baby. Here the wealthy one is chasing the less wealthy one: she can’t be after his money, because he doesn’t have any.35 Susan, though recognisably of the same aristocratic stock as her aunt, is not an old-fashioned type, not like the Wodehouseian English aristocrat a charming throwback. On the contrary, she’s very much up to the minute, outfitted in the latest fashions and thoroughly modern, for instance, in her trouserwearing, her taste for sporting accessories and in sometimes not wearing a hat. The breath of fresh air she brings, far from entailing a blood transfusion for the upper classes, is associated with her topdrawer social position. Such class lessons as the film contains are pro this top-drawer, but in a very different spirit from The Philadelphia Story, in which, as George Cukor sharply remarked, the playwright Philip Barry ‘starts to put them down [the rich] but he ends up very cosy with them’.36 Baby is stripped of this kind of cosy solidarity with the upper classes by the outsiderish knowledge that these members of the idle rich are – of course – absurd as well as delicious. Screwball comedies may often criticise or satirise particular rich people, but they generally conclude with a conciliatory version of rich and poor coming to see each other’s virtues. The protagonists learn a democratic lesson by shedding some of the class prejudices with which they started. In Baby, on the other hand, we have a rather Domestic space in Bringing Up Baby and Holiday (1938)

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marrying for money (as notably in It Happened One Night and The Lady Eve (1941)). Marriage is allowed to be a beneficial transaction as long as it proves that this isn’t its primary purpose. In a number of screwball comedies the rich are seen as a kind of ethnic group with social codes of their own, and they are often shadowed by a Darwinian sense that the clan has declined since its vigorous pioneer days; this would be true, for instance, of It Happened One Night and the adaptation of Philip Barry’s stage play Holiday. Some new democratic blood is needed to keep the moneyed classes from getting degenerate, to keep up, in fact, the pioneering American values. As part of that, the heiresses need to be taught a class lesson and to marry outside the enfeebled caste. But the situation is rather different in Bringing Up Baby. Here the wealthy one is chasing the less wealthy one: she can’t be after his money, because he doesn’t have any.35 Susan, though recognisably of the same aristocratic stock as her aunt, is not an old-fashioned type, not like the Wodehouseian English aristocrat a charming throwback. On the contrary, she’s very much up to the minute, outfitted in the latest fashions and thoroughly modern, for instance, in her trouserwearing, her taste for sporting accessories and in sometimes not wearing a hat. The breath of fresh air she brings, far from entailing a blood transfusion for the upper classes, is associated with her topdrawer social position. Such class lessons as the film contains are pro this top-drawer, but in a very different spirit from The Philadelphia Story, in which, as George Cukor sharply remarked, the playwright Philip Barry ‘starts to put them down [the rich] but he ends up very cosy with them’.36 Baby is stripped of this kind of cosy solidarity with the upper classes by the outsiderish knowledge that these members of the idle rich are – of course – absurd as well as delicious. Screwball comedies may often criticise or satirise particular rich people, but they generally conclude with a conciliatory version of rich and poor coming to see each other’s virtues. The protagonists learn a democratic lesson by shedding some of the class prejudices with which they started. In Baby, on the other hand, we have a rather Domestic space in Bringing Up Baby and Holiday (1938)

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shameless seduction into the aristocracy. David’s beguilement away from a sexless middle-class marriage is also an entrée into a gilded New England high society. He leaves his middle-class anxieties about job and money, and finds himself chez Susan, in a world of jodhpurs, eccentrics and untold wealth. This high society, however, isn’t defined by what it owns so much as by how it behaves. Self-possession seems to be its key feature. The film is seduced by the aristocracy because it’s a dream of independence. David and his museum are at first dependent on asking for money, evoked as awkwardness and indignity for David as he scurries along calling out to an unimpressed Mr Peabody. Susan teaches or beguiles him into discovering the value of doing as he likes and, finally, making a declaration of his independence from Alice, the keeper of his career flame. Luckily, but logically for the plot – facilitating her smooth displaceability – Alice is glad to let him go once he shows himself not to be enough of a middle-class conformist. Insofar as it works up to this declaration of independence, Baby may perhaps appear interested in pioneering American values. Such moments are indeed sometimes part of the genre, but other screwballs make their oaths of allegiance to independence in a more didactic spirit – Holiday, for example, in which taking the controversial ‘holiday’ before settling to a working life ‘will be Johnny’s declaration of independence’, or Theodora Goes Wild, in which the hero has to make ‘a declaration of independence’ from his rich political father before Theodora will accept him. Todd McCarthy gives many examples of what he calls Hawks’s own ‘insistent, overpowering will to independence’.37 Hawks liked Scarface best of all his films, he used to say, because he and Howard Hughes could just get on with it independently of studios, and he would tell generally exaggerated or invented stories about his triumphs over studio bosses. He told Peter Bogdanovich that he never signed contracts with studios after the 1930s, though, in fact, he frequently did.38 He seems not to have felt that this independence would be compromised by rising up the social scale through marriage. Marriage to a Shearer upped Hawks’s status in the

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industry, notably by making him Irving Thalberg’s brother-in-law.39 He had no Capra-esque scruples about standing on his own two feet when he could stand higher on top of his wife’s shoulders. Kenneth Hawks had achieved a comparable status hike by marrying the actress Mary Astor (it seems to have turned into a mariage blanc, much to her displeasure), so the advantages of a well-connected wife weren’t foreign to him as an idea. Similarly (or at least fairly similarly) getting the million dollars from his new girlfriend doesn’t seem to be a problem for David nor an affront to his sense of his masculinity. In the end, the money matters not for the sake of material gains but for what it means in terms of the independence and freedom it brings. Hawks and the Screen Directors Guild Questions about independence had a particular salience for Hawks at this time. Just before the film was made, he was heavily involved in the newly formed Screen Directors Guild (SDG). Formed along the model of the Screen Writers Guild, this was a sort of emergent trade union for film directors, taking the colouring of the Rooseveltinfluenced leftward political orientation of the times. Dudley Nichols, who co-wrote the screenplay for Baby, was a force in the Screen Writers Guild and very much a man of the left. Hawks’s own politics were in an idiosyncratic way right-wing, and this was the only occasion in his life when he became involved in a union-style organisation. But the desire to operate freely within his own fiefdom as a professional would continue to lie close to the heart of his politics beyond this late 1930s moment when it took organised form. He succeeded on several occasions in his ambition to be both producer and director of his films, and he was very unusual among mainstream directors in doing so. He managed to fashion for himself more financial and creative independence from the studios than probably any other major director. The Screen Directors Guild grew rapidly between 1936 and 1938. In February 1936 there had been only ninety members, but by

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shameless seduction into the aristocracy. David’s beguilement away from a sexless middle-class marriage is also an entrée into a gilded New England high society. He leaves his middle-class anxieties about job and money, and finds himself chez Susan, in a world of jodhpurs, eccentrics and untold wealth. This high society, however, isn’t defined by what it owns so much as by how it behaves. Self-possession seems to be its key feature. The film is seduced by the aristocracy because it’s a dream of independence. David and his museum are at first dependent on asking for money, evoked as awkwardness and indignity for David as he scurries along calling out to an unimpressed Mr Peabody. Susan teaches or beguiles him into discovering the value of doing as he likes and, finally, making a declaration of his independence from Alice, the keeper of his career flame. Luckily, but logically for the plot – facilitating her smooth displaceability – Alice is glad to let him go once he shows himself not to be enough of a middle-class conformist. Insofar as it works up to this declaration of independence, Baby may perhaps appear interested in pioneering American values. Such moments are indeed sometimes part of the genre, but other screwballs make their oaths of allegiance to independence in a more didactic spirit – Holiday, for example, in which taking the controversial ‘holiday’ before settling to a working life ‘will be Johnny’s declaration of independence’, or Theodora Goes Wild, in which the hero has to make ‘a declaration of independence’ from his rich political father before Theodora will accept him. Todd McCarthy gives many examples of what he calls Hawks’s own ‘insistent, overpowering will to independence’.37 Hawks liked Scarface best of all his films, he used to say, because he and Howard Hughes could just get on with it independently of studios, and he would tell generally exaggerated or invented stories about his triumphs over studio bosses. He told Peter Bogdanovich that he never signed contracts with studios after the 1930s, though, in fact, he frequently did.38 He seems not to have felt that this independence would be compromised by rising up the social scale through marriage. Marriage to a Shearer upped Hawks’s status in the

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industry, notably by making him Irving Thalberg’s brother-in-law.39 He had no Capra-esque scruples about standing on his own two feet when he could stand higher on top of his wife’s shoulders. Kenneth Hawks had achieved a comparable status hike by marrying the actress Mary Astor (it seems to have turned into a mariage blanc, much to her displeasure), so the advantages of a well-connected wife weren’t foreign to him as an idea. Similarly (or at least fairly similarly) getting the million dollars from his new girlfriend doesn’t seem to be a problem for David nor an affront to his sense of his masculinity. In the end, the money matters not for the sake of material gains but for what it means in terms of the independence and freedom it brings. Hawks and the Screen Directors Guild Questions about independence had a particular salience for Hawks at this time. Just before the film was made, he was heavily involved in the newly formed Screen Directors Guild (SDG). Formed along the model of the Screen Writers Guild, this was a sort of emergent trade union for film directors, taking the colouring of the Rooseveltinfluenced leftward political orientation of the times. Dudley Nichols, who co-wrote the screenplay for Baby, was a force in the Screen Writers Guild and very much a man of the left. Hawks’s own politics were in an idiosyncratic way right-wing, and this was the only occasion in his life when he became involved in a union-style organisation. But the desire to operate freely within his own fiefdom as a professional would continue to lie close to the heart of his politics beyond this late 1930s moment when it took organised form. He succeeded on several occasions in his ambition to be both producer and director of his films, and he was very unusual among mainstream directors in doing so. He managed to fashion for himself more financial and creative independence from the studios than probably any other major director. The Screen Directors Guild grew rapidly between 1936 and 1938. In February 1936 there had been only ninety members, but by

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summer 1937 its membership had expanded to 550, partly because it decided to include assistant directors and unit managers. The studio bosses were mainly disconcerted by the guild, considering that the directors belonged in class or caste terms with the producers, not with the hirelings; but as Hawks and others pointed out, financial control didn’t in the end rest with the director but with the hiring studio. Hawks played a major role as chairman of the committee whose task it was to negotiate an SDG contract with the producers, aiming to secure improved terms of employment for directors and other senior employees. Shooting on Baby, which began on 23 September 1937, meant that he had to take a less active role on these negotiations, but he returned to the fore following the shoot in May 1938, when he became the second vice-president of the SDG and a Dudley Nichols

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member of its twelve-man board of directors. Frank Capra and Woody Van Dyke at this time succeeded King Vidor and Lewis Milestone as, respectively, president and first vice-president of the organisation, so Hollywood’s major players were involved in the Guild. The SDG was in fighting form in 1938 and 1939, threatening to strike and boycott the Academy Awards when the producers proved refractory about an agreement and attempted to stipulate that the membership of the SDG should be limited to directors only. A final agreement between producers and SDG was settled in February 1939 and ratified in May 1939, and from this time Hawks’s involvement in the Guild diminished (and he was often characteristically late paying his dues).40 When thinking, then, of the million dollars David is looking for, we might note that the budget for Baby was $767,676, but that it ran over to top the million dollars. It came in at $1,096,000, mainly because the shoot hugely exceeded its schedule, with Hawks blithely unresponsive to RKO’s hurry-ups. The story has a certain edge if you strip it of its tinsel absurdity and see it as an allegory of an artist seeking funding for a project. The changes to Hagar Wilde’s plot would give support to this interpretation. In her story the money belonged to Suzan’s aunt (Suzan with a zed in the story), but in the film the authority for its distribution belongs instead to an institution, a bank. And we might see in David’s discomfort before Mr Peabody the burlesqued reflection of a film director’s discomfort at being beholden to the financing studio. Seen in these terms, the story suggests that you don’t need to seek the money to find it. Instead it offers an alluring fantasy that creative life can be best served and financed by having sexy fun with the right people, not by sucking up and form-filling. And maybe we should see this not as a fantasy but a plan of campaign. You need to be able to be sexy and fun yourself to carry it out, and it requires nerve and charm and bluff. It won’t work for everybody, but it might serve as an action plan for a senior player in the film industry like Howard Hawks. Marrying an heiress or star could well be part of it.

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summer 1937 its membership had expanded to 550, partly because it decided to include assistant directors and unit managers. The studio bosses were mainly disconcerted by the guild, considering that the directors belonged in class or caste terms with the producers, not with the hirelings; but as Hawks and others pointed out, financial control didn’t in the end rest with the director but with the hiring studio. Hawks played a major role as chairman of the committee whose task it was to negotiate an SDG contract with the producers, aiming to secure improved terms of employment for directors and other senior employees. Shooting on Baby, which began on 23 September 1937, meant that he had to take a less active role on these negotiations, but he returned to the fore following the shoot in May 1938, when he became the second vice-president of the SDG and a Dudley Nichols

BRINGING UP BABY

member of its twelve-man board of directors. Frank Capra and Woody Van Dyke at this time succeeded King Vidor and Lewis Milestone as, respectively, president and first vice-president of the organisation, so Hollywood’s major players were involved in the Guild. The SDG was in fighting form in 1938 and 1939, threatening to strike and boycott the Academy Awards when the producers proved refractory about an agreement and attempted to stipulate that the membership of the SDG should be limited to directors only. A final agreement between producers and SDG was settled in February 1939 and ratified in May 1939, and from this time Hawks’s involvement in the Guild diminished (and he was often characteristically late paying his dues).40 When thinking, then, of the million dollars David is looking for, we might note that the budget for Baby was $767,676, but that it ran over to top the million dollars. It came in at $1,096,000, mainly because the shoot hugely exceeded its schedule, with Hawks blithely unresponsive to RKO’s hurry-ups. The story has a certain edge if you strip it of its tinsel absurdity and see it as an allegory of an artist seeking funding for a project. The changes to Hagar Wilde’s plot would give support to this interpretation. In her story the money belonged to Suzan’s aunt (Suzan with a zed in the story), but in the film the authority for its distribution belongs instead to an institution, a bank. And we might see in David’s discomfort before Mr Peabody the burlesqued reflection of a film director’s discomfort at being beholden to the financing studio. Seen in these terms, the story suggests that you don’t need to seek the money to find it. Instead it offers an alluring fantasy that creative life can be best served and financed by having sexy fun with the right people, not by sucking up and form-filling. And maybe we should see this not as a fantasy but a plan of campaign. You need to be able to be sexy and fun yourself to carry it out, and it requires nerve and charm and bluff. It won’t work for everybody, but it might serve as an action plan for a senior player in the film industry like Howard Hawks. Marrying an heiress or star could well be part of it.

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RKO had been trying to get Hawks under contract for several years, and the terms of his employment, agreed on 8 March 1937, were generous: a two-year contract for up to six films, with a guaranteed salary of $130,000 per year. He was lined up as the director of the big-budget Gunga Din, and had begun to work on the script with Ben Hecht and Charles Macarthur and also Nichols, but that project was postponed owing to casting difficulties. Bringing Up Baby was planned as a smaller-scale interim film, partly to cash in on 1937’s great screwball hit The Awful Truth, and no doubt in the hope that the studio’s new star director would follow up his 1934 success with the archetypal screwball Twentieth Century. But when Hawks overshot the shooting schedule and budget, the studio, which was itself in a state of transition, lost faith in him, and brought George Stevens in to direct Gunga Din. It was evidently a time when Hawks was more than usually refractory about complying with the directives of the studio. Pitching for patronage: David (Cary Grant) and Mr Peabody (George Irving)

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He may have been influenced in his bloody-mindedness by his collaborators on Bringing Up Baby. Above all, there was the example of Cary Grant, who operated as an independent freelance. As Graham McCann says, ‘It is difficult today to appreciate just how astonishing and courageous (or reckless) Grant’s decision seemed in the mid-thirties. No one of his stature had contemplated acting as a freelance performer since the days before the studio system took hold of Hollywood.’41 Grant’s control over his own terms of employment no doubt impressed Hawks, who was to go on to work with Grant on five films and thought him the best in the business. It was something, however, that put Grant at odds with many senior figures in the industry. He was, for instance, the notable absentee from the Oscar nominees for The Awful Truth, mainly because, Marc Eliot suggests, ‘a large majority of the Academy’s executive members still harboured a grudge against him for having successfully broken the hitherto ironclad contract system’.42 The other figure somewhere in the background of the film was the formidably independent one of Howard Hughes. According to some accounts it was Hughes who suggested Cary Grant for the role of Dr Huxley, which had been turned down by a roster of notables including Ronald Colman, Fredric March and Robert Montgomery. Hughes had many meetings with Grant in which, according to Marc Eliot, he ‘patiently and meticulously helped Grant discover every nuance of his character’s part’.43 This may be to overstate the matter, but Grant suffered greatly from anxieties and inhibitions at this period, in spite of the tremendous success of The Awful Truth (which he himself didn’t rate), and there is no reason to doubt that he talked about his new and very different comic role with his good friend Hughes. The film was made at the height of Hughes’s affair with Katharine Hepburn, so he would also have been seeing her a great deal. ‘Cary and I worked out an awful lot of stuff together,’ Hepburn recalled.44 They would meet up early in the day to swop ideas before filming began and before the director arrived, and some of the ‘stuff’ may well have been influenced by Howard Hughes.

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RKO had been trying to get Hawks under contract for several years, and the terms of his employment, agreed on 8 March 1937, were generous: a two-year contract for up to six films, with a guaranteed salary of $130,000 per year. He was lined up as the director of the big-budget Gunga Din, and had begun to work on the script with Ben Hecht and Charles Macarthur and also Nichols, but that project was postponed owing to casting difficulties. Bringing Up Baby was planned as a smaller-scale interim film, partly to cash in on 1937’s great screwball hit The Awful Truth, and no doubt in the hope that the studio’s new star director would follow up his 1934 success with the archetypal screwball Twentieth Century. But when Hawks overshot the shooting schedule and budget, the studio, which was itself in a state of transition, lost faith in him, and brought George Stevens in to direct Gunga Din. It was evidently a time when Hawks was more than usually refractory about complying with the directives of the studio. Pitching for patronage: David (Cary Grant) and Mr Peabody (George Irving)

BRINGING UP BABY

He may have been influenced in his bloody-mindedness by his collaborators on Bringing Up Baby. Above all, there was the example of Cary Grant, who operated as an independent freelance. As Graham McCann says, ‘It is difficult today to appreciate just how astonishing and courageous (or reckless) Grant’s decision seemed in the mid-thirties. No one of his stature had contemplated acting as a freelance performer since the days before the studio system took hold of Hollywood.’41 Grant’s control over his own terms of employment no doubt impressed Hawks, who was to go on to work with Grant on five films and thought him the best in the business. It was something, however, that put Grant at odds with many senior figures in the industry. He was, for instance, the notable absentee from the Oscar nominees for The Awful Truth, mainly because, Marc Eliot suggests, ‘a large majority of the Academy’s executive members still harboured a grudge against him for having successfully broken the hitherto ironclad contract system’.42 The other figure somewhere in the background of the film was the formidably independent one of Howard Hughes. According to some accounts it was Hughes who suggested Cary Grant for the role of Dr Huxley, which had been turned down by a roster of notables including Ronald Colman, Fredric March and Robert Montgomery. Hughes had many meetings with Grant in which, according to Marc Eliot, he ‘patiently and meticulously helped Grant discover every nuance of his character’s part’.43 This may be to overstate the matter, but Grant suffered greatly from anxieties and inhibitions at this period, in spite of the tremendous success of The Awful Truth (which he himself didn’t rate), and there is no reason to doubt that he talked about his new and very different comic role with his good friend Hughes. The film was made at the height of Hughes’s affair with Katharine Hepburn, so he would also have been seeing her a great deal. ‘Cary and I worked out an awful lot of stuff together,’ Hepburn recalled.44 They would meet up early in the day to swop ideas before filming began and before the director arrived, and some of the ‘stuff’ may well have been influenced by Howard Hughes.

