Bringing Up Baby (BFI Film Classics)

Directed by Howard Hawks in 1938, Bringing Up Baby is one of the great screwball comedies and a treasure from the Golden Age of Hollywood. Cary Grant plays a naive and repressed professor who becomes entangled with (and ensnared by) a willful heiress played by Katharine Hepburn. Chaos ensues as romance blossoms and not one but two leopards are set loose in verdant Connecticut. As well as being a thoroughly American fiction of the 1930s, Bringing Up Baby also has a classical comic narrative, exploring conflicts between civilization and nature, rationality and insanity or eccentricity, middle-class inhibitions and aristocratic blitheness. It is an anthology of comic types and devices, and one of the most seductively funny films ever made.