Τετάρτη 28 Φεβρουαρίου: Leopard

1938
Howard Hawks
Bringing up Baby

“There’s a pitch in baseball called a screwball, which was perfected by a pitcher named Carl Hubbell back in the 1930s. It’s a pitch with a particular spin that sort of flutters and drops, goes in different directions, and behaves in very unexpected ways... Screwball comedy was unconventional, went in different directions, and behaved in unexpected ways” Andrew Bergman

Bringing Up Baby (1938) is one of versatile director Howard Hawks' greatest screwball comedies and often considered the definitive screwball film. It is also one of the funniest, wackiest and most inspired films of all time with its characteristic breathless pace, zany antics and pratfalls, absurd situations and misunderstandings, perfect sense of comic timing, completely screwball cast, series of lunatic and hare-brained misadventures, disasters, light-hearted surprises and romantic comedy. The non-stop, harum-scarum farce skewered many institutions, including psychiatry, the sterile field of science, the police, and high-society upper classes. At the time of its release, it failed miserably at the box-office and was soon forgotten, until it was revived years later.

As is true of many of Howard Hawks' finest films (including the crime film Scarface (1932), Twentieth Century (1934), His Girl Friday (1940), To Have and Have Not (1944), the detective film The Big Sleep (1946), Monkey Business (1952), and Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (1953)), this masterpiece was not nominated for a single Academy Award. Director Peter Bogdanovich paid homage to Hollywood's screwball comedy genre with a loose remake titled What's Up, Doc (1972) starring Barbra Streisand and Ryan O'Neal.

The fast-paced film involves the unlikely relationship of two individuals, portrayed by actress Katharine Hepburn and actor Cary Grant playing against type in a classic "conflict" of the sexes: a mad-cap, scheming, aggressive, impulsive, accident-prone and daffy society heiress, and a bumbling, clumsy, absent-minded, straight, nerdy and stuffy paleontologist from a natural history museum. This was the second of four films co-starring Hepburn and Grant [the others were Sylvia Scarlett (1936), Holiday (1938), and The Philadelphia Story (1940)]. Other characters include a small-town sheriff, a drunken Irish gardener, a big-game hunter, and two Brazilian leopards.

The film's screenplay (by Dudley Nichols and Hagar Wilde) was taken from a Collier's Magazine story authored by Hagar Wilde. [Reportedly, the plot of the antagonistic romance was inspired by the alleged affair that bespectacled director John Ford had with a mismatched Hepburn during the filming of Mary of Scotland (1936).]

This was Katharine Hepburn's only screwball comedy role - it pushed all its characters to the utter extreme, taking them into absurd, embarrassing, and destabilizing, humiliating circumstances (including sex-role reversals, such as frilly cross-dressing and the search for a lost dinosaur bone and a pet leopard named 'Baby') that are wildly and ruthlessly fun. [Grant later played a similar cross-dressing role in Hawks' own I Was a Male War Bride (1949).] The action centers around her eccentric and wild efforts to romantically capture his interest in her and liberate him - with assistance from her dog named "George" (a Scotch terrier named Skippy that played Asta in The Thin Man (1934) series of films and Mr. Smith in The Awful Truth (1937)), her music-loving pet leopard named "Baby" (played by Nissa) and her wealthy, widowed aunt.

Although Hepburn had a brilliant performance in this film, she was an unconventional, independent-spirited performer, and this was her last film for RKO - since she had been infamously labeled 'box-office poison' through most of the 30s. She bought out her contract and returned to Broadway after the film and took a role specifically written for her in playwright Philip Barry's The Philadelphia Story. The play was such a hit that she bought the film rights and made her way back to Hollywood through MGM's successful production of the play - directed by George Cukor.

Tim Dirks

*Για την φιλμογραφία του Hawks βλέπε στις πληροφορίες της πρώτης προβολής της ΣΙΝΕΜΑΤΕΚΑ με το His girl friday