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mavericks, speedsters and defiers of authority. Howard Hughes and the Screen Directors Guild seem unlikely confederates, but at this time both of them, in their own ways, defended and represented Howard Hawks’s freedom in the workplace. Going ‘gay all of a sudden’ As you might expect with a scriptwriter called Wilde, the story is partly about the friction between the tame and the untamed; as you might also expect from a Wilde, the world of the film is in many ways a queer one. ‘I just went gay all of a sudden,’ Cary Grant famously exclaims at one point, as well he might, wearing as he is a chiffon and maribou gown with bell sleeves and a satin belt and underbody. This moment was included in Vito Russo’s The Celluloid Closet (1995), and it earns its flamboyant place there, but the joke at this point is that the attire so little puts David in touch with anything like a feminine side. (Similarly a decade later, in I Was a Male War Bride (1949), Grant as Major Rochard would not go at all queeny in the cross-dressing scenes, but

Hawks had been able to take liberties in making the film partly because of the parlous finances at RKO and the power vacuums resulting from its changes of personnel in 1937 (with Sam Briskin resigning as vice-president of the studio in November). The financial crisis came to a head in 1938 and ‘just before the film opened, RKO fell into receivership’45 – at which point Howard Hughes bought it. At this time, according to Marc Eliot, ‘RKO out-and-out fired Hawks, citing numerous breaches of his contract. Hughes vigorously objected to the studio’s action, accusing it of making Hawks the scapegoat for its financial disarray, and threatened to back Hawks in a major lawsuit.’46 Hughes’s staunch defence of his friend may have come from a recognition of how much they had in common as Howard Hughes

Cary Grant going gay all of a sudden

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mavericks, speedsters and defiers of authority. Howard Hughes and the Screen Directors Guild seem unlikely confederates, but at this time both of them, in their own ways, defended and represented Howard Hawks’s freedom in the workplace. Going ‘gay all of a sudden’ As you might expect with a scriptwriter called Wilde, the story is partly about the friction between the tame and the untamed; as you might also expect from a Wilde, the world of the film is in many ways a queer one. ‘I just went gay all of a sudden,’ Cary Grant famously exclaims at one point, as well he might, wearing as he is a chiffon and maribou gown with bell sleeves and a satin belt and underbody. This moment was included in Vito Russo’s The Celluloid Closet (1995), and it earns its flamboyant place there, but the joke at this point is that the attire so little puts David in touch with anything like a feminine side. (Similarly a decade later, in I Was a Male War Bride (1949), Grant as Major Rochard would not go at all queeny in the cross-dressing scenes, but

Hawks had been able to take liberties in making the film partly because of the parlous finances at RKO and the power vacuums resulting from its changes of personnel in 1937 (with Sam Briskin resigning as vice-president of the studio in November). The financial crisis came to a head in 1938 and ‘just before the film opened, RKO fell into receivership’45 – at which point Howard Hughes bought it. At this time, according to Marc Eliot, ‘RKO out-and-out fired Hawks, citing numerous breaches of his contract. Hughes vigorously objected to the studio’s action, accusing it of making Hawks the scapegoat for its financial disarray, and threatened to back Hawks in a major lawsuit.’46 Hughes’s staunch defence of his friend may have come from a recognition of how much they had in common as Howard Hughes

Cary Grant going gay all of a sudden

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indeed have been enough vagueness about it for the censor not to object. But even so – and as with much the censor didn’t censor in the film – it points strongly to areas the Hays Code prohibited (‘Sex perversion or any inference to it is forbidden’). After all, what else could David mean by saying he’s wearing a woman’s gown because he’s gone gay? By jumping ferociously up in the air he shows that he doesn’t mean what he is saying, but he could hardly do the denying unless he knew what he was suggesting. David’s association of gay and negligée, of course, depends on a very narrow idea of homosexuality and for that matter a very narrow idea of cross-dressing. David is naive about such things. Maybe he has come across the burlesqued Freudianism with which the film is on teasingly familiar terms. Cary Grant, on the other hand, was not naive about such things, and the line about going gay is famously his ad-lib. It was a remarkably bold one, given that for many years there had been rumours about his cohabitation with Randolph Scott. Even now the

instead played up his character’s stolid masculinity.) Grant doesn’t swish or mince in his gown. In fact he jumps wildly and rather athletically into the air as he says he’s gone gay. Aunt Elizabeth has just asked him why he is wearing ‘that idiotic outfit’, and the point is that it puts him as thoroughly out of his gender element as Mark’s jodhpurs a scene later put him out of his social one. The gown is too small for him, for one thing, and a moment later he sits with unladylike legs apart on the stairs, revealing an immodest amount of masculine thigh. It has been argued that the phrase ‘went gay’ need not be understood as having anything to with homosexuality, and there must Cary Grant and Ann Sheridan in I Was a Male War Bride (1949), partly scripted (like Baby) by Hagar Wilde: ‘Cary was gonna put on a woman’s uniform and be feminine … I said “just act like a man in woman’s clothes”’ (Hawks)

Cary Grant and Randolph Scott

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indeed have been enough vagueness about it for the censor not to object. But even so – and as with much the censor didn’t censor in the film – it points strongly to areas the Hays Code prohibited (‘Sex perversion or any inference to it is forbidden’). After all, what else could David mean by saying he’s wearing a woman’s gown because he’s gone gay? By jumping ferociously up in the air he shows that he doesn’t mean what he is saying, but he could hardly do the denying unless he knew what he was suggesting. David’s association of gay and negligée, of course, depends on a very narrow idea of homosexuality and for that matter a very narrow idea of cross-dressing. David is naive about such things. Maybe he has come across the burlesqued Freudianism with which the film is on teasingly familiar terms. Cary Grant, on the other hand, was not naive about such things, and the line about going gay is famously his ad-lib. It was a remarkably bold one, given that for many years there had been rumours about his cohabitation with Randolph Scott. Even now the

instead played up his character’s stolid masculinity.) Grant doesn’t swish or mince in his gown. In fact he jumps wildly and rather athletically into the air as he says he’s gone gay. Aunt Elizabeth has just asked him why he is wearing ‘that idiotic outfit’, and the point is that it puts him as thoroughly out of his gender element as Mark’s jodhpurs a scene later put him out of his social one. The gown is too small for him, for one thing, and a moment later he sits with unladylike legs apart on the stairs, revealing an immodest amount of masculine thigh. It has been argued that the phrase ‘went gay’ need not be understood as having anything to with homosexuality, and there must Cary Grant and Ann Sheridan in I Was a Male War Bride (1949), partly scripted (like Baby) by Hagar Wilde: ‘Cary was gonna put on a woman’s uniform and be feminine … I said “just act like a man in woman’s clothes”’ (Hawks)

Cary Grant and Randolph Scott

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facts are not clear, and the evidence, like much showbiz evidence, is frequently unreliable and contradictory. Rival biographers heatedly continue to out and in their man.47 But it is clear that this was a sensitive matter and potentially enormously damaging for Grant’s career. In this context his line about going gay says ‘how ridiculous to think I’m gay, you only have to look at me in women’s clothes to see I’m no fag’. It also suggests through David’s exasperation how angry he is at being thought gay and how ludicrous the very idea appears. Grant’s ad-lib is an act of terrific effrontery no matter what the real nature of his relationship with Randolph Scott. Darwin Porter’s recent biography, Katharine the Great, has an interesting story from the making of Baby: The next day the newspapers ran a picture of Cary Grant and Randolph Scott leading the dance conga line at the appropriately named La Conga nightclub. For some reason, Grant had not invited [Phyllis] Brooks to serve as his beard and had defiantly dated Scott in public and in front of cameras. Pointing out the candid snapshot to Kate, Hawks said, ‘Those two fairies must really have balls to think they can get away with shit like that.’ His remark infuriated Kate, who became very defensive of them. ‘Don’t be homophobic,’ she cautioned him. ‘Otherwise you’ll alienate half your cast and crew on Bringing Up Baby.’48

Porter has an awe-inspiring acknowledgments list of the great and the good he has interviewed over a period of decades, but he is often inaccurate, saying, for instance, about this film that 30 May 1937 was one of ‘the closing days of shooting’ and that Howard Hawks married Virginia Walker.49 So it isn’t clear how big a pinch of salt this story needs to be taken with. Hepburn would certainly not have said ‘homophobic’ in 1937 since the word had not been coined in the 1930s, and Porter gives no date for the photos, so it isn’t easy to check up. But the gist of the story rings true – to this reader at least – and Hawks’s remark does sound like him. Nor is it simply homophobic, even if phrases like ‘those fairies’ and ‘shit like that’ (if

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accurately reported) need some special pleading. ‘Having a lot of balls’ is something Hawks warmly admired, and maybe it implies that we should admire fairies too for the dangerous game they’re macho enough to play. And getting away with stuff is what Baby is all about. Hepburn’s allusion to the gay-friendly ambience of the film is very interesting indeed, especially as she says in her memoirs that ‘Everyone contributed anything and everything they could think of to that script.’50 I would suggest that it’s a gay-savvy film and gives a warm welcome to the ways in which unconforming sexual adventure can get you in trouble with the world around. But I would also conclude that in context we can’t go very far with the idea that David ‘went gay’ – and that indeed the line defiantly means the opposite of what it says. Perhaps that’s why the censors allowed it to remain, since it suggested that the very idea of homosexuality was too silly to contemplate. Nonetheless, Hagar Wilde’s magazine story rather startlingly implies a central lesbian relationship, so it is hardly an imposition to look for the non-heterosexual in the film too. In the short story Aunt Elizabeth is ‘the biggest woman David had ever seen outside a circus tent’ and she lives and quarrels with a temperamental opera singer, Drusilla Maretti (perhaps the femme to her butch). Drusilla has a ‘moth-eaten cheetah she’s always lugging about’, and it is in an attempt to outdo Drusilla that Aunt Elizabeth acquires her panther. ‘They give the most ghastly dinner parties,’ Suzan says, ‘and wear feathers in their hair and serve champagne and Drusilla sings after dinner and Aunt Elizabeth sits in the corner and sneers.’ Whatever the ins and outs of their relationship, Aunt Elizabeth writes to Suzan that ‘Drusilla and I, at the moment, are not speaking. It makes things very difficult, living in the same house.’51 The fringes of Wilde’s story, then, are queerly Bohemian and upper class beyond gender norms. The David–Suzan relationship, by contrast, is more orthodox. They are engaged from the start, though Suzan keeps threatening to break off the engagement. They part company while hunting by night for Baby and George, following one of their many rows. But when they

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facts are not clear, and the evidence, like much showbiz evidence, is frequently unreliable and contradictory. Rival biographers heatedly continue to out and in their man.47 But it is clear that this was a sensitive matter and potentially enormously damaging for Grant’s career. In this context his line about going gay says ‘how ridiculous to think I’m gay, you only have to look at me in women’s clothes to see I’m no fag’. It also suggests through David’s exasperation how angry he is at being thought gay and how ludicrous the very idea appears. Grant’s ad-lib is an act of terrific effrontery no matter what the real nature of his relationship with Randolph Scott. Darwin Porter’s recent biography, Katharine the Great, has an interesting story from the making of Baby: The next day the newspapers ran a picture of Cary Grant and Randolph Scott leading the dance conga line at the appropriately named La Conga nightclub. For some reason, Grant had not invited [Phyllis] Brooks to serve as his beard and had defiantly dated Scott in public and in front of cameras. Pointing out the candid snapshot to Kate, Hawks said, ‘Those two fairies must really have balls to think they can get away with shit like that.’ His remark infuriated Kate, who became very defensive of them. ‘Don’t be homophobic,’ she cautioned him. ‘Otherwise you’ll alienate half your cast and crew on Bringing Up Baby.’48

Porter has an awe-inspiring acknowledgments list of the great and the good he has interviewed over a period of decades, but he is often inaccurate, saying, for instance, about this film that 30 May 1937 was one of ‘the closing days of shooting’ and that Howard Hawks married Virginia Walker.49 So it isn’t clear how big a pinch of salt this story needs to be taken with. Hepburn would certainly not have said ‘homophobic’ in 1937 since the word had not been coined in the 1930s, and Porter gives no date for the photos, so it isn’t easy to check up. But the gist of the story rings true – to this reader at least – and Hawks’s remark does sound like him. Nor is it simply homophobic, even if phrases like ‘those fairies’ and ‘shit like that’ (if

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accurately reported) need some special pleading. ‘Having a lot of balls’ is something Hawks warmly admired, and maybe it implies that we should admire fairies too for the dangerous game they’re macho enough to play. And getting away with stuff is what Baby is all about. Hepburn’s allusion to the gay-friendly ambience of the film is very interesting indeed, especially as she says in her memoirs that ‘Everyone contributed anything and everything they could think of to that script.’50 I would suggest that it’s a gay-savvy film and gives a warm welcome to the ways in which unconforming sexual adventure can get you in trouble with the world around. But I would also conclude that in context we can’t go very far with the idea that David ‘went gay’ – and that indeed the line defiantly means the opposite of what it says. Perhaps that’s why the censors allowed it to remain, since it suggested that the very idea of homosexuality was too silly to contemplate. Nonetheless, Hagar Wilde’s magazine story rather startlingly implies a central lesbian relationship, so it is hardly an imposition to look for the non-heterosexual in the film too. In the short story Aunt Elizabeth is ‘the biggest woman David had ever seen outside a circus tent’ and she lives and quarrels with a temperamental opera singer, Drusilla Maretti (perhaps the femme to her butch). Drusilla has a ‘moth-eaten cheetah she’s always lugging about’, and it is in an attempt to outdo Drusilla that Aunt Elizabeth acquires her panther. ‘They give the most ghastly dinner parties,’ Suzan says, ‘and wear feathers in their hair and serve champagne and Drusilla sings after dinner and Aunt Elizabeth sits in the corner and sneers.’ Whatever the ins and outs of their relationship, Aunt Elizabeth writes to Suzan that ‘Drusilla and I, at the moment, are not speaking. It makes things very difficult, living in the same house.’51 The fringes of Wilde’s story, then, are queerly Bohemian and upper class beyond gender norms. The David–Suzan relationship, by contrast, is more orthodox. They are engaged from the start, though Suzan keeps threatening to break off the engagement. They part company while hunting by night for Baby and George, following one of their many rows. But when they

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beyond. As Aunt Elizabeth is thinking of leaving her money to Susan, we may reasonably infer she has no husband or children. When we first see her, severely buttoned up in a full-length riding cape and check coat, hair neatly tied beneath a unisex trilby-style hat, the effect might fairly be described as ‘mannish’. Horace, on the other hand, hems and haws and defers from the start, in less than mannish style. Stanley Cavell calls Horace ‘a sexless zany’, and Gerald Mast follows him in calling Horace ‘sexless’.52 But how do they know? And aren’t they relying on a narrow idea of what his sexuality might be? One of the cancelled exchanges has Horace concurring with Susan about David’s charms: SUSAN

(gazing lovingly after David)

Isn’t he sweet! Did you ever see such shoulders?

separate David continues to shadow her, a safeguarding masculine presence in the darkness, as she tracks the leopard. And when she is taken into custody by the psychiatrist, he’s the one who captures Baby and George and brings them home, thereby winning Aunt Elizabeth’s approval and getting her to change her will. In the film of Bringing Up Baby it’s above all the aunt and the major of whom we might want to ask ‘In what ways are they straight?’ They are introduced without reference to any partners or marital commitments, although they are well into middle age or

APPLEGATE

The silent film actress Phyllis Gordon with her pet cheetah, London, 1939. Josephine Baker was already famous for her pet cheetah, and this shot from Vogue suggests that big-cat chic was still alive in the late 1930s (Courtesy of Getty Images)

The aunt (May Robson) and the major (Charles Ruggles)

(acidly)

And what legs! He’d make a splendid messenger boy.

SUSAN

Yes.53

This is a peculiarly camp remark from Horace, even if made as ‘acidly’ as the script transcript suggests, but in no way out of character with the figure we see on screen, who declares at one point ‘I’m the niece’ and then corrects himself ‘I’m the aunt’. His being a man, to notice such things as Cary Grant’s splendid legs perhaps

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beyond. As Aunt Elizabeth is thinking of leaving her money to Susan, we may reasonably infer she has no husband or children. When we first see her, severely buttoned up in a full-length riding cape and check coat, hair neatly tied beneath a unisex trilby-style hat, the effect might fairly be described as ‘mannish’. Horace, on the other hand, hems and haws and defers from the start, in less than mannish style. Stanley Cavell calls Horace ‘a sexless zany’, and Gerald Mast follows him in calling Horace ‘sexless’.52 But how do they know? And aren’t they relying on a narrow idea of what his sexuality might be? One of the cancelled exchanges has Horace concurring with Susan about David’s charms: SUSAN

(gazing lovingly after David)

Isn’t he sweet! Did you ever see such shoulders?

separate David continues to shadow her, a safeguarding masculine presence in the darkness, as she tracks the leopard. And when she is taken into custody by the psychiatrist, he’s the one who captures Baby and George and brings them home, thereby winning Aunt Elizabeth’s approval and getting her to change her will. In the film of Bringing Up Baby it’s above all the aunt and the major of whom we might want to ask ‘In what ways are they straight?’ They are introduced without reference to any partners or marital commitments, although they are well into middle age or

APPLEGATE

The silent film actress Phyllis Gordon with her pet cheetah, London, 1939. Josephine Baker was already famous for her pet cheetah, and this shot from Vogue suggests that big-cat chic was still alive in the late 1930s (Courtesy of Getty Images)

The aunt (May Robson) and the major (Charles Ruggles)

(acidly)

And what legs! He’d make a splendid messenger boy.

SUSAN

Yes.53

This is a peculiarly camp remark from Horace, even if made as ‘acidly’ as the script transcript suggests, but in no way out of character with the figure we see on screen, who declares at one point ‘I’m the niece’ and then corrects himself ‘I’m the aunt’. His being a man, to notice such things as Cary Grant’s splendid legs perhaps

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made the lines too risqué to include in the final cut. Earlier drafts of the screenplay had endowed the character, named ‘Horatio Pim’ until late in the script development, with an Arab attendant named Ali, who was to be played, Nichols and Wilde insisted, by ‘Mischa Auer Mischa Auer or Mischa Auer’.54 As the ‘protégé’ Carlo in My Man Godfrey, Auer had shown a touch of genius in his alarming and utterly unexpected cameo as a gorilla running amok in the drawingroom,55 bringing poor Carole Lombard back to the brink of the nervous breakdown she is recovering from. Carlo seems uninterested in doing the party turn, but once he starts the performance it is wildly over the top, goes on too long, and ends with him picking fleas out of the family chihuahua. Once in character, he stays there. He introduces a real sense of bedlam into the living-room and intimates that the space between madhouse and family house is really rather small. No wonder the writers were keen to get him into this story rich My Man Godfrey: a gorilla among Bullocks. Carlo (Mischa Auer) doing his turn as a gorilla as Mr and Mrs Bullock (Eugene Pallette and Alice Brady) and their daughter Irene (Carole Lombard) look on

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in animals and crazies. It would have made Horatio/Horace an even queerer character, carrying his exotic past even more fully into the film. Ali’s preposterous pretext was to be Horatio’s food-taster. Horatio and Ali would have paralleled Slocum and Elmer (who generally get a couple of tickets to go to the circus) as an ineffectual all-male couple. One of the most suggestive essays by the late Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, ‘Tales of the Avunculate’, opens up a promising avenue into the queerness of the film. Sedgwick discusses the prevalence of aunts and uncles in The Importance of Being Earnest, and suggests that the queerness of Wilde’s play lies not in spotting the deviants in the story, but in its imagination of a world densely populated by kinships and intimacies outside the heterosexual family.56 It’s just such a distance from the world of heterosexual family-making that makes it illuminating to see Bringing Up Baby as queer. For a film with ‘Baby’ in the title (and the cartoon titles), it remains exhilaratingly child-free. ‘I don’t like children too much in pictures,’ Hawks said. ‘I like ’em in real life, but in pictures they’re corny’.57 (Even so he had a lot of fun with the man-child George Winslow who played Henry Spofford III in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (1953) and the scalp-hungry ‘Little Indian’ in Monkey Business (1952).) Moreover, the film is also entirely parent-free, and in particular it distinctively lacks the daughter–father relations which structure most of the screwball heiress films (for instance, It Happened One Night, Libelled Lady, Holiday and The Philadelphia Story). Without being brazenly anti-family in the manner of His Girl Friday, it coldshoulders the issues belonging to the Oedipal inheritance. Even Dr Lehman, who is fascinated by Susan’s ‘love-fixation’, abstains from speculating on her feelings about her father and mother. And David seems to have no relatives at all. The formidable Aunt Elizabeth and the deliciously effete Major Applegate are all we see of Susan’s thoroughly unpatriarchal family circle. The only married couples in the film are the Lehmans and the Gogartys, peripheral to the plot and not very obtrusively connubial

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made the lines too risqué to include in the final cut. Earlier drafts of the screenplay had endowed the character, named ‘Horatio Pim’ until late in the script development, with an Arab attendant named Ali, who was to be played, Nichols and Wilde insisted, by ‘Mischa Auer Mischa Auer or Mischa Auer’.54 As the ‘protégé’ Carlo in My Man Godfrey, Auer had shown a touch of genius in his alarming and utterly unexpected cameo as a gorilla running amok in the drawingroom,55 bringing poor Carole Lombard back to the brink of the nervous breakdown she is recovering from. Carlo seems uninterested in doing the party turn, but once he starts the performance it is wildly over the top, goes on too long, and ends with him picking fleas out of the family chihuahua. Once in character, he stays there. He introduces a real sense of bedlam into the living-room and intimates that the space between madhouse and family house is really rather small. No wonder the writers were keen to get him into this story rich My Man Godfrey: a gorilla among Bullocks. Carlo (Mischa Auer) doing his turn as a gorilla as Mr and Mrs Bullock (Eugene Pallette and Alice Brady) and their daughter Irene (Carole Lombard) look on

