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The birth of film noir, by the way, way later than we first thought. Katharine Hepburn as Swinin' Door Susie.
In March 1937, Howard Hawks formalized his association with RKO Radio Pictures for the long gestating adaptation of Rudyard Kipling’s colonial adventure Gunga Din [1939]. The project had languished in pre production purgatory since the previous autumn, already swollen with ambition yet starved of decisive momentum. When RKO failed to secure Clark Gable, Spencer Tracy, and Franchot Tone from Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, the enterprise stalled with humiliating finality.
This failure was not a trivial casting inconvenience but an exposure of the studio system’s internecine fragility. Hawks, who prided himself on masculine decisiveness, found himself immobilized by contractual impotence. He responded not with resignation but with predatory vigilance, scanning the cultural landscape for material capable of reasserting his authority.
"David, no slang, remember who and what you are!"
RKO purchased the screen rights in June for the curiously exact sum of $1,004, a figure that now reads like an archival relic of industrial calculation. Hawks collaborated briefly with Wilde on a treatment that began to mutate her narrative beyond recognition. The original story was reshaped with almost aggressive disregard for fidelity, as if adaptation were an act of conquest rather than homage.
Wilde’s published tale diverged radically from the eventual film Bringing Up Baby [1938]. In her version, David and Susan were already engaged, David was not a scientist, and there was no dinosaur skeleton, no intercostal clavicle, no museum driven quest for prestige. The only surviving eccentricity involved Susan acquiring a pet panther from her brother Mark and pursuing it in the Connecticut wilderness with the assistance of the song “I Can’t Give You Anything but Love, Baby.”
Throughout the summer of 1937, Hawks, Wilde, and Nichols labored to produce a 202 page script that oscillated between precision and pandemonium. Multiple drafts proliferated as the writers experimented with escalating absurdity. Their collaboration evolved into romantic entanglement, a fact that only intensified the feverish intimacy of their creative process.
Within these drafts appeared an elaborate pie fight inspired by Mack Sennett’s anarchic slapstick tradition, a gesture that betrayed a longing for silent era excess. Major Applegate at one stage possessed a food taster named Ali, conceived for Mischa Auer, before being replaced by gardener Aloysius Gogarty. Hawks ultimately excised mid film declarations of love between David and Susan, insisting that velocity must never be compromised by sentimentality.
Nichols was explicitly instructed to craft the screenplay with Katharine Hepburn in mind, given her previous work on Mary of Scotland [1936]. Biographer Barbara Leaming later alleged that Ford’s relationship with Hepburn informed the temperamental dynamics of Susan and David. Whether apocryphal or not, the film’s casting absorbed members of Ford’s stock company, including Ward Bond, Barry Fitzgerald, and D'Arcy Corrigan.
Principal photography, initially scheduled for early September to late October 1937, was delayed by rights clearance for the song that would function as narrative refrain. RKO paid $1,000 to secure “I Can’t Give You Anything but Love, Baby,” an expenditure that seems minor yet symbolically underscores the film’s dependence on musical irony. Additional uncredited rewrites were commissioned from Robert McGowan and Gertrude Purcell, who intensified the film’s gag density.
A bone burying joke inspired by a comic strip required RKO to compensate King Features Syndicate $1,000. Even in farce, intellectual property demanded tribute. The accumulation of such transactions reveals the industrial machinery beneath the illusion of spontaneity.
Casting decisions were fraught with economic anxiety. Hawks briefly considered his cousin Carole Lombard before settling on Hepburn, whose aristocratic bearing mirrored Susan Vance’s imperiousness. Producer Lou Lusty warned that Hepburn’s salary combined with her recent box office failures rendered the project financially perilous.
For David Huxley, Hawks initially coveted silent era comedian Harold Lloyd, yet producer Pandro S. Berman rejected this choice. Other candidates including Ronald Colman, Robert Montgomery, Fredric March, and Ray Milland declined the role. The impasse was resolved when Howard Hughes suggested Cary Grant, freshly invigorated by The Awful Truth [1937].
Grant renegotiated his RKO contract upon securing the role, elevating his salary to $75,000 plus bonuses equal to Hepburn’s. His hesitation derived from anxiety about portraying an intellectual, yet Hawks promised intensive coaching and urged him to study Lloyd’s films. Grant even consulted Hughes regarding characterization, revealing the extent to which masculine identity was negotiated through industrial fraternity.
