Bringing Up Baby
Film Friday
This week I have been delivering a series of four lectures on “Women in Film” at the University of Ljubljana, where I was twice a visiting Fulbright lecturer. Tuesday’s talk was originally to have been about Katharine Hepburn and screwball comedies, particularly Bringing Up Baby (1938). Because people evinced an interest in Psycho, Silence of the Lambs, and the slasher film, however, I shifted topics. Here is a version of the talk I was prepared to give.
The screwball and romantic comedies of the 1930’s have always been among my favorite films. I’m thinking of such works as It Happened One Night, Twentieth Century, My Man Godfrey, The Awful Truth, The Thin Man, Holiday, His Girl Friday (my favorite), Nothing Sacred, and Philadelphia Story. The genre would morph into the slightly darker but equally wonderful comedies of Preston Sturges in the early 1940’s (The Lady Eve, Sullivan’s Travels). Then the war and the post-war issues would push comedy out of the spotlight for a time. But for 10 years or so, Hollywood produced some of its greatest comedies.
Bringing Up Baby is a general favorite today. Therefore it is interesting to discover that it was a flop in 1938. And not only a flop. People hated it.
The major reason was Katharine Hepburn. Hepburn was a woman who walked to her own drummer. In 1930’s group photos of MGM’s actors and actresses—“more stars than the Milky Way” was the studio’s slogan—Hepburn is often the only woman wearing pants. In Sylvia Scarlett she cross-dressed as a man. She insisted on negotiating her own contracts and, unlike most female stars, she didn’t allow herself to be pushed around. She came across as a forceful woman.
The 1930’s wasn’t the best time for forceful women. High unemployment was undermining male self-confidence and, for economic reasons, couples that might have gotten divorced in the 1920’s were deciding to stay together. (Divorce rates climbed dramatically with the new sexual liberation of the 1920’s and then just as dramatically declined during the Great Depression.)
Given the way comedy works, there was no automatic reason why assertive women would have been unwelcome on the screen. Romantic comedy specializes in laughing at what makes us nervous, so why not laugh at the antics of a Katharine Hepburn?
That’s probably what director Howard Hawks had in mind with Bringing Up Baby. Hawks, after all, was the quintessential man’s man, someone who loved airplanes, fast cars and beautiful women. (This guy went fishing and hunting with Hemingway! You can’t get more manly than that.) So when he shows us assertive women like Hepburn in Bringing Up Baby or Rosalind Russell in His Girl Friday, one can imagine that he’s exorcising his own male insecurities.
In Bringing Up Baby, wealthy socialite Susan Vance (Hepburn) steps into the life of timid paleontologist professor David Huxley (Cary Grant) and turns it upside down. His work focuses on dry bones (there is a considerable amount of sexual innuendo regarding David’s excitement over one of these bones) whereas Susan becomes associated with feline ferocity (there are a couple of leopards in the film). At one moment David, trying to get rid of her, says, “Now it isn’t that I don’t like you, Susan, because, after all, in moments of quiet, I’m strangely drawn toward you, but – well, there haven’t been any quiet moments.”
By the end, Susan manages to break off David’s impending marriage with his up-tight fiancé, destroy his brontosaur skeleton, and (presumably) win his hand. But not after first having managed to land him in jail and a host of other plot twists.
We have an image of masculine anxieties at their most intense when David has to don a woman’s frilly bathrobe and then undergo the scrutiny of Susan’s formidable aunt. “I just went gay all of a sudden,” he says hysterically. Men who were worried about being real men would have experienced this as a caricature of their fears. The fact that Cary Grant may have been bisexual (sensed but not known) would only have exacerbated the tension.
While comedy helps us handle our sexual anxieties through laughter, it has its limits. When the anxieties become too intense, we stop laughing. This seems to have occurred with Bringing Up Baby. The unruly woman comes on too strong. The man is buried by “the woman on top.”
In fact, Hepburn irritated male viewers to such a degree that theater owners all over America started labeling her “box office poison” and begged MGM to send them other films. Perhaps it wasn’t only men who were upset. Women trying to make precarious marriages work could also have felt more threatened than empowered by Hepburn.
In any event, the lady who would go on to become Hollywood’s most decorated actor (four Oscars) thought her days in in the movies were over. She returned to the east coast and the theater.
It is illuminating to see how she resurrected his film career. Having Howard Hughes in one’s corner is always a useful thing, and he insisted that she be cast in the leading role in Philadelphia Story, which she was playing on Broadway. That in itself couldn’t make the public love her, however. Here’s how she changed their opinion.
In the opening scene of Philadelphia Story, Cary Grant storms out of a house in a scene that clearly signals that a marriage is ending. Hepburn, seeming to play the role of dutiful housewife (the background music lets us know this), brings him his golf clubs—and then proceeds to break one of them over her knee. One doesn’t have to be a Freudian to see this as an image of emasculation.
And then Grant does something that men all over America had dreamed of: he shoves her in the face. At least he doesn’t punch her, his first impulse.
Hepburn/Tracy Lord takes a tremendous amount of verbal pounding in Philadelphia Story as well. It seems like one man or another is always running her down. But here’s the thing: she shows she is a good sport and takes it. In fact, rather than the criticism diminishing her, her resilience in the face of them makes her look even stronger. I may be channeling Jane Austen’s Knightley as I make this point, especially when he says (in connection with his marriage proposal), “I have blamed you, and lectured you, and you have borne it as no other woman in England would have borne it.” Like Emma Tracy has her faults, like Emma she is self-correcting, and like Emma she soars above those faults.
By film’s end 1930’s viewers may have come to the same conclusion arrived at by the Jimmy Stewart character: while they once considered Hepburn a judgmental goddess, they may have come to see her as a queen, a figure who moves in her own sphere. The old rules and the old anxieties don’t seem to apply.
And so Depression-era America came to terms with Katherine Hepburn. She went on to become maybe America’s greatest actress and one of our national treasures.