BRINGING UP BABY

in animals and crazies. It would have made Horatio/Horace an even queerer character, carrying his exotic past even more fully into the film. Ali’s preposterous pretext was to be Horatio’s food-taster. Horatio and Ali would have paralleled Slocum and Elmer (who generally get a couple of tickets to go to the circus) as an ineffectual all-male couple. One of the most suggestive essays by the late Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, ‘Tales of the Avunculate’, opens up a promising avenue into the queerness of the film. Sedgwick discusses the prevalence of aunts and uncles in The Importance of Being Earnest, and suggests that the queerness of Wilde’s play lies not in spotting the deviants in the story, but in its imagination of a world densely populated by kinships and intimacies outside the heterosexual family.56 It’s just such a distance from the world of heterosexual family-making that makes it illuminating to see Bringing Up Baby as queer. For a film with ‘Baby’ in the title (and the cartoon titles), it remains exhilaratingly child-free. ‘I don’t like children too much in pictures,’ Hawks said. ‘I like ’em in real life, but in pictures they’re corny’.57 (Even so he had a lot of fun with the man-child George Winslow who played Henry Spofford III in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (1953) and the scalp-hungry ‘Little Indian’ in Monkey Business (1952).) Moreover, the film is also entirely parent-free, and in particular it distinctively lacks the daughter–father relations which structure most of the screwball heiress films (for instance, It Happened One Night, Libelled Lady, Holiday and The Philadelphia Story). Without being brazenly anti-family in the manner of His Girl Friday, it coldshoulders the issues belonging to the Oedipal inheritance. Even Dr Lehman, who is fascinated by Susan’s ‘love-fixation’, abstains from speculating on her feelings about her father and mother. And David seems to have no relatives at all. The formidable Aunt Elizabeth and the deliciously effete Major Applegate are all we see of Susan’s thoroughly unpatriarchal family circle. The only married couples in the film are the Lehmans and the Gogartys, peripheral to the plot and not very obtrusively connubial

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(the wives hardly speak). No stigma attaches here to being a spinster or an unmarried man. And indeed the film seems only on affectionate terms with Horace and Elizabeth, as they are with each other, in a queerish parody of a heterosexual married couple taking an evening stroll in their garden. Even her bossing him about is marital according to a certain model of bossy wife. Some readers may think I exaggerate in drawing out these intimations of queerness in the film, in which case my fallback position would centre not on the film’s suggestions of sexuality but its treatment of gender. Few could disagree that Bringing Up Baby releases David from a stereotypical bourgeois henpeckery into a world with mannish aunts, twittering hunters and altogether less prescriptive gender roles. When the gardener Gogarty tries out a bit of old-fashioned patriarchalism (‘Where Aloysius Gogarty goes, Mrs Aloysius Gogarty goes too’), he sounds daft because drunk and the leopard at once sends him and his manly prerogative running. Antecedent screwballs have a certain space for going gay. Theodora’s elegant bachelor Uncle John in Theodora Goes Wild, for instance, has the hallmarked connotations of the non-marrying kind,58 and so more elusively does the melancholy alcoholic brother unable to shoulder his patriarchal inheritance in Holiday. Sullivan’s butler and valet make a charmingly odd couple in Sullivan’s Travels, filmed drying off together after a dousing in suggestive domestic conjugality. As William J. Mann has shown in his fascinating study Behind the Screen: How Gays and Lesbians Shaped Hollywood, 1910–1969, Franklin Pangborn who plays Mr Casalsis (the valet) was one of the actors whose version of bachelor male effeminacy was countenanced in the films of the day.59 The other odd couple even more pertinent to Baby are the Major and Monsieur Filiba in Lubitsch’s Trouble in Paradise, played by ‘Charlie Ruggles’ (as he is credited in the early 1930s) and Edward Everett Horton. Ostensibly rivals in love for Mme Colet, the two of them act like exquisites from restoration comedy and are far more interested in each other. Lubitsch was one of Hawks’s three favourite directors, and they were

BRINGING UP BABY

good friends (at least according to Hawks’s possibly self-serving account60). The famous tracking shot at the start of Hawks’s Scarface seems to me like a brilliant hommage to Lubitsch’s no less brilliant tracking shot at the start of Trouble in Paradise from the same year. In his very early Fig Leaves (1926) Hawks had already made a sophisticated decadent sex comedy in the Lubitsch mode. I would guess that calling the Ruggles character the ‘Major’ was a grateful allusion to Lubitsch, and implied that the atmosphere of knowingly indulged perversity in Trouble in Paradise lived on in Bringing Up Baby.61 Hawks’s films often explore loving relationships between men, but they keep their distance from the versions of the effeminate that actions such as cross-dressing in a negligée are likely to entail. The elderly director would object when his admirers suggested that his films explored homosexuality, but it’s hard to see that he had any right to do so when (for instance) he himself called A Girl in Every Trouble in Paradise: Monsieur Filiba (Edward Everett Horton) and the Major (Charlie Ruggles)

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(the wives hardly speak). No stigma attaches here to being a spinster or an unmarried man. And indeed the film seems only on affectionate terms with Horace and Elizabeth, as they are with each other, in a queerish parody of a heterosexual married couple taking an evening stroll in their garden. Even her bossing him about is marital according to a certain model of bossy wife. Some readers may think I exaggerate in drawing out these intimations of queerness in the film, in which case my fallback position would centre not on the film’s suggestions of sexuality but its treatment of gender. Few could disagree that Bringing Up Baby releases David from a stereotypical bourgeois henpeckery into a world with mannish aunts, twittering hunters and altogether less prescriptive gender roles. When the gardener Gogarty tries out a bit of old-fashioned patriarchalism (‘Where Aloysius Gogarty goes, Mrs Aloysius Gogarty goes too’), he sounds daft because drunk and the leopard at once sends him and his manly prerogative running. Antecedent screwballs have a certain space for going gay. Theodora’s elegant bachelor Uncle John in Theodora Goes Wild, for instance, has the hallmarked connotations of the non-marrying kind,58 and so more elusively does the melancholy alcoholic brother unable to shoulder his patriarchal inheritance in Holiday. Sullivan’s butler and valet make a charmingly odd couple in Sullivan’s Travels, filmed drying off together after a dousing in suggestive domestic conjugality. As William J. Mann has shown in his fascinating study Behind the Screen: How Gays and Lesbians Shaped Hollywood, 1910–1969, Franklin Pangborn who plays Mr Casalsis (the valet) was one of the actors whose version of bachelor male effeminacy was countenanced in the films of the day.59 The other odd couple even more pertinent to Baby are the Major and Monsieur Filiba in Lubitsch’s Trouble in Paradise, played by ‘Charlie Ruggles’ (as he is credited in the early 1930s) and Edward Everett Horton. Ostensibly rivals in love for Mme Colet, the two of them act like exquisites from restoration comedy and are far more interested in each other. Lubitsch was one of Hawks’s three favourite directors, and they were

BRINGING UP BABY

good friends (at least according to Hawks’s possibly self-serving account60). The famous tracking shot at the start of Hawks’s Scarface seems to me like a brilliant hommage to Lubitsch’s no less brilliant tracking shot at the start of Trouble in Paradise from the same year. In his very early Fig Leaves (1926) Hawks had already made a sophisticated decadent sex comedy in the Lubitsch mode. I would guess that calling the Ruggles character the ‘Major’ was a grateful allusion to Lubitsch, and implied that the atmosphere of knowingly indulged perversity in Trouble in Paradise lived on in Bringing Up Baby.61 Hawks’s films often explore loving relationships between men, but they keep their distance from the versions of the effeminate that actions such as cross-dressing in a negligée are likely to entail. The elderly director would object when his admirers suggested that his films explored homosexuality, but it’s hard to see that he had any right to do so when (for instance) he himself called A Girl in Every Trouble in Paradise: Monsieur Filiba (Edward Everett Horton) and the Major (Charlie Ruggles)

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Port (1928) ‘a love story between two men’62 or when in Red River (1948) (another instance) he shot a scene of two young men admiring each other’s guns so flirtatiously that it too made its way into The Celluloid Closet. Many of Hawks’s films move close to another paradigm influentially introduced by Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, namely the ‘homosocial’. In the homosocial, Sedgwick argues, men’s closest bonds are with each other and not with women. Stories involving love triangles with two men vying for the same woman essentially confirm and express the men’s closeness to each other. We could think of this motif in films as different as Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (1969) and Y tu mamá También (2001), as well as seeing its recurrence in Hawks’s films from A Girl in Every Port through Tiger Shark (1932), Today We Live (1933), Barbary Coast (1935), Red River, and even his final planned project When It’s Hot Play It Cool.63 In Sedgwick’s account, the homosocial tends to be misogynistic – in that it subordinates women to a secondary role – and homophobic, in that male homosociality has to be fiercely policed against the possibility of homosexuality. But in Hawks’s films, I would suggest, the homosocial is audaciously not policed in this way. Films such as A Girl in Every Port, The Dawn Patrol (1938), The Outlaw (1943), Red River and The Big Sky (1952) are idyllically nonchalant about where the love between men may lead. Even when the plots are the marrying kind, marriage is not presented as a confinement or abridgment of male intimacy. This may be one reason why Hawks’s Westerns are so much less elegiac about the historically doomed world of frontier masculine togetherness than, for instance, John Ford’s. Insofar as the films invoke male homosexuality, they are calmly blasé, provisional and free of panic. In the woods David and Susan set off into the woods and the heart of the film equipped with a croquet mallet and a rope and a butterfly net. The quest for Baby, like the quest for love, makes fools of their attempts to plan sensibly. A certain amount of glamour photography by

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moonlight adds its enchantment to this section of the film. Realistically the setting is too light for its post-sunset time, but that is no less true of other screwballs which set scenes of romance by the light of the moon (Libelled Lady, It Happened One Night and The Philadelphia Story among them). Realism will also take a tumble when David and Susan fall in the river – an obvious gag made very funny because it so well expresses Susan’s boundlessly counterfactual confidence (‘It’s shallow. We can wade across’) – and manage without the aid of towels or firelighters to make a fire and dry themselves and their clothes. The search mainly consists of misadventures, stumbles, breakages, drenchings and bruisings. After a number of these David A moonlit quest, heightened by Russell Metty’s romantic cinematography

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Port (1928) ‘a love story between two men’62 or when in Red River (1948) (another instance) he shot a scene of two young men admiring each other’s guns so flirtatiously that it too made its way into The Celluloid Closet. Many of Hawks’s films move close to another paradigm influentially introduced by Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, namely the ‘homosocial’. In the homosocial, Sedgwick argues, men’s closest bonds are with each other and not with women. Stories involving love triangles with two men vying for the same woman essentially confirm and express the men’s closeness to each other. We could think of this motif in films as different as Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (1969) and Y tu mamá También (2001), as well as seeing its recurrence in Hawks’s films from A Girl in Every Port through Tiger Shark (1932), Today We Live (1933), Barbary Coast (1935), Red River, and even his final planned project When It’s Hot Play It Cool.63 In Sedgwick’s account, the homosocial tends to be misogynistic – in that it subordinates women to a secondary role – and homophobic, in that male homosociality has to be fiercely policed against the possibility of homosexuality. But in Hawks’s films, I would suggest, the homosocial is audaciously not policed in this way. Films such as A Girl in Every Port, The Dawn Patrol (1938), The Outlaw (1943), Red River and The Big Sky (1952) are idyllically nonchalant about where the love between men may lead. Even when the plots are the marrying kind, marriage is not presented as a confinement or abridgment of male intimacy. This may be one reason why Hawks’s Westerns are so much less elegiac about the historically doomed world of frontier masculine togetherness than, for instance, John Ford’s. Insofar as the films invoke male homosexuality, they are calmly blasé, provisional and free of panic. In the woods David and Susan set off into the woods and the heart of the film equipped with a croquet mallet and a rope and a butterfly net. The quest for Baby, like the quest for love, makes fools of their attempts to plan sensibly. A certain amount of glamour photography by

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moonlight adds its enchantment to this section of the film. Realistically the setting is too light for its post-sunset time, but that is no less true of other screwballs which set scenes of romance by the light of the moon (Libelled Lady, It Happened One Night and The Philadelphia Story among them). Realism will also take a tumble when David and Susan fall in the river – an obvious gag made very funny because it so well expresses Susan’s boundlessly counterfactual confidence (‘It’s shallow. We can wade across’) – and manage without the aid of towels or firelighters to make a fire and dry themselves and their clothes. The search mainly consists of misadventures, stumbles, breakages, drenchings and bruisings. After a number of these David A moonlit quest, heightened by Russell Metty’s romantic cinematography

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tries to send Susan away, in a sequence which culminates in the two of them almost drawing together in a kiss, an example of Stanley Cavell’s nice observation that the film ‘plots love-making in the form of aborted leave-taking’.64 When David says ‘you must be very tired and I suggest that you go home’ he is framed, paradoxically, as if he were plighting his troth. We see the two of them profile to profile, with the viewer in the place of the congregation witnessing these outdoor nuptials. The action is taking place on two levels at once, with the body language and the language of the composition at odds with the spoken words. This is the second time the film has visually given us a pseudo-marital moment. The first one comes at Aunt Elizabeth’s when David gets down on his knees to explain to Susan, as if to an imbecile, but also

as if proposing marriage, the importance of the intercostal clavicle. The visuals inform us how tenaciously Susan will convert everything he says into courtship. When David asks her to go, Susan’s upset is shown in a closeup. ‘I know how to go when I’m not wanted,’ she says (counterfactually again), and tries to leave, but immediately trips over a tree-stump providentially placed there by the film. The pratfall is reassuringly classical: it echoes the moment when David stepped out of Susan’s car in New York and fell flat on his face. ‘I hope I never see you again,’ he said, but the film as well as Susan makes sure they can’t walk away from each other. David’s gallantry requires him to help her in her fall and her tears. These may well be genuine but we may suspect that she is also putting them on and playing them up. Perhaps like a child sensing the power of a crying fit, she doesn’t quite know where the real thing ends and the performance starts. Nor do we. Being a good-natured person, and also because he does Romance by moonlight: It Happened One Night and Theodora Goes Wild

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tries to send Susan away, in a sequence which culminates in the two of them almost drawing together in a kiss, an example of Stanley Cavell’s nice observation that the film ‘plots love-making in the form of aborted leave-taking’.64 When David says ‘you must be very tired and I suggest that you go home’ he is framed, paradoxically, as if he were plighting his troth. We see the two of them profile to profile, with the viewer in the place of the congregation witnessing these outdoor nuptials. The action is taking place on two levels at once, with the body language and the language of the composition at odds with the spoken words. This is the second time the film has visually given us a pseudo-marital moment. The first one comes at Aunt Elizabeth’s when David gets down on his knees to explain to Susan, as if to an imbecile, but also

as if proposing marriage, the importance of the intercostal clavicle. The visuals inform us how tenaciously Susan will convert everything he says into courtship. When David asks her to go, Susan’s upset is shown in a closeup. ‘I know how to go when I’m not wanted,’ she says (counterfactually again), and tries to leave, but immediately trips over a tree-stump providentially placed there by the film. The pratfall is reassuringly classical: it echoes the moment when David stepped out of Susan’s car in New York and fell flat on his face. ‘I hope I never see you again,’ he said, but the film as well as Susan makes sure they can’t walk away from each other. David’s gallantry requires him to help her in her fall and her tears. These may well be genuine but we may suspect that she is also putting them on and playing them up. Perhaps like a child sensing the power of a crying fit, she doesn’t quite know where the real thing ends and the performance starts. Nor do we. Being a good-natured person, and also because he does Romance by moonlight: It Happened One Night and Theodora Goes Wild

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indeed like her, David comes to Susan’s aid. When he comforts her as she cries, he tries to keep up the affianced proprieties, putting her head on his shoulder but patting rather than embracing her. The moment at which they nearly kiss is acted with beautiful subtlety and restraint, and not at all overplayed in this film where much is over the top. Crucially there’s no shot of her smiling in satisfaction as he agrees to let her tag along: it is Susan’s nature wildly to improvise her way out of emergencies and not approvingly to watch the unfolding of her plans. The initial cut of the film continued here with a scene in which David and Susan discuss the almost-kissing, with him carrying her piggyback.65 Susan tries to persuade him to kiss her ‘accidentally’. This was deleted from the initial cut when the film was edited down from 10,150 to 9,204 feet. It was the last of three deleted scenes in which we as audience were in the first cut kept up to speed with Susan’s motivations and intentions. The first of these came very early, with Susan in her New York apartment telling her maid Carrie that ‘I’m in love and he’s the most wonderful man.’ In the next she tried to persuade David to stay in Connecticut for a week, commending it as a good spot for falling in love.66 And then there was this scene, in which Susan (sounding very like Carole Lombard’s Irene in My Man Godfrey) was to opine ‘there’s really nothing wrong in kissing a girl. I mean, it’s just that you have to get a point of view about it.’ According to Gerald Mast, Cary Grant ‘played an important advisory role in cutting the film’,67 so he may have had a voice in implementing these extremely well-judged cuts. The combined effect of these scenes would have made Susan a more aggressive character and more aware of what she’s up to. If her intentions were to the fore in this way – or if they were even intelligible – it would transform the story by endowing her more with a woman’s wiles and less with a child’s impulses. ‘Dream a while, scheme a while,’ says the theme song, ‘you’re sure to find happiness’. The mixture of dreaming, in which you aren’t in control, and scheming, in which David not proposing to Susan

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indeed like her, David comes to Susan’s aid. When he comforts her as she cries, he tries to keep up the affianced proprieties, putting her head on his shoulder but patting rather than embracing her. The moment at which they nearly kiss is acted with beautiful subtlety and restraint, and not at all overplayed in this film where much is over the top. Crucially there’s no shot of her smiling in satisfaction as he agrees to let her tag along: it is Susan’s nature wildly to improvise her way out of emergencies and not approvingly to watch the unfolding of her plans. The initial cut of the film continued here with a scene in which David and Susan discuss the almost-kissing, with him carrying her piggyback.65 Susan tries to persuade him to kiss her ‘accidentally’. This was deleted from the initial cut when the film was edited down from 10,150 to 9,204 feet. It was the last of three deleted scenes in which we as audience were in the first cut kept up to speed with Susan’s motivations and intentions. The first of these came very early, with Susan in her New York apartment telling her maid Carrie that ‘I’m in love and he’s the most wonderful man.’ In the next she tried to persuade David to stay in Connecticut for a week, commending it as a good spot for falling in love.66 And then there was this scene, in which Susan (sounding very like Carole Lombard’s Irene in My Man Godfrey) was to opine ‘there’s really nothing wrong in kissing a girl. I mean, it’s just that you have to get a point of view about it.’ According to Gerald Mast, Cary Grant ‘played an important advisory role in cutting the film’,67 so he may have had a voice in implementing these extremely well-judged cuts. The combined effect of these scenes would have made Susan a more aggressive character and more aware of what she’s up to. If her intentions were to the fore in this way – or if they were even intelligible – it would transform the story by endowing her more with a woman’s wiles and less with a child’s impulses. ‘Dream a while, scheme a while,’ says the theme song, ‘you’re sure to find happiness’. The mixture of dreaming, in which you aren’t in control, and scheming, in which David not proposing to Susan

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you are, is the essence of her pursuit of David. A better schemer than Susan would know where she was going and wouldn’t fall over so much – three times in this section of the film, plus breaking her heel – but a mere dreamer wouldn’t go all out so resourcefully to get her man. The theme song comes magically into its own at the end of the section in the Connecticut woods. David and Susan emerge to find George in the garden and Baby on the roof of what turns out by exquisite coincidence to be the Lehman residence. What follows is the most wonderful scene in the film (and would get my vote for the most wonderful scene in all screwball comedy). Susan decides that they need to sing Baby’s theme song to get him down from the roof. They never sing the song to each other, but only to the leopard, in this respect their indispensable amorous go-between. When she starts to sing she does so alone and rather flat, and David looks at her askance. She gets him to join in, and when George (held by David) makes their duet a barking baying trio, you can see the two actors are delighted. Once Baby joins in – with what Horace has informed us is the leopard’s mating-cry – we have a blissful quartet. It is at once polyphony and caterwauling, a magical harmony and an awful racket, an operatic aria for four voices and a dissonant din from the menagerie. Babington and Evans suggest that it brings with it some of the enchantment of a ‘wonder tale where magical animals befriend the protagonist’.68 The quartet has a precursor in Theodora Goes Wild, its title already a plot of animality overtaking gentility. In an amazing scene of cacophony the hero and Theodora launch on a furious longdistance duet of his whistled popular song from the garden and her hymn thumped out on the piano in the living-room, ending in the window being slammed and a montage of screaming aunts and cats, including one (cat, that is) who gets her tail caught in the slammed door. It’s interesting that there is no long shot of the four singers together, which could have been engineered, probably, without any

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more trouble than many of the other scenes with the animal principals. Such a shot would be funny, but would also be saying ‘Look how funny I am’, and Hawks’s comic style is too laconic and dry for such self-congratulation. Instead, the scene moves swiftly on – always in my experience before the viewers’ laughter dies down – with David disappearing out of frame to follow the escaping George, and Susan singing the last line as in a serenade up to Dr Lehman, who has just appeared at the window. When he goes downstairs his place at the window is taken by Mrs Lehman, who says ‘Sing if you like, dear’. It is a sign of the warmth of the film’s atmosphere that she should be so readily if mistakenly full of tendresse for the poor loony below.