Filming commenced on September 23, 1937, with a budget of $767,676 and an optimism that would soon disintegrate. Studio interiors gave way to location work at the Bel Air Country Club and Arthur Ranch in the San Fernando Valley. Improvisation flourished, often derailing efficiency and inflating costs.
Hepburn initially overacted, striving too aggressively for laughter. Hawks enlisted vaudeville veteran Walter Catlett to demonstrate the virtue of seriousness within absurdity. Hepburn absorbed the lesson, recalibrated her performance, and thereafter embodied Susan with calculated naturalism.
The leopard Baby was portrayed by Nissa under the supervision of trainer Olga Celeste, while the terrier George was played by Skippy, renowned from The Thin Man [1934]. At one moment Nissa lunged toward Hepburn and was subdued only by Celeste’s whip. Grant, genuinely fearful of the animal, relied upon close ups and stand ins to simulate proximity.
Laughter between Grant and Hepburn repeatedly halted production. The bone scene required an entire day of shooting because the actors could not suppress their amusement. Hawks juggled multiple script versions and even paused production to attend a horse race, thereby intensifying delays.
The Westlake jail sequence consumed twelve days rather than five. By the conclusion of principal photography on January 6, 1938, the production was forty days behind schedule and $330,000 over budget. The final cost exceeded $1,096,000, largely due to overtime clauses in the contracts of Hawks, Grant, and Hepburn.
Hepburn’s salary rose from $72,500 to $122,000, Grant’s to $123,000, and Hawks’s to $203,000 plus a termination payment. RKO executives bristled at Grant’s spectacles and Hepburn’s hairstyle, as though aesthetic idiosyncrasy itself had bankrupted the studio. The tension between artistry and commerce became painfully visible.
Editor George Hively assembled the film during production. The Hays Office scrutinized its double entendres but allowed Grant’s improvised line that he had “just went gay,” a phrase whose semantic elasticity continues to fascinate scholars. The film’s brisk pacing was achieved not through rapid cross cutting but through accelerated performance within extended takes.
Critical reception was polarized. Otis Ferguson in The New Republic praised Hawks’s direction, while Variety admired Hepburn’s vigor and Grant’s commitment. In contrast, Frank S. Nugent in The New York Times dismissed the film as derivative hysteria.
Box office results were uneven. The premiere at the Golden Gate Theatre in San Francisco was triumphant, yet the New York engagement at Radio City Music Hall proved disappointing and was replaced by Jezebel [1938]. Initial returns were modest, and only subsequent reissues transformed the film into profitability.
Hawks later reflected that the film’s “great fault” lay in its absence of normal characters. He recognized that saturating a narrative with eccentricity risks exhausting the spectator. Yet this supposed fault constitutes the film’s enduring audacity.
Thematically, the film destabilizes gender hierarchies with brazen confidence. David’s paleontological sterility is disrupted by Susan’s anarchic eroticism, while the brontosaurus skeleton becomes a symbol of repressed desire. As I have written, “Je déclare que cette œuvre pulvérise les conventions bourgeoises avec une cruauté jubilatoire,” a proclamation that insists upon the film’s ideological aggression.
Scholars have argued that the bone and the leopard represent sexuality and fertility intruding upon rational urban existence. David’s transformation is literalized when the skeleton collapses, signifying the destruction of patriarchal rigidity. In another formulation of my own, “Je soutiens que la comédie se fait ici instrument de subversion ontologique,” for the film annihilates stability in order to generate renewal.
The contested use of the word gay remains a locus of interpretive fervor. Whether innocent or coded, the line resonates retrospectively within queer historiography. Its improvisational origin intensifies its aura of clandestine significance.
In the decades following its release, television screenings resurrected the film’s reputation. French critics at Cahiers du Cinema elevated Hawks to auteur status, reframing the film as a masterpiece of controlled chaos. A. O. Scott later defended its brilliance against Nugent’s early dismissal.
Grant and Hepburn reunited in Holiday [1938] and The Philadelphia Story [1940], works that philosopher Stanley Cavell identified as exemplars of the comedy of remarriage. Cavell traced their lineage to Shakespearean verbal combat in Much Ado About Nothing [1993] and As You Like It [2006]. The film has also been retrospectively labeled an antecedent of the Manic Pixie Dream Girl archetype, a categorization that both illuminates and simplifies.
