One of my all-time favorite comedies, Bringing Up Baby is a mad-cap, screwball comedy featuring spot on performances from Cary Grant and the untouchable Katharine Hepburn. I have seen it multiple times, with each viewing I learn something new about the art of comedy, and of the amazing gifts of both actors.
In a nutshell, there is a paleontologist, David Huxley, who has spent the last four years assembling the newly discovered brontosaurus skeleton. On the eve of his marriage to a fellow coworker, David has several chance encounters--none of them good--with a wealthy and slightly eccentric young heiress named Susan Vance. Long story short, a fox terrier runs off with the brontosaurus' clavicle bone, the two of them buy 30 pounds of steak for jazz-loving leopard named Baby, Huxley turns gay all of a sudden, everyone makes loon calls at the dinner table, and Susan busts out of jail pretending to be 'Swingin' Door Susie' of the Leopard Gang. In the end it turns out that Susan was David's pair of Ruby slippers all the time who could have gotten him what he wanted from the very beginning, but what fun would that have been? The roundabout, ridiculous way is far more interesting.
Katharine Hepburn is my favorite actress, and Cary Grant is in my top 5 favorite actors. Pitting them against one another is a match made in heaven for me; I would gladly watch them banter while never saying anything all day if I could. I usually think of Hepburn as the unmatched Queen of Drama doing that weepy-eyed thing that she does so well, but I forget sometimes what a youthful energy she brought to the screen when she was starting out. Her rapier wit was so perfectly matched to the sort of fast paced, think-on-your-feet dialogue in a film like this that you forget her work in films like The Lion in Winter and On Golden Pond. Each of those had a more intellectual comedy shade to them, but nothing like the roll 'em out jokes of this movie.
Grant, as everyone should know, is a master of comedy who is one of the few people in cinematic history that had perfect timing, all of the time. I admire and desire his skills so much. His choices in this film were so interesting, but I am sure that not many people except those who act themselves or those who have a watched a considerably large number of films (guilty to both) would see. They were not choices I, or many others I think, ever would have thought of, but they fit so perfectly it seems as if he wrote the lines himself.
Watching two greats play off one another the way that they did was dazzling and inspiring. There are moments in the film that I do not necessarily laugh out loud (though there are a fair share of those), but rarely are there moments when I watch it that I don't grin from ear to ear. Simply the shear wonderment of being inspired at your craft is enough to keep me happy. This is not a comedy for everyone, however. Many will find it dated, many will find that they have seen what is done there many times in more recent films, and many will find the acting forced in a time when realism is the name of the game. The type of acting that we look at now as being "authentic" really was not established until the early-50's with Marlon Brando's Stanley Kuwalski in A Streetcar Named Desire, so for those unaccustomed to the style pre-Brando it may seem phony. But to those who can look past that, and the fact that they have seen films who have taken inspiration directly from it, this is rewarding, hilarious, and very odd experience.
4/4
No comments:
Post a Comment