Polyphony and caterwauling

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you are, is the essence of her pursuit of David. A better schemer than Susan would know where she was going and wouldn’t fall over so much – three times in this section of the film, plus breaking her heel – but a mere dreamer wouldn’t go all out so resourcefully to get her man. The theme song comes magically into its own at the end of the section in the Connecticut woods. David and Susan emerge to find George in the garden and Baby on the roof of what turns out by exquisite coincidence to be the Lehman residence. What follows is the most wonderful scene in the film (and would get my vote for the most wonderful scene in all screwball comedy). Susan decides that they need to sing Baby’s theme song to get him down from the roof. They never sing the song to each other, but only to the leopard, in this respect their indispensable amorous go-between. When she starts to sing she does so alone and rather flat, and David looks at her askance. She gets him to join in, and when George (held by David) makes their duet a barking baying trio, you can see the two actors are delighted. Once Baby joins in – with what Horace has informed us is the leopard’s mating-cry – we have a blissful quartet. It is at once polyphony and caterwauling, a magical harmony and an awful racket, an operatic aria for four voices and a dissonant din from the menagerie. Babington and Evans suggest that it brings with it some of the enchantment of a ‘wonder tale where magical animals befriend the protagonist’.68 The quartet has a precursor in Theodora Goes Wild, its title already a plot of animality overtaking gentility. In an amazing scene of cacophony the hero and Theodora launch on a furious longdistance duet of his whistled popular song from the garden and her hymn thumped out on the piano in the living-room, ending in the window being slammed and a montage of screaming aunts and cats, including one (cat, that is) who gets her tail caught in the slammed door. It’s interesting that there is no long shot of the four singers together, which could have been engineered, probably, without any

BRINGING UP BABY

more trouble than many of the other scenes with the animal principals. Such a shot would be funny, but would also be saying ‘Look how funny I am’, and Hawks’s comic style is too laconic and dry for such self-congratulation. Instead, the scene moves swiftly on – always in my experience before the viewers’ laughter dies down – with David disappearing out of frame to follow the escaping George, and Susan singing the last line as in a serenade up to Dr Lehman, who has just appeared at the window. When he goes downstairs his place at the window is taken by Mrs Lehman, who says ‘Sing if you like, dear’. It is a sign of the warmth of the film’s atmosphere that she should be so readily if mistakenly full of tendresse for the poor loony below.

Polyphony and caterwauling

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‘Crazy people’ How close is screwball comedy to madness? The genre clearly enjoys playing with the idea of madness, but often in the safe spirit in which young people like to think their friends ‘crazy’. It’s a nice idea of being a bit wild but in the end a perfectly safe one. Perhaps the closest the genre gets to a more alarming idea of madness comes in Carole Lombard’s wonderful performance as Irene Bullock (yet another animal), the millionaire’s daughter who falls for the butler in My Man Godfrey. We hear she has recently suffered a nervous breakdown, and during the film she stalks Godfrey with an abject devotion that’s both funny and disturbing. Love, hysteria and derangement are not easily disentangled in My Man Godfrey. Moroever, as I’ve discussed, it has its further moments of bedlam in the scavenger hunt and Carlo’s gorilla turn. The other film that sails uncomfortably far from sanity is Hawks’s own supremely dark His Girl Friday, which has a less cosy shrink than Baby’s and an irresponsibility that at times takes its protagonists beyond the rational human fold. The English language offers a descendingly deranged set of near-synonyms, going from mad to crazy to dotty to scatty to screwy: where is Baby in this spectrum? Before addressing that question, we could consider again Hawks’s biographical circumstances. The mental health of his first wife Athole (Shearer) had been precarious ever since 1917–18, when she suffered her first breakdowns. She had a major depressive episode in 1928, the year that she married Hawks, who postponed the nuptials until her recovery. The Shearer family kept some of the details of her illness from Hawks, but he probably guessed most of them. Their marriage had been failing for some time by 1936, partly because of Howard’s frequent affairs. Things came to a head decisively in October 1936, as Todd McCarthy relates: Athole surprised her errant husband by doing something uncharacteristically bold and assertive: she went to New York to confront him about their marriage. Theodora Goes Wild: unhappy aunts

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‘Crazy people’ How close is screwball comedy to madness? The genre clearly enjoys playing with the idea of madness, but often in the safe spirit in which young people like to think their friends ‘crazy’. It’s a nice idea of being a bit wild but in the end a perfectly safe one. Perhaps the closest the genre gets to a more alarming idea of madness comes in Carole Lombard’s wonderful performance as Irene Bullock (yet another animal), the millionaire’s daughter who falls for the butler in My Man Godfrey. We hear she has recently suffered a nervous breakdown, and during the film she stalks Godfrey with an abject devotion that’s both funny and disturbing. Love, hysteria and derangement are not easily disentangled in My Man Godfrey. Moroever, as I’ve discussed, it has its further moments of bedlam in the scavenger hunt and Carlo’s gorilla turn. The other film that sails uncomfortably far from sanity is Hawks’s own supremely dark His Girl Friday, which has a less cosy shrink than Baby’s and an irresponsibility that at times takes its protagonists beyond the rational human fold. The English language offers a descendingly deranged set of near-synonyms, going from mad to crazy to dotty to scatty to screwy: where is Baby in this spectrum? Before addressing that question, we could consider again Hawks’s biographical circumstances. The mental health of his first wife Athole (Shearer) had been precarious ever since 1917–18, when she suffered her first breakdowns. She had a major depressive episode in 1928, the year that she married Hawks, who postponed the nuptials until her recovery. The Shearer family kept some of the details of her illness from Hawks, but he probably guessed most of them. Their marriage had been failing for some time by 1936, partly because of Howard’s frequent affairs. Things came to a head decisively in October 1936, as Todd McCarthy relates: Athole surprised her errant husband by doing something uncharacteristically bold and assertive: she went to New York to confront him about their marriage. Theodora Goes Wild: unhappy aunts

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… More adamant than ever that there was no hope of salvaging their marriage, Hawks sent her packing almost as soon as she arrived. Shattered by her husband’s callous attitude toward her good intentions, Athole returned to Los Angeles and went into an unchecked tailspin, the worst emotional collapse of her life. After undergoing tests at UCLA Medical Center and being diagnosed as a schizophrenic, Athole entered Las Encinas sanitarium in Pasadena, an exclusive facility that treated mainly alcoholics. There, with the approval of her UCLA physicians, she underwent electric-shock therapy, which was designed to stabilize her condition for the moment.69

She remained in institutional care for most of the rest of her life. Not to labour the point, it is really astonishing how lightly a film made the year after Athole’s breakdown can treat madness. In ways that may strike us as brilliant, or therapeutic, or rather appalling, Hawks in Bringing Up Baby contrives to turns his back on the reality of mental disturbance and reframe it as eccentricity, oddity, screwiness, craziness, with never a shadow of the reality of the asylum. Hawks and Athole

BRINGING UP BABY

There is, of course, plenty of topsy-turvydom in the film. David protests that Susan appears to ‘look at everything upside down’, a motif which returns with a horseshoe hanging the wrong way up in the background of Aunt Elizabeth’s garage and with an upside-down map which the circus handlers try to decipher. The impossible ‘intercostal clavicle’, too, would have to be the wrong way up – it means a shoulderblade between the ribs. This is craziness as a change of perspective. The film has fun with the idea that you lose yourself, for better and worse, when you fall in love. Hence this inspired exchange between David and Susan’s aunt when they first meet. DAVID

What do you want?

AUNT ELIZABETH

Well, who are you?

DAVID

Who are you?

AUNT ELIZABETH

But, who are you?

DAVID

What do you want?

AUNT ELIZABETH

Well, who are you?

Although upside-down, the horseshoe, like Susan, tells us that everything’s going to be all right

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… More adamant than ever that there was no hope of salvaging their marriage, Hawks sent her packing almost as soon as she arrived. Shattered by her husband’s callous attitude toward her good intentions, Athole returned to Los Angeles and went into an unchecked tailspin, the worst emotional collapse of her life. After undergoing tests at UCLA Medical Center and being diagnosed as a schizophrenic, Athole entered Las Encinas sanitarium in Pasadena, an exclusive facility that treated mainly alcoholics. There, with the approval of her UCLA physicians, she underwent electric-shock therapy, which was designed to stabilize her condition for the moment.69

She remained in institutional care for most of the rest of her life. Not to labour the point, it is really astonishing how lightly a film made the year after Athole’s breakdown can treat madness. In ways that may strike us as brilliant, or therapeutic, or rather appalling, Hawks in Bringing Up Baby contrives to turns his back on the reality of mental disturbance and reframe it as eccentricity, oddity, screwiness, craziness, with never a shadow of the reality of the asylum. Hawks and Athole

BRINGING UP BABY

There is, of course, plenty of topsy-turvydom in the film. David protests that Susan appears to ‘look at everything upside down’, a motif which returns with a horseshoe hanging the wrong way up in the background of Aunt Elizabeth’s garage and with an upside-down map which the circus handlers try to decipher. The impossible ‘intercostal clavicle’, too, would have to be the wrong way up – it means a shoulderblade between the ribs. This is craziness as a change of perspective. The film has fun with the idea that you lose yourself, for better and worse, when you fall in love. Hence this inspired exchange between David and Susan’s aunt when they first meet. DAVID

What do you want?

AUNT ELIZABETH

Well, who are you?

DAVID

Who are you?

AUNT ELIZABETH

But, who are you?

DAVID

What do you want?

AUNT ELIZABETH

Well, who are you?

Although upside-down, the horseshoe, like Susan, tells us that everything’s going to be all right

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The weird and wonderful rhythms are worthy of Harold Pinter. David has no answer to Aunt Elizabeth’s not unreasonable question about who he is; many of the men in the story get their own names wrong (Slocum, the Major). He goes on to reply ‘I don’t know. I’m not quite myself today,’ before adding that ‘I’m sitting in the middle of Forty-Second Street, waiting for a bus.’ He has a wild look as he speaks, enough to raise sanity alarm-bells with the aunt and Hannah, but to the viewer he is mainly not quite himself not because he’s mad but because he now has a charming kiss-curl and no spectacles – which, as Susan points out in a later non-sequitur, makes him look much more handsome. But David does become unmistakably eccentric – or ‘absentminded’ we might better say – in his professional obsession with recovering the intercostal clavicle. At dinner his total focus on the dog takes him well beyond dining-room small talk and far enough away that he forgets all about his Mr Bone disguise. He holds on to his soup spoon, though he remembers to apologise, when he rises like a somnambulist from the table to follow George out the door. Aunt Elizabeth complains that he is ‘stalking like Hamlet’s ghost’, showing that her grasp of the play is a little shaky, but really the distracted David seems more like the Prince of Denmark himself. Hamlet belongs in the atmosphere of the film because, like Susan, he ‘puts an antic disposition on’ in a way that perhaps no entirely sane person would do, and because like David he may be considered ‘crazy’, ‘very excitable’, ‘a loon’ and ‘a nut from Brazil’, and to have ‘bats in the belfry’ and ‘a nervous breakdown’. These are just some of the phrases that Bringing Up Baby calls on to describe mental abnormality. One style of contemporary film madness the film draws on, especially in its early scenes, comes from the Marx brothers. Aunt Elizabeth, in particular, with her dotty dignity asking for a fall and her placable sternness, might almost step out of one of their films.70 Many of these, like Bringing Up Baby, have titles with an animal in them – notably Duck Soup (1933), Horse Feathers (1932) and Animal Crackers (1930)71 – and there is also the later At the Circus

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(1939), another place (like the Connecticut woods, like the cinema) where temporary departure from human control is staged and enjoyed. As well as its Marxian animals and circuses, Bringing Up Baby sometimes has a Groucho-like style of dialogue. DAVID

Now, it isn’t that I don’t like you, Susan. Because, after all, in moments of quiet I’m strangely drawn to you. But, well, there haven’t been any quiet moments.

If Groucho were the speaker, these lines would be timed so that his victim (usually Margaret Dumont) would look up happily when told he is strangely drawn to her, to be promptly crushed by the Irish Bull that follows. It would be a humour of cruelty, like offering a child a sweet and then snatching it away when he reaches for it. But with David as speaker it’s a humour of befuddlement, like his monologue on the phone to Alice, with its flustered poetry of self-contradiction: ‘Yes, I did see Mr Peabody, but I didn’t see him. Well, that is, I didn’t see him really, I … Yes, I, I spoke to him twice, but I didn’t talk to him.’ David is not in charge of his nonsense, he can’t grasp how he can be strangely drawn to Susan when according to the usual rules of time and space he can’t be.72 This is craziness as enchantment by love. Even closer to the Marx brothers effect is Susan’s Groucho-like capacity to win exchanges by rising above mere understanding of her interlocutor. When David sees the leopard and says ‘Susan, you’ve got to get out of this apartment’, she replies ‘But, David, I can’t. I have a lease.’73 If Groucho were the speaker the implication would be ‘I reject your sense.’ But Katharine Hepburn’s delivery is so deadpan and so sweetly reasonable (how typical that she calls him ‘David’ in mid-explanation) that it seems as if she has no conception that his sense is sensible. She has many such moments, of which the key lies in our uncertainty whether her naivety is real or skilfully affected. One scene at Aunt Elizabeth’s ends with David telling Susan, with heavy sarcasm, ‘You can think faster than I can,’ which she serenely takes –

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The weird and wonderful rhythms are worthy of Harold Pinter. David has no answer to Aunt Elizabeth’s not unreasonable question about who he is; many of the men in the story get their own names wrong (Slocum, the Major). He goes on to reply ‘I don’t know. I’m not quite myself today,’ before adding that ‘I’m sitting in the middle of Forty-Second Street, waiting for a bus.’ He has a wild look as he speaks, enough to raise sanity alarm-bells with the aunt and Hannah, but to the viewer he is mainly not quite himself not because he’s mad but because he now has a charming kiss-curl and no spectacles – which, as Susan points out in a later non-sequitur, makes him look much more handsome. But David does become unmistakably eccentric – or ‘absentminded’ we might better say – in his professional obsession with recovering the intercostal clavicle. At dinner his total focus on the dog takes him well beyond dining-room small talk and far enough away that he forgets all about his Mr Bone disguise. He holds on to his soup spoon, though he remembers to apologise, when he rises like a somnambulist from the table to follow George out the door. Aunt Elizabeth complains that he is ‘stalking like Hamlet’s ghost’, showing that her grasp of the play is a little shaky, but really the distracted David seems more like the Prince of Denmark himself. Hamlet belongs in the atmosphere of the film because, like Susan, he ‘puts an antic disposition on’ in a way that perhaps no entirely sane person would do, and because like David he may be considered ‘crazy’, ‘very excitable’, ‘a loon’ and ‘a nut from Brazil’, and to have ‘bats in the belfry’ and ‘a nervous breakdown’. These are just some of the phrases that Bringing Up Baby calls on to describe mental abnormality. One style of contemporary film madness the film draws on, especially in its early scenes, comes from the Marx brothers. Aunt Elizabeth, in particular, with her dotty dignity asking for a fall and her placable sternness, might almost step out of one of their films.70 Many of these, like Bringing Up Baby, have titles with an animal in them – notably Duck Soup (1933), Horse Feathers (1932) and Animal Crackers (1930)71 – and there is also the later At the Circus

BRINGING UP BABY

(1939), another place (like the Connecticut woods, like the cinema) where temporary departure from human control is staged and enjoyed. As well as its Marxian animals and circuses, Bringing Up Baby sometimes has a Groucho-like style of dialogue. DAVID

Now, it isn’t that I don’t like you, Susan. Because, after all, in moments of quiet I’m strangely drawn to you. But, well, there haven’t been any quiet moments.

If Groucho were the speaker, these lines would be timed so that his victim (usually Margaret Dumont) would look up happily when told he is strangely drawn to her, to be promptly crushed by the Irish Bull that follows. It would be a humour of cruelty, like offering a child a sweet and then snatching it away when he reaches for it. But with David as speaker it’s a humour of befuddlement, like his monologue on the phone to Alice, with its flustered poetry of self-contradiction: ‘Yes, I did see Mr Peabody, but I didn’t see him. Well, that is, I didn’t see him really, I … Yes, I, I spoke to him twice, but I didn’t talk to him.’ David is not in charge of his nonsense, he can’t grasp how he can be strangely drawn to Susan when according to the usual rules of time and space he can’t be.72 This is craziness as enchantment by love. Even closer to the Marx brothers effect is Susan’s Groucho-like capacity to win exchanges by rising above mere understanding of her interlocutor. When David sees the leopard and says ‘Susan, you’ve got to get out of this apartment’, she replies ‘But, David, I can’t. I have a lease.’73 If Groucho were the speaker the implication would be ‘I reject your sense.’ But Katharine Hepburn’s delivery is so deadpan and so sweetly reasonable (how typical that she calls him ‘David’ in mid-explanation) that it seems as if she has no conception that his sense is sensible. She has many such moments, of which the key lies in our uncertainty whether her naivety is real or skilfully affected. One scene at Aunt Elizabeth’s ends with David telling Susan, with heavy sarcasm, ‘You can think faster than I can,’ which she serenely takes –

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soon enough, in a cancelled scene in which Dr Lehman interrogates her about her ‘love-fixation’. To judge from a surviving still, this would have been a disconcerting spectacle; the longish scene was played with Susan tied up under a strong light from beginning to end. Despite her immobility she runs verbal rings round Dr Lehman as he attempts to sound her mysteries through word-association games.74 As in her dealings with David, her method involves non-cooperative cooperation in his efforts. Regulating Susan is quite beyond his powers, or the film’s. But still, this is the closest the film comes to a shiver at the idea of madness. In jail With the aid of Constable Slocum, the film now gathers its principals together in Westlake Jail, as in the dénouement of a theatre farce. Variety on 16 February 1938 judged that the ‘chief shortcoming is that too much time is consumed with the jail sequence’. I reluctantly

or is it chooses to take? – as a compliment: ‘Thank you, David.’ This is craziness as heiress savoir-faire. When the circus handlers take David to be another dangerous escapee, they ask Susan ‘Shall we help you tie him up lady?’ He remains unshackled, but Susan herself will be strapped into a chair A still from the cut scene in which Dr Lehman fails to sound Susan’s mystery

The principals regathered at Westlake Jail

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soon enough, in a cancelled scene in which Dr Lehman interrogates her about her ‘love-fixation’. To judge from a surviving still, this would have been a disconcerting spectacle; the longish scene was played with Susan tied up under a strong light from beginning to end. Despite her immobility she runs verbal rings round Dr Lehman as he attempts to sound her mysteries through word-association games.74 As in her dealings with David, her method involves non-cooperative cooperation in his efforts. Regulating Susan is quite beyond his powers, or the film’s. But still, this is the closest the film comes to a shiver at the idea of madness. In jail With the aid of Constable Slocum, the film now gathers its principals together in Westlake Jail, as in the dénouement of a theatre farce. Variety on 16 February 1938 judged that the ‘chief shortcoming is that too much time is consumed with the jail sequence’. I reluctantly

or is it chooses to take? – as a compliment: ‘Thank you, David.’ This is craziness as heiress savoir-faire. When the circus handlers take David to be another dangerous escapee, they ask Susan ‘Shall we help you tie him up lady?’ He remains unshackled, but Susan herself will be strapped into a chair A still from the cut scene in which Dr Lehman fails to sound Susan’s mystery

The principals regathered at Westlake Jail

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agree with this verdict. It may be that the tempo has by this point become too relentless, and that the jail scenes would have benefited from the contrast in pace with the deleted scene of Dr Lehman interrogating Susan. I recently watched this section of the film on its own, as if it were a short or a one-act play, and found its farce-like brilliance more exciting and enlivening than in its fuller context. There is much skill in the whirl of complications and the assembling of the disparate cast (and cats) and threads of the plot, but the viewer is conscious that the ending is approaching and many of the jokes seem like reprises. On the other hand, if speed is value in the film, then this extended sequence is its climax. The dynamism of the action guarantees the designing intelligence of the storytellers, and also communicates the fun of speed. The main problem is that there is never any question of anybody being seriously in trouble with the law. Their incarcerations The intensely dramatic and moving dénouement of Sullivan’s Travels, with Sullivan among the chained prisoners in church

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can only be temporary. One could compare the astonishingly unexpected jail scenes in Sullivan’s Travels, which suddenly introduce a stark documentary accuracy to the picaresque tale. Preston Sturges himself spoke of ‘some horrible crimes against juxtaposition’75 in his film, but its shift of mode is intensely dramatic. But where Sturges wishes to take us out to a world beyond the usual limits of the genre, Hawks’s intentions are opposite – a restatement and integration of the elements of the film, not a departure into new ground. While everyone else in this section tries to hold onto reality, Susan goes along with the fantastical misconceptions and tries out a new identity as gangster’s moll – not an entirely new identity for her, since it’s also a reversion to criminal type. After her escape through the window Dr Lehman notices that ‘She’s got my car again.’ Having your car stolen once might be accident, but twice by the same person looks like carlessness. To Lehman it makes sense since he sees behaviour in terms of psychological compulsions, and to us it makes sense because the wild plot is so tightly put together by a pattern of coincidences. This section ends stirringly, with Susan dragging the roped and collared bad leopard into the jail. ‘I’m just as determined as you are,’ she says. David rises leopard-tamingly to the occasion when she discovers with horror that she has the wrong leopard, the Mr Hyde to Baby’s Dr Jekyll. The brave deeds are hilariously burlesque but also something more, because we sense that the absurd story has something to do with real courage as David goes to the defence of ‘poor darling Susan’. ‘She’s in danger and she’s helpless without me,’ he explains, which is not quite the courtship we’ve seen, but its final stages – with David’s rescuing Susan from a wild beast and a deadly fall – endow our hero with a touch of his film contemporary Tarzan.