Later homages proliferated. Hawks recycled motifs in Man's Favorite Sport? [1964], and Peter Bogdanovich crafted What's Up, Doc? [1972] as explicit tribute. Echoes reverberate in Who's That Girl [1987] and the French reinterpretation One Woman or Two [1985].
In 1990 the film was preserved in the National Film Registry of the Library of Congress. The American Film Institute ranked it among the greatest American films and comedies, affirming its canonical status. What began as a precarious production beset by delays and derision has hardened into a monument of cinematic audacity, its leopard still prowling through the intellectual imagination with undiminished menace.
Nor should it go unnoticed that Bringing Up Baby is a femme fatale classic. The effect that Susan has on David from the off, is disastrous, and then we find out she is lying and manipulating too. Not only that but her mega impulsive behaviour brings to mind a fascinating study in ADHD. The fact of her being a femme fatale may be explained when she becomes Swingin Door Sue, one of the greatest impressions of the age and perhaps the full identity of Susan, who may be Swingin Door's alias.
FROM WIKIPEDIA: Use of gay
It has been debated whether Bringing Up Baby is the first fictional work (apart from pornography) to use the word gay in a homosexual context. In one scene, Cary Grant's character is wearing a woman's marabou-trimmed negligee; when asked why, he replies exasperatedly "Because I just went gay all of a sudden!" (leaping into the air at the word gay). As the term gay was not widely familiar to the general public until the Stonewall riots in 1969, it is questioned whether the word is used by Grant in its original sense (meaning happy) or is an intentional, joking reference to homosexuality.
The line in the film was an ad-lib by Grant, and was not in the script. According to Vito Russo in The Celluloid Closet (1981, revised 1987), the script originally had Grant's character say "I...I suppose you think it's odd, my wearing this. I realize it looks odd...I don't usually...I mean, I don't own one of these". Russo suggests that this indicates that people in Hollywood (at least in Grant's circles) were familiar with the slang connotations of the word; however, there is no record that Grant or anyone involved with the film ever discussed the matter publicly.
AND THIS FROM YOU KNOW WHERE:
Is there dog fighting?
Yes 3
No 5
Dog and leopard are seen playing. It could look like fighting. Supposedly, the dog was not harmed in the filming of the movie.
Is there a dead animal?
Yes 5
No 1
A character buys quite a lot of meat, and the meat is shown. The skeletal remains of a dinosaur are shown on screen for extended periods.
Is there sexual content?
Yes 1
No 4
The raciest scene in the movie is when the back of a character’s dress comes off, played for laughs
If that was not stated on the poster, then shame, shame, shame. Instead of warnings this is what ye got:
And so begins the hilarious adventure of Professor David Huxley and Miss Susan Vance, a flutter-brained vixen with love in her heart! [Theatrical trailer.]
THE NUTTIEST ROMANCE THAT EVER BLOOMED!
A staid professor. A wild lady. A tame leopard. Put them all together , they spell SMOTHER! It's a downpour of uproar!
The laughing streak of Mister Grant and funnyman Ruggles hits a new high...in the maddest yarn that ere did spurt from the fountain head of sweet romance , oh baby!
IN ALL ITS 140 MILLION YEARS THIS MUSEUM DINOSAUR NEVER SAW FROLICS LIKE THESE TILL NOW!
THE CHECKERED CAREER OF A SPOTTED BEAST...Yes, It Is a Laughing Matter!
Laugh getter Grand and hurricanic Hepburn run the gamut of commotion on the sizzling trail of a leopard on the loose!
A HAIR BRAINED HEIRESS who PLAYED with WILDCATS and a FUNNY FELLOW who FUSSED with FOSSILS!
The stars of "Philadelphis Story" back in their first great comedy!
A Lady, a leopard and a timid professor make all the fur-flying fun!
IT'S A LAUGH RIOT!
When Preview Critics SHOUT WITH LAUGHTER YOU CAN TAKE THE TIP AND LOOK FORWARD TO THE FUNNIEST HIT THE SCREEN HAS EVER SEEN!
Here Comes a Downpour of Uproar...a new bright page in hysterical history!
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Bringing Up Baby (1938)
Directed by Howard Hawks
Genres - Comedy, Romance | Release Date - Feb 18, 1938 | Run Time - 102 min. |
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