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agree with this verdict. It may be that the tempo has by this point become too relentless, and that the jail scenes would have benefited from the contrast in pace with the deleted scene of Dr Lehman interrogating Susan. I recently watched this section of the film on its own, as if it were a short or a one-act play, and found its farce-like brilliance more exciting and enlivening than in its fuller context. There is much skill in the whirl of complications and the assembling of the disparate cast (and cats) and threads of the plot, but the viewer is conscious that the ending is approaching and many of the jokes seem like reprises. On the other hand, if speed is value in the film, then this extended sequence is its climax. The dynamism of the action guarantees the designing intelligence of the storytellers, and also communicates the fun of speed. The main problem is that there is never any question of anybody being seriously in trouble with the law. Their incarcerations The intensely dramatic and moving dénouement of Sullivan’s Travels, with Sullivan among the chained prisoners in church

BRINGING UP BABY

can only be temporary. One could compare the astonishingly unexpected jail scenes in Sullivan’s Travels, which suddenly introduce a stark documentary accuracy to the picaresque tale. Preston Sturges himself spoke of ‘some horrible crimes against juxtaposition’75 in his film, but its shift of mode is intensely dramatic. But where Sturges wishes to take us out to a world beyond the usual limits of the genre, Hawks’s intentions are opposite – a restatement and integration of the elements of the film, not a departure into new ground. While everyone else in this section tries to hold onto reality, Susan goes along with the fantastical misconceptions and tries out a new identity as gangster’s moll – not an entirely new identity for her, since it’s also a reversion to criminal type. After her escape through the window Dr Lehman notices that ‘She’s got my car again.’ Having your car stolen once might be accident, but twice by the same person looks like carlessness. To Lehman it makes sense since he sees behaviour in terms of psychological compulsions, and to us it makes sense because the wild plot is so tightly put together by a pattern of coincidences. This section ends stirringly, with Susan dragging the roped and collared bad leopard into the jail. ‘I’m just as determined as you are,’ she says. David rises leopard-tamingly to the occasion when she discovers with horror that she has the wrong leopard, the Mr Hyde to Baby’s Dr Jekyll. The brave deeds are hilariously burlesque but also something more, because we sense that the absurd story has something to do with real courage as David goes to the defence of ‘poor darling Susan’. ‘She’s in danger and she’s helpless without me,’ he explains, which is not quite the courtship we’ve seen, but its final stages – with David’s rescuing Susan from a wild beast and a deadly fall – endow our hero with a touch of his film contemporary Tarzan.

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3 In New York ‘A rather happy ending’ You’ve got a rather happy ending … (Howard Hawks in Bogdanovich, Who the Devil Made It?, pp. 304–5)

Unlike a farce, the story ends not with the ensemble scene but with the two leads alone together some days later, back in the museum in New York where we started. Susan visits David there, bringing him all he’s been searching for, both the bone and the money. But he’s not exultant and runs away up to the safety of his platform atop the dinosaur. Or it would be to safety if Susan didn’t follow, drawing from him the admission that he had the best day of his life with her and thinks he loves her. In her excitement Susan’s ladder sways back and forth and overbalances, at which point she jumps onto the bronto. David pulls her up to the platform and the bronto magnificently collapses. This may be a disaster for David and the museum, but is a triumph in terms of film spectacle and the deferred pay-off of what we now see was a joke set up right at the start. In Ball of Fire Miss Bragg says of Barbara Stanwyck: ‘That is the kind of woman who makes whole civilisations topple.’ Here we see the toppling, and the ending is a leap of faith into a toppled world. Susan asks David to confirm that ‘you still love me’, and he agrees, or at least he says ‘Oh, dear. Oh, my. Hmm,’ and embraces her. It’s not that Susan wants to change David – she likes him as he is – but she changes his world anyway, by force of nature. Many screwballs experiment with the idea of a liberated and independent woman only to reinstate a version of women’s subordinacy, but not this one. We might wonder whether the terms of their likely marriage will impose on Susan a renunciation of what she’s like. It is hard to imagine that ‘A rather happy ending’

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3 In New York ‘A rather happy ending’ You’ve got a rather happy ending … (Howard Hawks in Bogdanovich, Who the Devil Made It?, pp. 304–5)

Unlike a farce, the story ends not with the ensemble scene but with the two leads alone together some days later, back in the museum in New York where we started. Susan visits David there, bringing him all he’s been searching for, both the bone and the money. But he’s not exultant and runs away up to the safety of his platform atop the dinosaur. Or it would be to safety if Susan didn’t follow, drawing from him the admission that he had the best day of his life with her and thinks he loves her. In her excitement Susan’s ladder sways back and forth and overbalances, at which point she jumps onto the bronto. David pulls her up to the platform and the bronto magnificently collapses. This may be a disaster for David and the museum, but is a triumph in terms of film spectacle and the deferred pay-off of what we now see was a joke set up right at the start. In Ball of Fire Miss Bragg says of Barbara Stanwyck: ‘That is the kind of woman who makes whole civilisations topple.’ Here we see the toppling, and the ending is a leap of faith into a toppled world. Susan asks David to confirm that ‘you still love me’, and he agrees, or at least he says ‘Oh, dear. Oh, my. Hmm,’ and embraces her. It’s not that Susan wants to change David – she likes him as he is – but she changes his world anyway, by force of nature. Many screwballs experiment with the idea of a liberated and independent woman only to reinstate a version of women’s subordinacy, but not this one. We might wonder whether the terms of their likely marriage will impose on Susan a renunciation of what she’s like. It is hard to imagine that ‘A rather happy ending’

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being the case, but the film chooses to stop at the threshold of such questions and to stop short of affirming anything resembling an ideology of the married couple. Hawks drily called this ‘a rather happy ending’. As Raymond Durgnat pointed out, Hawks’s ‘happy endings are so odd and ironic that they never really sell out to an optimistic complacency’.76 This one has prompted a good deal of critical comment, and I’d like here to consider responses to it from four of the writers whose work on screwball I’ve found most helpful. Their views are much in contrast with each other. First, the late Robin Wood in his pioneering book on Hawks pays the conclusion of the film the compliment of taking it very seriously. In a chapter titled ‘The Lure of Irresponsibility’, he contrasts it with the endings of Scarface and Monkey Business, in which ‘our yearnings for total irresponsibility are evoked to be chastened’. One is forced also to contemplate Hepburn as a suitable life-partner for him. One can only feel uneasy, and question whether the triumph of total irresponsibility the film appears to be offering as fitting resolution is in fact acceptable. There is no sense of a possible synthesis or even compromise; the only alternative to Susan is made so ridiculous as to be instantly discounted. Hasn’t the temptation to irresponsibility, that gives Scarface and Monkey Business their tension and vividness, here got the better of Hawks’s judgment? – as it is to do again, and more disturbingly, in His Girl Friday.77

There might be two rejoinders to this stimulating critique. First, that the ending is not simply offered ‘as a fitting resolution’ but rather equivocally as an overthrow by love of the masculine preserve of work. Both alarming and strangely reassuring, it seems as much a compromise or surrender as a resolution and has, I would suggest, a good deal of the ‘tension and vividness’ admired by Robin Wood. Second, it seems a little churlish and partial of Wood to call the ending ‘the triumph of total irresponsibility’. Susan may be

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irresponsible, but there is more to her than that. She has nerve, flair, ardour, generosity, animal spirits, a capacity for pleasure, and the ending may no less be the triumph of these. Nor is ‘responsibility’ quite a transparent term. Susan’s resolve articulates a strong sense of responsibility to self, to the claims of her own happiness, and perhaps her irresponsibility does no great harm to others. Moreover, she has just spent several days recovering David’s intercostal clavicle and hasn’t hesitated for a moment before giving him a million dollars of what’s now her own money. She’s hardly Tony Camonte from Scarface. Gerald Mast, in his study Howard Hawks, Storyteller, sees Susan as bringing David not ‘irresponsibility’, but the reverse – a new responsibility to what we might call the natural man. Against the apparent grain of the film, Mast’s emphasis is audaciously didactic: ‘the series of madcap events to follow will be his new university’, ‘David’s education about which bones go where’, ‘his education which will teach him spontaneity and improvisation’.78 The story is certainly meant to be an eye-opener for David but this makes the film feel too instructionally safe, with Susan in the role of lifestyle guru. If Robin Wood was the old-style headmaster scolding Susan for being totally irresponsible, Gerald Mast is the new-style headmaster recruiting her, like a prefect, to the educational cause. Writing in 1983, Andrew Britton sees Bringing Up Baby in terms of a liberating politics of gender and sexuality. His view of Susan is in this respect closer to Mast’s than that of his mentor Robin Wood, though Britton’s more politicised critical vocabulary diverges from the emphasis on personal morality in both. Along with Holiday, he argues, Baby is one of ‘Hepburn’s most progressive and most completely satisfying films’ with a ‘commitment to the construction of a non-patriarchal heterosexual couple’: Hawks’s film affiliates to Susan’s deviant logic and the anarchy precipitated by it, and ends with the hero’s admission that he has never had a better time in his life. Here, the act of recognition involves not the repudiation of

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being the case, but the film chooses to stop at the threshold of such questions and to stop short of affirming anything resembling an ideology of the married couple. Hawks drily called this ‘a rather happy ending’. As Raymond Durgnat pointed out, Hawks’s ‘happy endings are so odd and ironic that they never really sell out to an optimistic complacency’.76 This one has prompted a good deal of critical comment, and I’d like here to consider responses to it from four of the writers whose work on screwball I’ve found most helpful. Their views are much in contrast with each other. First, the late Robin Wood in his pioneering book on Hawks pays the conclusion of the film the compliment of taking it very seriously. In a chapter titled ‘The Lure of Irresponsibility’, he contrasts it with the endings of Scarface and Monkey Business, in which ‘our yearnings for total irresponsibility are evoked to be chastened’. One is forced also to contemplate Hepburn as a suitable life-partner for him. One can only feel uneasy, and question whether the triumph of total irresponsibility the film appears to be offering as fitting resolution is in fact acceptable. There is no sense of a possible synthesis or even compromise; the only alternative to Susan is made so ridiculous as to be instantly discounted. Hasn’t the temptation to irresponsibility, that gives Scarface and Monkey Business their tension and vividness, here got the better of Hawks’s judgment? – as it is to do again, and more disturbingly, in His Girl Friday.77

There might be two rejoinders to this stimulating critique. First, that the ending is not simply offered ‘as a fitting resolution’ but rather equivocally as an overthrow by love of the masculine preserve of work. Both alarming and strangely reassuring, it seems as much a compromise or surrender as a resolution and has, I would suggest, a good deal of the ‘tension and vividness’ admired by Robin Wood. Second, it seems a little churlish and partial of Wood to call the ending ‘the triumph of total irresponsibility’. Susan may be

BRINGING UP BABY

irresponsible, but there is more to her than that. She has nerve, flair, ardour, generosity, animal spirits, a capacity for pleasure, and the ending may no less be the triumph of these. Nor is ‘responsibility’ quite a transparent term. Susan’s resolve articulates a strong sense of responsibility to self, to the claims of her own happiness, and perhaps her irresponsibility does no great harm to others. Moreover, she has just spent several days recovering David’s intercostal clavicle and hasn’t hesitated for a moment before giving him a million dollars of what’s now her own money. She’s hardly Tony Camonte from Scarface. Gerald Mast, in his study Howard Hawks, Storyteller, sees Susan as bringing David not ‘irresponsibility’, but the reverse – a new responsibility to what we might call the natural man. Against the apparent grain of the film, Mast’s emphasis is audaciously didactic: ‘the series of madcap events to follow will be his new university’, ‘David’s education about which bones go where’, ‘his education which will teach him spontaneity and improvisation’.78 The story is certainly meant to be an eye-opener for David but this makes the film feel too instructionally safe, with Susan in the role of lifestyle guru. If Robin Wood was the old-style headmaster scolding Susan for being totally irresponsible, Gerald Mast is the new-style headmaster recruiting her, like a prefect, to the educational cause. Writing in 1983, Andrew Britton sees Bringing Up Baby in terms of a liberating politics of gender and sexuality. His view of Susan is in this respect closer to Mast’s than that of his mentor Robin Wood, though Britton’s more politicised critical vocabulary diverges from the emphasis on personal morality in both. Along with Holiday, he argues, Baby is one of ‘Hepburn’s most progressive and most completely satisfying films’ with a ‘commitment to the construction of a non-patriarchal heterosexual couple’: Hawks’s film affiliates to Susan’s deviant logic and the anarchy precipitated by it, and ends with the hero’s admission that he has never had a better time in his life. Here, the act of recognition involves not the repudiation of

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deviance but its apprehension as the new norm, and at once provokes the final collapse of the existing (bourgeois/patriarchal) order.79

This brings out admirably how far the ending is at odds with most Hollywood versions of the final couple, but Britton’s ‘deviance’, like Wood’s ‘irresponsibility’, strikes me as a problematic term with which to sum up Susan Vance. She’s a good girl as well as a wild thing, and the wildness, moreover, is qualified by its temporariness as a form of desperate pursuit. The married Susan may turn out to be a different animal – possibly even akin to her tamed-down sitcom successors in I Love Lucy (1951) and Bewitched (1964–72), disrupting the bourgeois/patriarchal order but never seriously challenging it and quite uninterested in its overthrow. Moreover, it is problematic for Britton to characterise ‘deviance’ as a ‘norm’, since deviance has to be deviance from something or else it remains a vacant reflex of opposition and not a set of values in itself. Britton sees the ending of Bringing Up Baby in utopian terms: it ‘comes as near as any film has ever done to celebrating the end of patriarchal sexuality’, he says, and gives ‘an intimation, albeit ambiguous, of the polymorphous reorganization of desire’.80 I’m not convinced. In socio-political terms, the ending seems to me more like a wryly misogynistic shrug about masculine professionalism fighting a losing battle with disruptive loving femininity, sweetened because the surrender is simultaneously a seduction by aristocratic licence and money. And yet the ending is so exultant a catastrophe and the narrative returns so satisfyingly to a happier version of its opening that this feels too sour a way of putting it. Moreover, Britton puts very well into post-Marxian terms what I would see as the film being a celebration not of the structures and permanence of marriage but of the anarchy and hedonism of having an affair. It affirms the affair, which is an unusual thing for any film to do, never mind a Golden Age Hollywood one. Finally, there is the formidable figure of Stanley Cavell. Many of my reflections on screwball have been prompted by his 1981 book Lucille Ball in I Love Lucy (1951) and Elizabeth Montgomery in Bewitched (1964–72)

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deviance but its apprehension as the new norm, and at once provokes the final collapse of the existing (bourgeois/patriarchal) order.79

This brings out admirably how far the ending is at odds with most Hollywood versions of the final couple, but Britton’s ‘deviance’, like Wood’s ‘irresponsibility’, strikes me as a problematic term with which to sum up Susan Vance. She’s a good girl as well as a wild thing, and the wildness, moreover, is qualified by its temporariness as a form of desperate pursuit. The married Susan may turn out to be a different animal – possibly even akin to her tamed-down sitcom successors in I Love Lucy (1951) and Bewitched (1964–72), disrupting the bourgeois/patriarchal order but never seriously challenging it and quite uninterested in its overthrow. Moreover, it is problematic for Britton to characterise ‘deviance’ as a ‘norm’, since deviance has to be deviance from something or else it remains a vacant reflex of opposition and not a set of values in itself. Britton sees the ending of Bringing Up Baby in utopian terms: it ‘comes as near as any film has ever done to celebrating the end of patriarchal sexuality’, he says, and gives ‘an intimation, albeit ambiguous, of the polymorphous reorganization of desire’.80 I’m not convinced. In socio-political terms, the ending seems to me more like a wryly misogynistic shrug about masculine professionalism fighting a losing battle with disruptive loving femininity, sweetened because the surrender is simultaneously a seduction by aristocratic licence and money. And yet the ending is so exultant a catastrophe and the narrative returns so satisfyingly to a happier version of its opening that this feels too sour a way of putting it. Moreover, Britton puts very well into post-Marxian terms what I would see as the film being a celebration not of the structures and permanence of marriage but of the anarchy and hedonism of having an affair. It affirms the affair, which is an unusual thing for any film to do, never mind a Golden Age Hollywood one. Finally, there is the formidable figure of Stanley Cavell. Many of my reflections on screwball have been prompted by his 1981 book Lucille Ball in I Love Lucy (1951) and Elizabeth Montgomery in Bewitched (1964–72)

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Pursuits of Happiness: The Hollywood Comedy of Remarriage (including some dissenting ones in relation to the political engagements of the genre and the educability of screwball heroines by screwball heroes). In revisiting it I have been struck again by the reach and subtlety of his arguments. He suggests (unless I mistake his sometimes elusive argument) that the ending of Bringing Up Baby asks us searching questions about the nature and value of watching films. He proposes that the viewer’s relation to this film is a reflection of David’s relation to Susan, and points out that David keeps asking himself some version of the question ‘What am I doing here, that is, how have I got into this relation and why do I stay in it?’ In a fine turn Cavell suggests that ‘I, as his spectator, am to learn to ask this question about my relation to this film’81 – to ask, then, as David asks himself about Susan, whether we consider ourselves hypnotised or awakened by our encounter with the pleasures of the film. To Cavell, David’s embrace of Susan is the embrace not of irresponsibility, nor of deviant logic, but of another kind of responsibility, to film itself and to the way that our passions may be captivated by it. [David] mumbles something like, ‘Oh my; oh dear; oh well,’ in other words, I am here, the relation is mine, what I make of it is now part of what I make of my life, I embrace it. But the conclusion of Hawks’s object provides me, its spectator and subject, with a little something more, and less: with a declaration that if I am hypnotized by (his) film, rather than awakened, then I am the fool of an unfunny world, which is, and is not, a laughing and fascinating matter; and that the responsibility, either way, is mine. – I embrace it.82

Cavell’s emphasis on ‘responsibility’ – so different in its bearing from Robin Wood’s – prompts me to return a last time to My Man Godfrey, the film which seems to me the crucial precursor of Baby. It too has a strangely subdued and really disconcerting ending to its central romance. The romantic deal is done when Godfrey declines to voice

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further demurral as Irene patiently informs him that he has no choice but to acknowledge he loves her: ‘You know there’s no sense in struggling against a thing when it’s got you. It’s got you, and that’s all there is to it. It’s got you.’83 A man can’t help being captured by love; desire is absurd, predictable and unavoidable. Godfrey has no reply to this, and when she tells him to ‘Stand still Godfrey, it’ll all be over in a minute’ (with the minister summoned to perform the marriage) the end-title duly appears. Here too we are not far from the misogynistic territory of women getting their unstoppable way, but in My Man Godfrey that possibility is movingly tempered by the mutuality with which at different moments each has acknowledged a sense of ‘responsibility’ (that word again) to the other. Early in the film Irene declares that Godfrey is her protégé: ‘You’re my responsibility,’ she says, in a big close-up. It is a line she repeats near the conclusion: ‘You’re my responsibility and somebody has to take care of you.’ In between the two occurrences Godfrey tells her that ‘I feel a certain responsibility to you,’ explaining ‘You see, you helped me to find myself, and I’m very grateful.’ This ending coincides with Godfrey’s setting up a welfare project to rehabilitate his down-and-out friends from the city dump, despite his friend Tommy telling him that ‘These men are not your responsibility.’ Godfrey’s magically successful My Man Godfrey: ‘there’s no sense in struggling against a thing when it’s got you’

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Pursuits of Happiness: The Hollywood Comedy of Remarriage (including some dissenting ones in relation to the political engagements of the genre and the educability of screwball heroines by screwball heroes). In revisiting it I have been struck again by the reach and subtlety of his arguments. He suggests (unless I mistake his sometimes elusive argument) that the ending of Bringing Up Baby asks us searching questions about the nature and value of watching films. He proposes that the viewer’s relation to this film is a reflection of David’s relation to Susan, and points out that David keeps asking himself some version of the question ‘What am I doing here, that is, how have I got into this relation and why do I stay in it?’ In a fine turn Cavell suggests that ‘I, as his spectator, am to learn to ask this question about my relation to this film’81 – to ask, then, as David asks himself about Susan, whether we consider ourselves hypnotised or awakened by our encounter with the pleasures of the film. To Cavell, David’s embrace of Susan is the embrace not of irresponsibility, nor of deviant logic, but of another kind of responsibility, to film itself and to the way that our passions may be captivated by it. [David] mumbles something like, ‘Oh my; oh dear; oh well,’ in other words, I am here, the relation is mine, what I make of it is now part of what I make of my life, I embrace it. But the conclusion of Hawks’s object provides me, its spectator and subject, with a little something more, and less: with a declaration that if I am hypnotized by (his) film, rather than awakened, then I am the fool of an unfunny world, which is, and is not, a laughing and fascinating matter; and that the responsibility, either way, is mine. – I embrace it.82

Cavell’s emphasis on ‘responsibility’ – so different in its bearing from Robin Wood’s – prompts me to return a last time to My Man Godfrey, the film which seems to me the crucial precursor of Baby. It too has a strangely subdued and really disconcerting ending to its central romance. The romantic deal is done when Godfrey declines to voice

BRINGING UP BABY

further demurral as Irene patiently informs him that he has no choice but to acknowledge he loves her: ‘You know there’s no sense in struggling against a thing when it’s got you. It’s got you, and that’s all there is to it. It’s got you.’83 A man can’t help being captured by love; desire is absurd, predictable and unavoidable. Godfrey has no reply to this, and when she tells him to ‘Stand still Godfrey, it’ll all be over in a minute’ (with the minister summoned to perform the marriage) the end-title duly appears. Here too we are not far from the misogynistic territory of women getting their unstoppable way, but in My Man Godfrey that possibility is movingly tempered by the mutuality with which at different moments each has acknowledged a sense of ‘responsibility’ (that word again) to the other. Early in the film Irene declares that Godfrey is her protégé: ‘You’re my responsibility,’ she says, in a big close-up. It is a line she repeats near the conclusion: ‘You’re my responsibility and somebody has to take care of you.’ In between the two occurrences Godfrey tells her that ‘I feel a certain responsibility to you,’ explaining ‘You see, you helped me to find myself, and I’m very grateful.’ This ending coincides with Godfrey’s setting up a welfare project to rehabilitate his down-and-out friends from the city dump, despite his friend Tommy telling him that ‘These men are not your responsibility.’ Godfrey’s magically successful My Man Godfrey: ‘there’s no sense in struggling against a thing when it’s got you’

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solution to the Depression – an individually enterprising rather than governmentally organised one – may be the film’s wishful dream, as in different style is the bringing down of a bronto, but these films have the weight and power they surprisingly do because such dreams are linked to real responsibilities, both to self and others.

Hands Across the Table (1935) ALLEN (RALPH BELLAMY)

I’ve never had so much fun in my entire life.

Theodora Goes Wild MICHAEL (MELVYN DOUGLAS)

It’s a disgrace to have a little fun in Lynnfield.

‘Fun’ and screwball comedy My Man Godfrey For God’s sake, see if you can’t get some fun out of it. (Howard Hawks, parting

GODFREY (WILLIAM POWELL)

There are different ways of having fun.

advice to young directors, McBride, Hawks on Hawks, p .157, his last word in

CORNELIA (GAIL PATRICK)

You have a very peculiar sense of humour.

the book). Holiday (1) Oh Christ, I’m much more fun than Garbo! (Katharine Hepburn)

LINDA (KATHARINE HEPBURN)

She [their mother] thought there should be at least one room where people could have

The word ‘fun’ resounds through Hawks’s interviews with Peter Bogdanovich and Joseph McBride. His verdict on his career was ‘We just made scenes that were fun to do.’ ‘I think it’s fun to have a woman dominant and let the man be funniest,’ he said of Bringing Up Baby.84 The interested reader can find other ‘fun’-filled examples in McBride’s Hawks on Hawks on pages 22, 46, 52, 54, 56, 57, 60, 66, 70, 74, 94, 95, 102, 103, 104, 105, 112, 124, 127, 133, 137, 144, 145, 147 and 155.85 On many occasions the relevant phrase is ‘a lot of fun’. That’s a whole lot of fun. ‘Fun’ is evidently a crucial idea or set of ideas for Hawks, a ‘complex word’ in the sense in which William Empson argued that such words could work as ‘compacted doctrines’.86 The heart of the doctrine of fun is the grand elementary principle of pleasure seen as a source of value and vitality. A small anthology of examples may help to show how far the cycle of screwball comedies are in agreement that fun matters:

some fun. Holiday (2) JOHNNY (CARY GRANT)

Let’s not let the fun get out of it.

JULIA (DORIS NOLAN)

I can’t see what particular fun a secret would be.

JOHNNY

The Philadelphia Story C. K. DEXTER HAVEN (CARY GRANT)

Tracy and I always took a swim after a party.

ELIZABETH (RUTH HUSSEY)

Bet it was fun.

Ball of Fire MISS TOTTEN (MARY FIELD)

SUSAN

ELLIE (CLAUDETTE COLBERT)

I’ve never had so much fun in my life.

Bringing Up Baby (1) We could have such fun. This moonlight and everything is so lovely. And I do so like

It Happened One Night PETER (CLARK GABLE)

Can’t you, dear?

being with you.

I don’t think I’ll write that book [about hitching].

Bringing Up Baby (2)

But think of the fun we’ve had.

SUSAN

Isn’t this fun, David, just like a game?

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solution to the Depression – an individually enterprising rather than governmentally organised one – may be the film’s wishful dream, as in different style is the bringing down of a bronto, but these films have the weight and power they surprisingly do because such dreams are linked to real responsibilities, both to self and others.

Hands Across the Table (1935) ALLEN (RALPH BELLAMY)

I’ve never had so much fun in my entire life.

Theodora Goes Wild MICHAEL (MELVYN DOUGLAS)

It’s a disgrace to have a little fun in Lynnfield.

‘Fun’ and screwball comedy My Man Godfrey For God’s sake, see if you can’t get some fun out of it. (Howard Hawks, parting

GODFREY (WILLIAM POWELL)

There are different ways of having fun.

advice to young directors, McBride, Hawks on Hawks, p .157, his last word in

CORNELIA (GAIL PATRICK)

You have a very peculiar sense of humour.

the book). Holiday (1) Oh Christ, I’m much more fun than Garbo! (Katharine Hepburn)

LINDA (KATHARINE HEPBURN)

She [their mother] thought there should be at least one room where people could have

The word ‘fun’ resounds through Hawks’s interviews with Peter Bogdanovich and Joseph McBride. His verdict on his career was ‘We just made scenes that were fun to do.’ ‘I think it’s fun to have a woman dominant and let the man be funniest,’ he said of Bringing Up Baby.84 The interested reader can find other ‘fun’-filled examples in McBride’s Hawks on Hawks on pages 22, 46, 52, 54, 56, 57, 60, 66, 70, 74, 94, 95, 102, 103, 104, 105, 112, 124, 127, 133, 137, 144, 145, 147 and 155.85 On many occasions the relevant phrase is ‘a lot of fun’. That’s a whole lot of fun. ‘Fun’ is evidently a crucial idea or set of ideas for Hawks, a ‘complex word’ in the sense in which William Empson argued that such words could work as ‘compacted doctrines’.86 The heart of the doctrine of fun is the grand elementary principle of pleasure seen as a source of value and vitality. A small anthology of examples may help to show how far the cycle of screwball comedies are in agreement that fun matters:

some fun. Holiday (2) JOHNNY (CARY GRANT)

Let’s not let the fun get out of it.

JULIA (DORIS NOLAN)

I can’t see what particular fun a secret would be.

JOHNNY

The Philadelphia Story C. K. DEXTER HAVEN (CARY GRANT)

Tracy and I always took a swim after a party.

ELIZABETH (RUTH HUSSEY)

Bet it was fun.

Ball of Fire MISS TOTTEN (MARY FIELD)

SUSAN

ELLIE (CLAUDETTE COLBERT)

I’ve never had so much fun in my life.

Bringing Up Baby (1) We could have such fun. This moonlight and everything is so lovely. And I do so like

It Happened One Night PETER (CLARK GABLE)

Can’t you, dear?

being with you.

I don’t think I’ll write that book [about hitching].

Bringing Up Baby (2)

But think of the fun we’ve had.

SUSAN

Isn’t this fun, David, just like a game?

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Bringing Up Baby (3) After all the fun we’ve had?

SUSAN

‘Fun’ is also what counts in some dialogue, eventually cut, in which David and Alice agree to break off their engagement. I suppose true poetry is chasing a leopard around the

ALICE

country. No, it isn’t. But I had fun.

DAVID

You had fun.

ALICE DAVID

(brightening)

Yes, I had a good time. And it’s the first time in my existence I haven’t been thinking about work.87

David doesn’t laugh and hardly smiles88 throughout the film, so his fun comes from distractions deeper than laughter. Ideas and propositions important to screwball comedy are implicit in these laconic exchanges, for instance: ‘We are like children when we enjoy things. In the end few things count for more than pleasure. Don’t get too solemn about pleasure. There’s no need to analyse pleasure. Enjoyment is sociable. Enjoyment is lively. The capacity to play is an important one. Fun is an authentic form of selfexpression. You share something important if you share an understanding of fun.’ Together these might be thought to make up a good part of the ethos of the genre. Accounts of the filming of Bringing Up Baby suggest that it was almost as much fun as the days it describes. Hawks would often arrive late, and sometimes go to the races when he should have been working (like Edward Elgar, perhaps a model of aristo savoir-faire for the Anglophile Hawks); he presented two cases of champagne to cast and crew to celebrate the completion of the scenes in the bar; Hepburn regularly served tea on set, in a carnivalesque up-ending of the usual cast and crew hierachies. According to Gerald Mast, the two writers, Hagar Wilde and Dudley Nichols, started a love affair as they worked on adapting her original short story: ‘the screwball

romance of Susan and David on-screen was mirrored by the romance of the writers off-screen’.89 And they took their time. The schedule called for a fifty-one-day shoot; in the end it took ninety-one days, involving big extra fees for the stars, both animals and humans. There was much improvisation on set. The film embodied the fun it praised: it was a kind of dream of what might be in the industry. But we should consider that the idea of fun may also have its darker side. ‘The word “fun” crops up constantly in Hawks’s interviews and scripts. It masks his despair,’ according to Peter Wollen, who sees Hawksian ‘fun’ as part of an absurd code of values masking the existential void of his films.90 Another critic, Raymond Durgnat, detects in Hawks ‘a fascinatingly uneasy ambivalence between puritanism and fun morality’. Durgnat’s stimulating book on American comedy, The Crazy Mirror, has a characteristically dense and opinionated footnote about this phrase. He defines ‘fun morality’ as the post-puritan attitude whereby it’s your duty to have fun, and if you fail you feel not only sad, but positively guilty. It’s the puritan conscience devoted to post-puritan goals, and as preoccupied with one’s salvation. Hence it’s far from generous either (which is probably why it’s so unrewarding).91

This is the duty of hedonism, with fun featuring grimly on the selfish path to salvation. A far cry from the experience of watching Bringing Up Baby, but Durgnat shows real insight in the suggestion that ‘fun’, too, can be a ‘morality’ of sorts, and therefore strict. Take, for example, one of Ernest Hemingway’s early stories, in which Nick Adams decides to break up with his girlfriend Marjorie. ‘It isn’t fun any more. Not any of it.’ … ‘Isn’t love any fun?’ Marjorie said. ‘No.’92

Nick seems to be acting on a ruthless principle that if something isn’t fun, you end it and go away. Fun outranks loyalty.

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Bringing Up Baby (3) After all the fun we’ve had?

SUSAN

‘Fun’ is also what counts in some dialogue, eventually cut, in which David and Alice agree to break off their engagement. I suppose true poetry is chasing a leopard around the

ALICE

country. No, it isn’t. But I had fun.

DAVID

You had fun.

ALICE DAVID

(brightening)

Yes, I had a good time. And it’s the first time in my existence I haven’t been thinking about work.87

David doesn’t laugh and hardly smiles88 throughout the film, so his fun comes from distractions deeper than laughter. Ideas and propositions important to screwball comedy are implicit in these laconic exchanges, for instance: ‘We are like children when we enjoy things. In the end few things count for more than pleasure. Don’t get too solemn about pleasure. There’s no need to analyse pleasure. Enjoyment is sociable. Enjoyment is lively. The capacity to play is an important one. Fun is an authentic form of selfexpression. You share something important if you share an understanding of fun.’ Together these might be thought to make up a good part of the ethos of the genre. Accounts of the filming of Bringing Up Baby suggest that it was almost as much fun as the days it describes. Hawks would often arrive late, and sometimes go to the races when he should have been working (like Edward Elgar, perhaps a model of aristo savoir-faire for the Anglophile Hawks); he presented two cases of champagne to cast and crew to celebrate the completion of the scenes in the bar; Hepburn regularly served tea on set, in a carnivalesque up-ending of the usual cast and crew hierachies. According to Gerald Mast, the two writers, Hagar Wilde and Dudley Nichols, started a love affair as they worked on adapting her original short story: ‘the screwball

romance of Susan and David on-screen was mirrored by the romance of the writers off-screen’.89 And they took their time. The schedule called for a fifty-one-day shoot; in the end it took ninety-one days, involving big extra fees for the stars, both animals and humans. There was much improvisation on set. The film embodied the fun it praised: it was a kind of dream of what might be in the industry. But we should consider that the idea of fun may also have its darker side. ‘The word “fun” crops up constantly in Hawks’s interviews and scripts. It masks his despair,’ according to Peter Wollen, who sees Hawksian ‘fun’ as part of an absurd code of values masking the existential void of his films.90 Another critic, Raymond Durgnat, detects in Hawks ‘a fascinatingly uneasy ambivalence between puritanism and fun morality’. Durgnat’s stimulating book on American comedy, The Crazy Mirror, has a characteristically dense and opinionated footnote about this phrase. He defines ‘fun morality’ as the post-puritan attitude whereby it’s your duty to have fun, and if you fail you feel not only sad, but positively guilty. It’s the puritan conscience devoted to post-puritan goals, and as preoccupied with one’s salvation. Hence it’s far from generous either (which is probably why it’s so unrewarding).91

This is the duty of hedonism, with fun featuring grimly on the selfish path to salvation. A far cry from the experience of watching Bringing Up Baby, but Durgnat shows real insight in the suggestion that ‘fun’, too, can be a ‘morality’ of sorts, and therefore strict. Take, for example, one of Ernest Hemingway’s early stories, in which Nick Adams decides to break up with his girlfriend Marjorie. ‘It isn’t fun any more. Not any of it.’ … ‘Isn’t love any fun?’ Marjorie said. ‘No.’92

Nick seems to be acting on a ruthless principle that if something isn’t fun, you end it and go away. Fun outranks loyalty.

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From another point of view, fun may not be a democratic idea, since only those who are entertaining may make its grade. The dullspirited and the dull-witted need not apply, unless, perhaps, they’re captivatingly beautiful. Losers lose. One such is Bruce Baldwin (Ralph Bellamy) in His Girl Friday. He is thoroughly decent, reliable, loyal and sound, and will make what is called a good husband, but in no way is he fun. Walter Burns (Grant) derides him mercilessly and brilliantly, and we the audience, wedded to a fun evening in the cinema, enjoy the spectacle in which an aristocrat of wit takes it out on the dumb proletarian. But it is one of the moments where comedy and sadism are uneasily close: we are taking pleasure in a scene of somebody being humiliatingly put in their subordinate place. As ever with Hawks, the core of value is defined in terms of elites. An elite of fun is an odd idea, but perfectly intelligible, and probably accounts for the way a lot of people do structure their social lives, especially in showbiz. One of the best episodes of Friends (season 2, episode 10) has a character called ‘Fun Bobby’. Bobby is dating Monica, and all the friends agree he is great fun to be around and makes things move with a swing. On further reflection they notice how much he drinks. ‘There is a reason Fun Bobby is so fun,’ as Monica puts it. Bobby notices this himself and becomes a teetotaller, but once sober he ‘isn’t fun any more’, like the relationship in Hemingway. Like Nick Adams, Monica dumps him (what kind of friend does that make her?). Keeping up the fun can be a stressful business and sometimes it needs alcoholic or narcotic help. Like all ideals – and it is a sort of ideal for Hawks – it exacts its price and has its conditions of entry. Among the dangers of fun, then, we could balefully list selfishness, snobbery, sanctimoniousness and disloyalty. The genius of Bringing Up Baby is that none of these charges seems relevant. It has a gorgeously indulgent tone, which Hawks never recaptured, though he came closest in Monkey Business fourteen years later. One source of its sunniness is that it rises above any hierarchy of fun: everybody is fun here, and the director as a social master of

BRINGING UP BABY

ceremonies ensures that nothing else comes into view. The cuttingroom floor is where the rejects from ‘fun’ end up, safely out of our sight as viewers. There are no interludes of explicit seriousness in this film, as there are in the Philip Barry adaptations, for instance, or even in Sullivan’s Travels. Hawks came to think this ubiquity of the screwball a problem: It had a great fault and I learned an awful lot from it. There were no normal people in it. Everyone you met was a screwball and since that time I have learned my lesson and I don’t intend ever again to make everybody crazy … I think it would have done better at the box office if there had been a few sane folks in it – everybody was nuts.93

This isn’t entirely true – Mr Peabody is normal enough and the others are variously and intermittently eccentric, no more. But the exemption from normality which Hawks calls a fault – reflecting on the relatively disappointing box-office returns – seems to me more like a description of the magic of the film. Bringing Up Baby never lets up. ‘Fun is fun, but no girl wants to laugh all of the time,’ according to the sage blonde words of Anita Loos’s Lorelei Lee.94 But in this amazing film we do go on laughing all the time; every scene without exception is a funny one. Only in the last section in the jail does the comic invention fall off, and even here it in no way slows down. Perhaps this is the key to the utopian magic of the film. It is a good place where everything is delightful and funny, not excepting those things which can elsewhere cause alarm and mayhem, and ‘everything’s going to be all right’. Life just can’t take place in such a comic atmosphere and at such a relentlessly comic pace, but perhaps romance can, and the film places its trust in the wild abnormalities of romance.

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From another point of view, fun may not be a democratic idea, since only those who are entertaining may make its grade. The dullspirited and the dull-witted need not apply, unless, perhaps, they’re captivatingly beautiful. Losers lose. One such is Bruce Baldwin (Ralph Bellamy) in His Girl Friday. He is thoroughly decent, reliable, loyal and sound, and will make what is called a good husband, but in no way is he fun. Walter Burns (Grant) derides him mercilessly and brilliantly, and we the audience, wedded to a fun evening in the cinema, enjoy the spectacle in which an aristocrat of wit takes it out on the dumb proletarian. But it is one of the moments where comedy and sadism are uneasily close: we are taking pleasure in a scene of somebody being humiliatingly put in their subordinate place. As ever with Hawks, the core of value is defined in terms of elites. An elite of fun is an odd idea, but perfectly intelligible, and probably accounts for the way a lot of people do structure their social lives, especially in showbiz. One of the best episodes of Friends (season 2, episode 10) has a character called ‘Fun Bobby’. Bobby is dating Monica, and all the friends agree he is great fun to be around and makes things move with a swing. On further reflection they notice how much he drinks. ‘There is a reason Fun Bobby is so fun,’ as Monica puts it. Bobby notices this himself and becomes a teetotaller, but once sober he ‘isn’t fun any more’, like the relationship in Hemingway. Like Nick Adams, Monica dumps him (what kind of friend does that make her?). Keeping up the fun can be a stressful business and sometimes it needs alcoholic or narcotic help. Like all ideals – and it is a sort of ideal for Hawks – it exacts its price and has its conditions of entry. Among the dangers of fun, then, we could balefully list selfishness, snobbery, sanctimoniousness and disloyalty. The genius of Bringing Up Baby is that none of these charges seems relevant. It has a gorgeously indulgent tone, which Hawks never recaptured, though he came closest in Monkey Business fourteen years later. One source of its sunniness is that it rises above any hierarchy of fun: everybody is fun here, and the director as a social master of

BRINGING UP BABY

ceremonies ensures that nothing else comes into view. The cuttingroom floor is where the rejects from ‘fun’ end up, safely out of our sight as viewers. There are no interludes of explicit seriousness in this film, as there are in the Philip Barry adaptations, for instance, or even in Sullivan’s Travels. Hawks came to think this ubiquity of the screwball a problem: It had a great fault and I learned an awful lot from it. There were no normal people in it. Everyone you met was a screwball and since that time I have learned my lesson and I don’t intend ever again to make everybody crazy … I think it would have done better at the box office if there had been a few sane folks in it – everybody was nuts.93

This isn’t entirely true – Mr Peabody is normal enough and the others are variously and intermittently eccentric, no more. But the exemption from normality which Hawks calls a fault – reflecting on the relatively disappointing box-office returns – seems to me more like a description of the magic of the film. Bringing Up Baby never lets up. ‘Fun is fun, but no girl wants to laugh all of the time,’ according to the sage blonde words of Anita Loos’s Lorelei Lee.94 But in this amazing film we do go on laughing all the time; every scene without exception is a funny one. Only in the last section in the jail does the comic invention fall off, and even here it in no way slows down. Perhaps this is the key to the utopian magic of the film. It is a good place where everything is delightful and funny, not excepting those things which can elsewhere cause alarm and mayhem, and ‘everything’s going to be all right’. Life just can’t take place in such a comic atmosphere and at such a relentlessly comic pace, but perhaps romance can, and the film places its trust in the wild abnormalities of romance.

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Appendix: Bringing Up Baby at the box office Bringing Up Baby had puzzlingly mixed fortunes at the box office. Expectations were very high, given the audience enthusiasm at previews and the trade press reviews hailing the film as a successor to 1937’s hit screwball The Awful Truth. At its first screenings in San Francisco on Valentine’s Day 1938 it did great business, and it also did well in such diverse venues as Los Angeles, Portland, Denver, Cincinatti and Washington DC. However, when it opened at Radio City Music Hall in New York, the results were a great disappointment. It grossed only $70,000 in its first week, where full houses would have meant $100,000 and upwards, and it was pulled (perhaps prematurely) after only a week. In the end the film did make a profit, but a modest one. It grossed $715,000 on its initial American run, and $394,000 overseas. It was reissued in 1940–1, so somebody must have thought well of it still, and made a further $150,000. But it fell a long way short of the $1,850,000 at which point Hawks himself would have been entitled to a share of the profits.95 The disappointing box office remains ultimately baffling, but various factors may have played a part. RKO’s financial and administrative turmoil probably prevented the studio getting decisively behind the film; its mood may have been too light for the prewar times; the heiress theme may have seemed a tired one and the gender politics too disconcerting; the popularity of screwball comedy was not over, but Baby’s slapstick may have seemed retrograde after the sophistication of The Awful Truth. And Katharine Hepburn’s reputation was on the wane commercially in the years between her early success in Little Women (1933) and her triumphant box-office revival with The Philadelphia Story (1940). In May 1938, famously, her name was included in a trade notice in a list of lead actresses labelled ‘box office poison’.96 The American public may have been reluctant to be charmed by a lead role so close to the off-screen persona of its star.

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Notes 1 New York Times, 4 March 1938; cited in Gerald Mast (ed.), Bringing Up Baby (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers Films in Print, 1988), p. 265. 2 See Maria DiBattista’s Fast-Talking Dames (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2001). 3 ‘Bringing Up Baby, which in its homegrown, screwball style also suggested an equivalent of Restoration comedy’: Pauline Kael, review of Shampoo on 17 February 1975, in Kael, For Keeps: 30 Years at the Movies (New York: Plume, 1996), p. 607; Stanley Cavell, Pursuits of Happiness: The Hollywood Comedy of Remarriage (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1981), pp. 20–1, 48–52. 4 David explains some of the relevant history to the circus handlers in a deleted bit of dialogue: ‘You see, gentlemen, years ago, where New York City now stands – and by years ago I mean, oh, even before the Dutch purchased the island from the Indians, there existed a peculiar kind of animal.’ See Gerald Mast’s transcript of the film in his valuable edition of Bringing Up Baby for the Rutgers Films in Print series (Script Variation 40, p. 221). I have used Mast’s transcript whenever I quote from the film. 5 We first meet P. G. Wodehouse’s Lord Emsworth as a non-worrier: ‘Worrying, indeed, seemed to be the twentiethcentury specialty. Lord Emsworth never worried’ (Something Fresh, 1915). Blissful incapacity. 6 Peter Bogdanovich, Who the Devil Made It? Conversations with Legendary Film Directors (New York: Ballantine, 1997), p. 307.

7 Hawks said that ‘We start off … with a complete caricature of the man and then reduce it to give him a feeling of normality … You have to almost overdo it a little in the beginning and then he becomes more normal as the picture goes along, just by his association with the girl’ (Bogdanovich, Who the Devil Made It?, pp. 304–5). 8 Maria DiBattista nicely suggests that the substitution of bronto for child ‘alerts us to how weird, as well as selfdefeating, human object choice can be’ (DiBattista, Fast-talking Dames, p. 181). 9 Bruce Babington and Peter William Evans, Affairs to Remember: The Hollywood Comedy of the Sexes (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1989), p. 21. 10 Hawks must have liked the name, as there is another Mr Peabody in Monkey Business (1952). 11 See McBride, Hawks on Hawks, p. 51, Todd McCarthy, Howard Hawks: The Grey Fox of Hollywood (New York: Grove Press, 1997), p. 59, Bogdanovich, Who the Devil Made It?, pp. 259, 272. 12 Check ref, cited Bergan, p. 71. 13 One of the screenplay drafts by Nichols and Wilde notes ‘The off-stage noise you hear is two authors being slightly sick because they don’t know what Susan and David have been doing until sunset’ (Mast, Bringing Up Baby, p. 5), but such problems evaporate in the freewheeling non-stop tempo of the film itself. 14 Mast, Bringing Up Baby, p. 233 (Scene Variation 72). 15 ‘We dislike the use of that word,’ Dr Lehman replies, rather like P. G.

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Wodehouse’s ‘nerve specialist’ Sir Roderick Glossop objecting to Bertie Wooster’s idea of his profession: ‘“So the Duke is off his rocker, what?” “The expression which you use is not precisely the one which I should have employed myself …” ’ (see ‘Sir Roderick Comes to Lunch’). 16 These are shots 526 (jail), 528 (cell door), 235 (garden) and 93 (Ritz Plaza) in Gerald Mast’s transcript of the film. 17 Hawks told Peter Bogdanovich that the scene included the line ‘I feel a perfect ass’, which would be an excellent joke. ‘The audience was always laughing so much that the censors never heard it. Then they put it on TV and that’s the first time anybody ever heard it’ (Bogdanovich, Who the Devil Made It?, p. 306). But the line isn’t in any of the prints I’ve managed to see nor in the published screenplay (which includes some omitted scenes). 18 McCarthy, Howard Hawks, pp. 257–8. 19 Das Unbehagen in der Kultur (1930), translated as Civilisation and Its Discontents. 20 Despite Baby’s association with female designs and wildness, Baby’s gender is not specified in Hagar Wilde’s short story. The leopard in the film, ‘Nissa’, was an eight-year-old mother of cubs, but Susan calls him ‘he’ in the New York scenes (Mast, Bringing Up Baby, pp. 72–82). 21 See Katharine Hepburn, Me: Stories of My Life (Harmondsworth: Viking Penguin, 1991), p. 191. 22 He develops the idea in Chambers, Loiterature (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 1999), especially in the

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sections ‘Towards a Poetics of Digression’ and ‘Lessons in Crittercism’ (pp. 83–211). 23 The play she co-wrote with Dale Eunson in 1940, Guest in the House, goes a good deal further and centres on a monstrous manipulative femme fatale, Evelyn, a Bette Davis type. Evelyn is eventually killed off, very much with the dramatists’ blessing, by the play’s Aunt Martha (her ‘executioner’, as the synopsis calls her), who exploits Evelyn’s fatal heart condition. 24 Mast, Bringing Up Baby, p. 232. 25 In The New Republic, 2 March 1938, reprinted in Mast, Bringing Up Baby, p. 268. 26 Cavell, Pursuits of Happiness, p. 000, Babington and Evans, Affairs to Remember, p. 000. 27 See McBride, Hawks on Hawks, pp. 73, 101. 28 McBride, Hawks on Hawks, pp. 74, 133, 110, 126, 152, 169. 29 McCarthy, Howard Hawks, p. 49. 30 In the brief scene at the circus we see in the background a silhouette version of a femme fatale-style exotic dance. The dancer may be Susan’s fearsome double, just as the circus leopard is Baby’s. 31 The former journalist Ben Hecht (coscreenwriter of His Girl Friday) wrote my favourite line about journalists in his screenplay for Nothing Sacred (Wellman, 1937): ‘The hand of God reaching down into the mire couldn’t elevate them to the depths of degradation.’ 32 McCarthy, Howard Hawks, p. 65. 33 Cited in Bogdanovich, Who the Devil Made It?, p. 247.

34 McBride, Hawks on Hawks, p. 40, Bogdanovich, Who the Devil Made It?, p. 250. 35 A comparable romantic structure returns in The Big Sleep, with the rich girl (Bacall) after the unaffluent guy (Bogart), but here inherited wealth is associated with corrupt blood. All through the film we’re kept unsure whether Lauren Bacall is to be trusted. Eventually she is. 36 Gavin Lambert, On Cukor (New York: Putnam, 1973), p. 000. 37 McCarthy, Howard Hawks, p. 7. 38 Ibid., pp. 44–5, 100; see also McBride, Hawks on Hawks, p. 43. 39 Ibid., p. 106. 40 My summary of Hawks’s involvement in the Guild is drawn from McCarthy, Howard Hawks, pp. 248–50, pp. 259–60. 41 Graham McCann, Cary Grant: A Class Apart (London: Fourth Estate, 1996, reprinted 1997), p. 92. 42 Marc Eliot, Cary Grant: A Biography (New York: Random House, 2004), p. 187. 43 Ibid., p. 178. 44 McCarthy, Howard Hawks, p. 251. 45 Eliot, Cary Grant, p. 180. 46 Ibid. 47 See, for instance, McCann, Cary Grant, pp. 148–53, and Eliot, Cary Grant, pp. 000–000; see also Boze Hadleigh, Hollywood Gays: Conversations with Cary Grant, Liberace, Tony Perkins, Paul Lynde, Cesar Romero, Randolph Scott (New York: Barricade, 1996), pp. 000–000. 48 Darwin Porter, Katharine the Great: Secrets of a Lifetime … Revealed (New York: Blood Moon Productions, 2004), p. 300.

49 Ibid., pp. 301 and 298. Shooting in fact began on 23 September 1937 and ended on 6 January 1938. It was Howard’s brother Bill Hawks who married Virginia Walker, though there is no reason to doubt Porter’s report that Hepburn was annoyed that Howard ‘seemed to be spending more time with Walker than Kate’. 50 Hepburn, Me, p. 191. 51 Quotations from the short story as reprinted in Mast, Bringing Up Baby, pp. 238, 239, 237. 52 Cavell, Pursuits of Happiness, p. 120; Gerald Mast, Howard Hawks, Storyteller (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1982), p. 154. 53 Mast, Bringing Up Baby, p. 215 (Script Variation 24). 54 Ibid., p. 6. 55 Like Evelyn Waugh’s ‘Mrs Melrose Ape’ in Vile Bodies, whose name is a miniature of sofa meeting simian. 56 Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Tendencies (London: Routledge, 1994), pp. 52–72. 57 McBride, Hawks on Hawks, p. 114. 58 Though the script alludes to his womanising past, he acts like one of the Oscar Wildeish cultured queens who sometimes appear in the plays of the period (such as Pauncefort Quentin in Coward’s The Vortex (1924) and Rupert Cadell in Patrick Hamilton’s Rope (1929)). 59 William J. Mann, Behind the Screen: How Gays and Lesbians Shaped Hollywood, 1910–1969 (Harmondsworth: Viking Penguin, 2001), pp. 133–5; see also pp. 129–32 on Edward Everett Horton. 60 When asked which of Lubitsch’s films he liked best Hawks replied

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Wodehouse’s ‘nerve specialist’ Sir Roderick Glossop objecting to Bertie Wooster’s idea of his profession: ‘“So the Duke is off his rocker, what?” “The expression which you use is not precisely the one which I should have employed myself …” ’ (see ‘Sir Roderick Comes to Lunch’). 16 These are shots 526 (jail), 528 (cell door), 235 (garden) and 93 (Ritz Plaza) in Gerald Mast’s transcript of the film. 17 Hawks told Peter Bogdanovich that the scene included the line ‘I feel a perfect ass’, which would be an excellent joke. ‘The audience was always laughing so much that the censors never heard it. Then they put it on TV and that’s the first time anybody ever heard it’ (Bogdanovich, Who the Devil Made It?, p. 306). But the line isn’t in any of the prints I’ve managed to see nor in the published screenplay (which includes some omitted scenes). 18 McCarthy, Howard Hawks, pp. 257–8. 19 Das Unbehagen in der Kultur (1930), translated as Civilisation and Its Discontents. 20 Despite Baby’s association with female designs and wildness, Baby’s gender is not specified in Hagar Wilde’s short story. The leopard in the film, ‘Nissa’, was an eight-year-old mother of cubs, but Susan calls him ‘he’ in the New York scenes (Mast, Bringing Up Baby, pp. 72–82). 21 See Katharine Hepburn, Me: Stories of My Life (Harmondsworth: Viking Penguin, 1991), p. 191. 22 He develops the idea in Chambers, Loiterature (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 1999), especially in the

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sections ‘Towards a Poetics of Digression’ and ‘Lessons in Crittercism’ (pp. 83–211). 23 The play she co-wrote with Dale Eunson in 1940, Guest in the House, goes a good deal further and centres on a monstrous manipulative femme fatale, Evelyn, a Bette Davis type. Evelyn is eventually killed off, very much with the dramatists’ blessing, by the play’s Aunt Martha (her ‘executioner’, as the synopsis calls her), who exploits Evelyn’s fatal heart condition. 24 Mast, Bringing Up Baby, p. 232. 25 In The New Republic, 2 March 1938, reprinted in Mast, Bringing Up Baby, p. 268. 26 Cavell, Pursuits of Happiness, p. 000, Babington and Evans, Affairs to Remember, p. 000. 27 See McBride, Hawks on Hawks, pp. 73, 101. 28 McBride, Hawks on Hawks, pp. 74, 133, 110, 126, 152, 169. 29 McCarthy, Howard Hawks, p. 49. 30 In the brief scene at the circus we see in the background a silhouette version of a femme fatale-style exotic dance. The dancer may be Susan’s fearsome double, just as the circus leopard is Baby’s. 31 The former journalist Ben Hecht (coscreenwriter of His Girl Friday) wrote my favourite line about journalists in his screenplay for Nothing Sacred (Wellman, 1937): ‘The hand of God reaching down into the mire couldn’t elevate them to the depths of degradation.’ 32 McCarthy, Howard Hawks, p. 65. 33 Cited in Bogdanovich, Who the Devil Made It?, p. 247.

34 McBride, Hawks on Hawks, p. 40, Bogdanovich, Who the Devil Made It?, p. 250. 35 A comparable romantic structure returns in The Big Sleep, with the rich girl (Bacall) after the unaffluent guy (Bogart), but here inherited wealth is associated with corrupt blood. All through the film we’re kept unsure whether Lauren Bacall is to be trusted. Eventually she is. 36 Gavin Lambert, On Cukor (New York: Putnam, 1973), p. 000. 37 McCarthy, Howard Hawks, p. 7. 38 Ibid., pp. 44–5, 100; see also McBride, Hawks on Hawks, p. 43. 39 Ibid., p. 106. 40 My summary of Hawks’s involvement in the Guild is drawn from McCarthy, Howard Hawks, pp. 248–50, pp. 259–60. 41 Graham McCann, Cary Grant: A Class Apart (London: Fourth Estate, 1996, reprinted 1997), p. 92. 42 Marc Eliot, Cary Grant: A Biography (New York: Random House, 2004), p. 187. 43 Ibid., p. 178. 44 McCarthy, Howard Hawks, p. 251. 45 Eliot, Cary Grant, p. 180. 46 Ibid. 47 See, for instance, McCann, Cary Grant, pp. 148–53, and Eliot, Cary Grant, pp. 000–000; see also Boze Hadleigh, Hollywood Gays: Conversations with Cary Grant, Liberace, Tony Perkins, Paul Lynde, Cesar Romero, Randolph Scott (New York: Barricade, 1996), pp. 000–000. 48 Darwin Porter, Katharine the Great: Secrets of a Lifetime … Revealed (New York: Blood Moon Productions, 2004), p. 300.

49 Ibid., pp. 301 and 298. Shooting in fact began on 23 September 1937 and ended on 6 January 1938. It was Howard’s brother Bill Hawks who married Virginia Walker, though there is no reason to doubt Porter’s report that Hepburn was annoyed that Howard ‘seemed to be spending more time with Walker than Kate’. 50 Hepburn, Me, p. 191. 51 Quotations from the short story as reprinted in Mast, Bringing Up Baby, pp. 238, 239, 237. 52 Cavell, Pursuits of Happiness, p. 120; Gerald Mast, Howard Hawks, Storyteller (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1982), p. 154. 53 Mast, Bringing Up Baby, p. 215 (Script Variation 24). 54 Ibid., p. 6. 55 Like Evelyn Waugh’s ‘Mrs Melrose Ape’ in Vile Bodies, whose name is a miniature of sofa meeting simian. 56 Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Tendencies (London: Routledge, 1994), pp. 52–72. 57 McBride, Hawks on Hawks, p. 114. 58 Though the script alludes to his womanising past, he acts like one of the Oscar Wildeish cultured queens who sometimes appear in the plays of the period (such as Pauncefort Quentin in Coward’s The Vortex (1924) and Rupert Cadell in Patrick Hamilton’s Rope (1929)). 59 William J. Mann, Behind the Screen: How Gays and Lesbians Shaped Hollywood, 1910–1969 (Harmondsworth: Viking Penguin, 2001), pp. 133–5; see also pp. 129–32 on Edward Everett Horton. 60 When asked which of Lubitsch’s films he liked best Hawks replied

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‘I studied them all. He was at Paramount when I was there. We became very good friends’ (McBride, Hawks on Hawks, p. 20). 61 George Cukor’s Sylvia Scarlett (1935) in which Hepburn and Grant first appeared together, deserves a footnote here. Now a cult film on the queer circuit, it was a box-office failure in its own time. A cross-dressing drama, it makes use of Hepburn’s fashionable androgyny (she plays a boy) and among its audacities it chooses not to explain away a scene in which the hero says he fancies the boy he takes Hepburn to be. 62 Bogdanovich, Who the Devil Made It?, p. 263, McBride, Hawks on Hawks, p. 147 63 See her book Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985), especially pp. 000–000. Todd McCarthy reproduces the last scene of the screenplay and calls it undoubtedly ‘the most outrageous and explicit manifestation of the naive, instinctive homoerotic undercurrent running through a good deal of the director’s entire career’ (McCarthy, Howard Hawks, pp. 652–3). 64 Cavell, Pursuits of Happiness, p. 127. 65 Mast, Bringing Up Baby, Script Variation 47, pp. 223–4. The piggyback probably recalls Gable carrying Colbert piggyback across a stream in It Happened One Night. 66 Mast, Bringing Up Baby, Script Variations 6 and 16, pp. 208, 212–13. 67 Mast, Bringing Up Baby, p. 13. 68 Babington and Evans, Affairs to Remember, p. 32. 69 McCarthy, Howard Hawks, p. 245.

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70 In one of the cut scenes Aunt Elizabeth is herself taken for a lunatic by officials from the zoo (see Mast, Bringing Up Baby, Script Variation 44, pp. 222–3). 71 And Monkey Business, a Marx brothers title which Hawks was to reappropriate for one of his own films. 72 David’s hat in the apartment scene, at an angle going in, gives him a pointy head and makes him look like Harpo Marx. 73 In the short story the exchange is a little different: ‘“Suzan Vance, you get right out of that apartment.” “Nonsense,” said Suzan. “I have a lease.”’ (Mast, Bringing Up Baby, p. 236). 74 The cancelled scene is reproduced as Scene Variation 48 in Mast, Bringing Up Baby, pp. 224–6. 75 Preston Sturges and Sandy Sturges, Preston Sturges by Preston Sturges (London: Faber and Faber, 1991), adapted and edited by Sandy Sturges, p. 295. 76 Rayhmond Durgnat, The Crazy Mirror: Hollywood Comedy and the American Image (London: Faber and Faber, 1969), p. 214. 77 Robin Wood, Howard Hawks (London: BFI, 1981), pp. 64, 71. 78 Mast, Howard Hawks, Storyteller, pp. 142, 141, 144. 79 Andrew Britton, Katharine Hepburn: Star as Feminist (London: Studio Vista, 1984, repr. 1995), pp. 180, 202. 80 Britton, Katharine Hepburn, p. 182. 81 Cavell, Pursuits of Happiness, p. 130. 82 Ibid., p. 132. 83 Compare Allen Macklyn (Ralph Bellamy) in Hands Across the Table telling Regi Allen (Carole Lombard) ‘You can’t run away from love, Regi. It just comes.’

84 McBride, Hawks on Hawks, pp. 8, 70. 85 And many more appear in the Hawks section of Bogdanovich, Who the Devil Made It? (pp. 244–378). 86 William Empson, The Structure of Complex Words (1951) (Harvard, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989), p. 000. 87 Mast, Bringing Up Baby, Script Variation 70, pp. 232–3. 88 You can see Cary Grant just about successfully suppressing involuntary smiles when Susan bags him in her butterfly net and when George joins in their serenade to Baby and Dr Lehman. 89 Mast, Bringing Up Baby, p. 5. 90 Ibid., p. 273.

91 Durquat, The Crazy Mirror, p. 214. 92 The story, from In Our Time, is called ‘The End of Something’. 93 Bogdanovich, Who the Devil Made It?, p. 306. 94 Anita Loos, Gentlemen Prefer Blondes: The Illuminating Diary of a Professional Lady (1925) (London: Picador, 1974), p. 87. Lorelei is quoting her friend Dorothy. 95 For further details, see McCarthy, Howard Hawks, pp. 255–6, and Mast, Bringing Up Baby, pp. 14–15. 96 See William J. Mann, Kate: The Woman Who Was Katharine Hepburn (London: Faber and Faber, 2006), pp. 282–3.

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‘I studied them all. He was at Paramount when I was there. We became very good friends’ (McBride, Hawks on Hawks, p. 20). 61 George Cukor’s Sylvia Scarlett (1935) in which Hepburn and Grant first appeared together, deserves a footnote here. Now a cult film on the queer circuit, it was a box-office failure in its own time. A cross-dressing drama, it makes use of Hepburn’s fashionable androgyny (she plays a boy) and among its audacities it chooses not to explain away a scene in which the hero says he fancies the boy he takes Hepburn to be. 62 Bogdanovich, Who the Devil Made It?, p. 263, McBride, Hawks on Hawks, p. 147 63 See her book Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985), especially pp. 000–000. Todd McCarthy reproduces the last scene of the screenplay and calls it undoubtedly ‘the most outrageous and explicit manifestation of the naive, instinctive homoerotic undercurrent running through a good deal of the director’s entire career’ (McCarthy, Howard Hawks, pp. 652–3). 64 Cavell, Pursuits of Happiness, p. 127. 65 Mast, Bringing Up Baby, Script Variation 47, pp. 223–4. The piggyback probably recalls Gable carrying Colbert piggyback across a stream in It Happened One Night. 66 Mast, Bringing Up Baby, Script Variations 6 and 16, pp. 208, 212–13. 67 Mast, Bringing Up Baby, p. 13. 68 Babington and Evans, Affairs to Remember, p. 32. 69 McCarthy, Howard Hawks, p. 245.

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70 In one of the cut scenes Aunt Elizabeth is herself taken for a lunatic by officials from the zoo (see Mast, Bringing Up Baby, Script Variation 44, pp. 222–3). 71 And Monkey Business, a Marx brothers title which Hawks was to reappropriate for one of his own films. 72 David’s hat in the apartment scene, at an angle going in, gives him a pointy head and makes him look like Harpo Marx. 73 In the short story the exchange is a little different: ‘“Suzan Vance, you get right out of that apartment.” “Nonsense,” said Suzan. “I have a lease.”’ (Mast, Bringing Up Baby, p. 236). 74 The cancelled scene is reproduced as Scene Variation 48 in Mast, Bringing Up Baby, pp. 224–6. 75 Preston Sturges and Sandy Sturges, Preston Sturges by Preston Sturges (London: Faber and Faber, 1991), adapted and edited by Sandy Sturges, p. 295. 76 Rayhmond Durgnat, The Crazy Mirror: Hollywood Comedy and the American Image (London: Faber and Faber, 1969), p. 214. 77 Robin Wood, Howard Hawks (London: BFI, 1981), pp. 64, 71. 78 Mast, Howard Hawks, Storyteller, pp. 142, 141, 144. 79 Andrew Britton, Katharine Hepburn: Star as Feminist (London: Studio Vista, 1984, repr. 1995), pp. 180, 202. 80 Britton, Katharine Hepburn, p. 182. 81 Cavell, Pursuits of Happiness, p. 130. 82 Ibid., p. 132. 83 Compare Allen Macklyn (Ralph Bellamy) in Hands Across the Table telling Regi Allen (Carole Lombard) ‘You can’t run away from love, Regi. It just comes.’

84 McBride, Hawks on Hawks, pp. 8, 70. 85 And many more appear in the Hawks section of Bogdanovich, Who the Devil Made It? (pp. 244–378). 86 William Empson, The Structure of Complex Words (1951) (Harvard, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989), p. 000. 87 Mast, Bringing Up Baby, Script Variation 70, pp. 232–3. 88 You can see Cary Grant just about successfully suppressing involuntary smiles when Susan bags him in her butterfly net and when George joins in their serenade to Baby and Dr Lehman. 89 Mast, Bringing Up Baby, p. 5. 90 Ibid., p. 273.

91 Durquat, The Crazy Mirror, p. 214. 92 The story, from In Our Time, is called ‘The End of Something’. 93 Bogdanovich, Who the Devil Made It?, p. 306. 94 Anita Loos, Gentlemen Prefer Blondes: The Illuminating Diary of a Professional Lady (1925) (London: Picador, 1974), p. 87. Lorelei is quoting her friend Dorothy. 95 For further details, see McCarthy, Howard Hawks, pp. 255–6, and Mast, Bringing Up Baby, pp. 14–15. 96 See William J. Mann, Kate: The Woman Who Was Katharine Hepburn (London: Faber and Faber, 2006), pp. 282–3.

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BRINGING UP BABY

Credits Bringing Up Baby USA 1938 Directed by Howard Hawks Screenplay by Dudley Nichols and Hagar Wilde from the story by Hagar Wilde Photographed by Russell Metty Edited by George Hively Art Director Van Nest Polglase ©1938. RKO Radio Pictures, Inc. Production Company An RKO Radio picture RKO Radio Pictures, Inc. presents Howard Hawks’s production Associate Producer Cliff Reid Assistant Director Edward Donahue Special Effects by Vernon L. Walker Associate [Art Director] Perry Ferguson Set Dressing by Darrell Silvera Gowns by Howard Greer Musical Director Roy Webb [Sound] Recorded by John L. Cass

uncredited Producer Howard Hawks Production Manager J. R. Crone Unit Manager George Rogell Camera Operator Charles Burke Assistant Camera Cliff Shirpser Make-up Mel Berns Nissa’s Trainer Madame Olga Celeste Doubles Cary Grant: Jimmy Dundee Katharine Hepburn: Helen Thurston Stand-ins Katharine Hepburn: Mimi Doyle Katharine Hepburn: Patsy Doyle Cary Grant: Mal Merrihugh Barry Fitzgerald: Ed Rochelle May Robson: May Warren Fritz Feld: Bill Knudsen Jack Morton

CAST Katharine Hepburn Susan Vance Cary Grant Professor David Huxley Charlie Ruggles Major Horace Applegate Walter Catlett Constable Slocum Barry Fitzgerald Mr Aloysius Gogarty May Robson Aunt Elizabeth Random Fritz Feld Dr Fritz Lehman Leona Roberts Mrs Hannah Gogarty George Irving Mr Alexander Peabody Tala Birell Mrs Lehman Virginia Walker Alice Swallow John Kelly Elmer uncredited Asta George, the dog Nissa Baby, the leopard Ward Bond motorcycle cop George Humbert Louis, the head waiter Ernest Cossart Joe, the bartender Buster Slavin Peabody’s caddy Terry Moore hat-check girl

Jack Carson roustabout Richard Lane circus manager Frank Marlowe Joe Pat West Mac Billy Bevan bartender Adylin Ashbury Mrs Peabody Judy Ford hat-check girl Maxine Martel Jeanne Martel cigarette girls Edward Gargan zoo official D’Arcy Corrigan Professor La Touche Garry Owen butcher Eleanor Peterson Geraldine Hall Evelyn Eager circus performers Jack Gardner delivery man Billy Benedict David’s caddy Frances Gifford William Corson Stanley Blystone Buck Mack Pat O’Malley Bill Franey Harry Campbell Frank M. Thomas Paul Guilfoyle Bob Thatcher

Ida Vollmar Cynthia Westlake Robert Stone Crawford Weaver Peggy Carroll Lorraine Krueger Dickie Moore C. C. Gilmore Dorothy Lloyd Ruth Adler Duke Green Jack Stoney Teddy Manjean Bill Burnhart Billy Graff

Release Details US theatrical release by RKO Radio Pictures, Inc. on 18 February 1938 (San Francisco premiere on 16 February 1938). Running time: 102 minutes. UK theatrical release by Radio Pictures Ltd on 15 August 1938. Running time: 99 minutes 53 seconds/8,900 feet, BBFC certificate U (passed with cuts – submitted at 101 minutes 51 seconds).

Production Details Filmed from 23 September 1937 to 6 January 1938 on location at the Bel Air Country Club (Los Angeles), Arthur Ranch (Malibu), Columbia Ranch (Burbank, California) and Oakgrove Park (Flintridge, California) and at 20th Century-Fox Studios (35mm; black and white; 1.37:1; sound: mono – RCA Victor System; MPAA: 3752)

Credits compiled by Julian Grainger

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BRINGING UP BABY

Credits Bringing Up Baby USA 1938 Directed by Howard Hawks Screenplay by Dudley Nichols and Hagar Wilde from the story by Hagar Wilde Photographed by Russell Metty Edited by George Hively Art Director Van Nest Polglase ©1938. RKO Radio Pictures, Inc. Production Company An RKO Radio picture RKO Radio Pictures, Inc. presents Howard Hawks’s production Associate Producer Cliff Reid Assistant Director Edward Donahue Special Effects by Vernon L. Walker Associate [Art Director] Perry Ferguson Set Dressing by Darrell Silvera Gowns by Howard Greer Musical Director Roy Webb [Sound] Recorded by John L. Cass

uncredited Producer Howard Hawks Production Manager J. R. Crone Unit Manager George Rogell Camera Operator Charles Burke Assistant Camera Cliff Shirpser Make-up Mel Berns Nissa’s Trainer Madame Olga Celeste Doubles Cary Grant: Jimmy Dundee Katharine Hepburn: Helen Thurston Stand-ins Katharine Hepburn: Mimi Doyle Katharine Hepburn: Patsy Doyle Cary Grant: Mal Merrihugh Barry Fitzgerald: Ed Rochelle May Robson: May Warren Fritz Feld: Bill Knudsen Jack Morton

CAST Katharine Hepburn Susan Vance Cary Grant Professor David Huxley Charlie Ruggles Major Horace Applegate Walter Catlett Constable Slocum Barry Fitzgerald Mr Aloysius Gogarty May Robson Aunt Elizabeth Random Fritz Feld Dr Fritz Lehman Leona Roberts Mrs Hannah Gogarty George Irving Mr Alexander Peabody Tala Birell Mrs Lehman Virginia Walker Alice Swallow John Kelly Elmer uncredited Asta George, the dog Nissa Baby, the leopard Ward Bond motorcycle cop George Humbert Louis, the head waiter Ernest Cossart Joe, the bartender Buster Slavin Peabody’s caddy Terry Moore hat-check girl

Jack Carson roustabout Richard Lane circus manager Frank Marlowe Joe Pat West Mac Billy Bevan bartender Adylin Ashbury Mrs Peabody Judy Ford hat-check girl Maxine Martel Jeanne Martel cigarette girls Edward Gargan zoo official D’Arcy Corrigan Professor La Touche Garry Owen butcher Eleanor Peterson Geraldine Hall Evelyn Eager circus performers Jack Gardner delivery man Billy Benedict David’s caddy Frances Gifford William Corson Stanley Blystone Buck Mack Pat O’Malley Bill Franey Harry Campbell Frank M. Thomas Paul Guilfoyle Bob Thatcher

Ida Vollmar Cynthia Westlake Robert Stone Crawford Weaver Peggy Carroll Lorraine Krueger Dickie Moore C. C. Gilmore Dorothy Lloyd Ruth Adler Duke Green Jack Stoney Teddy Manjean Bill Burnhart Billy Graff

Release Details US theatrical release by RKO Radio Pictures, Inc. on 18 February 1938 (San Francisco premiere on 16 February 1938). Running time: 102 minutes. UK theatrical release by Radio Pictures Ltd on 15 August 1938. Running time: 99 minutes 53 seconds/8,900 feet, BBFC certificate U (passed with cuts – submitted at 101 minutes 51 seconds).

Production Details Filmed from 23 September 1937 to 6 January 1938 on location at the Bel Air Country Club (Los Angeles), Arthur Ranch (Malibu), Columbia Ranch (Burbank, California) and Oakgrove Park (Flintridge, California) and at 20th Century-Fox Studios (35mm; black and white; 1.37:1; sound: mono – RCA Victor System; MPAA: 3752)

Credits compiled by Julian Grainger

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BRINGING UP BABY

Select Bibliography Babington, Bruce and Evans, Peter William, Affairs to Remember: The Hollywood Comedy of the Sexes (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1989). Bogdanovich, Peter, The Cinema of Howard Hawks (New York: Museum of Modern Art Film Library, 1962). Bogdanovich, Peter, Who the Devil Made It? Conversations with Legendary Film Directors (New York: Ballantine, 1997). Britton, Andrew, Cary Grant: Comedy and Male Desire (Newcastle-upon-Tyne: Tyneside Cinema, 1983). Britton, Andrew, Katharine Hepburn: Star as Feminist (1984) (London: Studio Vista, 1995). Britton, Andrew, Britton on Film: The Complete Film Criticism of Andrew Britton, ed. by Barry Keith Grant (Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press, 2009). Carney, Raymond, American Vision: The Films of Frank Capra (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1986). Cavell, Stanley, Pursuits of Happiness: The Hollywood Comedy of Remarriage (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1981). Chambers, Ross, Loiterature (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 1999). Chierichetti, David, Mitchell Leisen: Hollywood Director (1973) (Los Angeles: Photoventures Press, 1995). DiBattista, Maria, Fast-Talking Dames (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2001). Durgnat, Raymond, The Crazy Mirror: Hollywood Comedy and the American

Image (London: Faber and Faber, 1969). Eliot, Marc, Cary Grant: A Biography (New York: Random House, 2004). Empson, William, The Structure of Complex Words (1951) (Harvard, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989). Eyman, Scott, Ernst Lubitsch: Laughter in Paradise (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1993). Gehring, Wes D., Screwball Comedy: A Genre of Madcap Romance (New York: Greenwood Press, 1983). Hadleigh, Boze, Conversations with My Elders (New York: St Martin’s Press, 1986). Hadleigh, Boze, Hollywood Gays: Conversations with Cary Grant, Liberace, Tony Perkins, Paul Lynde, Cesar Romero, Randolph Scott (New York: Barricade, 1996). Hemingway, Ernest, In Our Time (1925) (New York: Scribner, 1996). Hepburn, Katharine, Me: Stories of My Life (Harmondsworth: Viking Penguin, 1991). Hillier, Jim and Wollen, Peter (eds), Howard Hawks: American Artist (London: BFI, 1997). Jacobs, Diane, Christmas in July: The Life and Times of Preston Sturges (Berkeley and London: University of California Press, 1992). Kael, Pauline, For Keeps: 30 Years at the Movies (New York: Plume, 1996). Lambert, Gavin, On Cukor (New York: Putnam, 1973). Leaming, Barbara, Katharine Hepburn (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1995).

Loos, Anita, Gentlemen Prefer Blondes: The Illuminating Diary of a Professional Lady (1925) (London: Picador, 1974). McBride, Joseph, Focus on Howard Hawks (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1972). McBride, Joseph, Hawks on Hawks (Berkeley and London: University of California Press, 1982). McBride, Joseph, Frank Capra: The Catastrophe of Success (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1992). McCann, Graham, Cary Grant: A Class Apart (London: Fourth Estate, 1996). McCarthy, Todd, Howard Hawks: The Grey Fox of Hollywood (New York: Grove Press, 1997). McGilligan, Patrick, George Cukor: A Double Life (London: Faber and Faber, 1992). Mann, William J., Behind the Screen: How Gays and Lesbians Shaped Hollywood, 1910–1969 (Harmondsworth: Viking Penguin, 2001). Mann, William J., Kate: The Woman Who Was Katharine Hepburn (London: Faber and Faber, 2006). Mast, Gerald, Howard Hawks, Storyteller (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1982). Mast, Gerald (ed.), Bringing Up Baby (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, Rutgers Films in Print, 1988).

Porter, Darwin, Katharine the Great: Secrets of a Lifetime … Revealed (New York: Blood Moon Productions, 2004). Rothman, William, The ‘I’ of the Camera: Essays on Film Criticism, History and Aesthetics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988). Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky, Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985). Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky, Tendencies (London: Routledge, 1994). Sturges, Preston and Sturges, Sandy, Preston Sturges by Preston Sturges (London: Faber and Faber, 1991). Thomson, David, The Big Sleep (London: BFI, 1997). Thomson, David, The New Biographical Dictionary of the Cinema (London: Little Brown, 2003). Wilde, Hagar, Made in Heaven: A Play in Three Acts (New York: Samuel French, 1947). Wilde, Hagar and Eunson, Dale, Guest in the House (New York: Samuel French, 1942). Wodehouse, P. G., The Most of P.G.Wodehouse (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1969). Wood, Robin, Howard Hawks (1968) (London: BFI, rev. edn 1981). Wood, Robin, Rio Bravo (London: BFI, 2003).

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BRINGING UP BABY

Select Bibliography Babington, Bruce and Evans, Peter William, Affairs to Remember: The Hollywood Comedy of the Sexes (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1989). Bogdanovich, Peter, The Cinema of Howard Hawks (New York: Museum of Modern Art Film Library, 1962). Bogdanovich, Peter, Who the Devil Made It? Conversations with Legendary Film Directors (New York: Ballantine, 1997). Britton, Andrew, Cary Grant: Comedy and Male Desire (Newcastle-upon-Tyne: Tyneside Cinema, 1983). Britton, Andrew, Katharine Hepburn: Star as Feminist (1984) (London: Studio Vista, 1995). Britton, Andrew, Britton on Film: The Complete Film Criticism of Andrew Britton, ed. by Barry Keith Grant (Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press, 2009). Carney, Raymond, American Vision: The Films of Frank Capra (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1986). Cavell, Stanley, Pursuits of Happiness: The Hollywood Comedy of Remarriage (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1981). Chambers, Ross, Loiterature (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 1999). Chierichetti, David, Mitchell Leisen: Hollywood Director (1973) (Los Angeles: Photoventures Press, 1995). DiBattista, Maria, Fast-Talking Dames (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2001). Durgnat, Raymond, The Crazy Mirror: Hollywood Comedy and the American

Image (London: Faber and Faber, 1969). Eliot, Marc, Cary Grant: A Biography (New York: Random House, 2004). Empson, William, The Structure of Complex Words (1951) (Harvard, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989). Eyman, Scott, Ernst Lubitsch: Laughter in Paradise (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1993). Gehring, Wes D., Screwball Comedy: A Genre of Madcap Romance (New York: Greenwood Press, 1983). Hadleigh, Boze, Conversations with My Elders (New York: St Martin’s Press, 1986). Hadleigh, Boze, Hollywood Gays: Conversations with Cary Grant, Liberace, Tony Perkins, Paul Lynde, Cesar Romero, Randolph Scott (New York: Barricade, 1996). Hemingway, Ernest, In Our Time (1925) (New York: Scribner, 1996). Hepburn, Katharine, Me: Stories of My Life (Harmondsworth: Viking Penguin, 1991). Hillier, Jim and Wollen, Peter (eds), Howard Hawks: American Artist (London: BFI, 1997). Jacobs, Diane, Christmas in July: The Life and Times of Preston Sturges (Berkeley and London: University of California Press, 1992). Kael, Pauline, For Keeps: 30 Years at the Movies (New York: Plume, 1996). Lambert, Gavin, On Cukor (New York: Putnam, 1973). Leaming, Barbara, Katharine Hepburn (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1995).

Loos, Anita, Gentlemen Prefer Blondes: The Illuminating Diary of a Professional Lady (1925) (London: Picador, 1974). McBride, Joseph, Focus on Howard Hawks (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1972). McBride, Joseph, Hawks on Hawks (Berkeley and London: University of California Press, 1982). McBride, Joseph, Frank Capra: The Catastrophe of Success (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1992). McCann, Graham, Cary Grant: A Class Apart (London: Fourth Estate, 1996). McCarthy, Todd, Howard Hawks: The Grey Fox of Hollywood (New York: Grove Press, 1997). McGilligan, Patrick, George Cukor: A Double Life (London: Faber and Faber, 1992). Mann, William J., Behind the Screen: How Gays and Lesbians Shaped Hollywood, 1910–1969 (Harmondsworth: Viking Penguin, 2001). Mann, William J., Kate: The Woman Who Was Katharine Hepburn (London: Faber and Faber, 2006). Mast, Gerald, Howard Hawks, Storyteller (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1982). Mast, Gerald (ed.), Bringing Up Baby (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, Rutgers Films in Print, 1988).

Porter, Darwin, Katharine the Great: Secrets of a Lifetime … Revealed (New York: Blood Moon Productions, 2004). Rothman, William, The ‘I’ of the Camera: Essays on Film Criticism, History and Aesthetics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988). Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky, Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985). Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky, Tendencies (London: Routledge, 1994). Sturges, Preston and Sturges, Sandy, Preston Sturges by Preston Sturges (London: Faber and Faber, 1991). Thomson, David, The Big Sleep (London: BFI, 1997). Thomson, David, The New Biographical Dictionary of the Cinema (London: Little Brown, 2003). Wilde, Hagar, Made in Heaven: A Play in Three Acts (New York: Samuel French, 1947). Wilde, Hagar and Eunson, Dale, Guest in the House (New York: Samuel French, 1942). Wodehouse, P. G., The Most of P.G.Wodehouse (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1969). Wood, Robin, Howard Hawks (1968) (London: BFI, rev. edn 1981). Wood, Robin, Rio Bravo (London: BFI, 2003).

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