Bringing Up Baby (1938) on Netflix
Passed19381h 42mComedyFamilyRomance
Paleontologist David Huxley needs a million-dollar donation and a bone to finish his Brontosaurus. The day before his wedding he meets heiress Susan Vance and her tame leopard, Baby.
- Netflix3.9/5
- IMDb7.8/1069,849 votes
- Rotten Tomatoes97%
Trailer
Plot summary
David Huxley, a mild-mannered paleontologist, has spent four years assembling a Brontosaurus skeleton, and one bone, the intercostal clavicle, is still missing. The museum wants a million dollars from Elizabeth Random, and David, who marries his assistant Alice Swallow the next day, must make a good impression on her. On a golf course he meets Susan Vance, a free-spirited heiress who plays his ball by mistake. Her brother Mark has shipped her a tame leopard called Baby from Brazil, and she persuades David to help her take it to her aunt's farm in Connecticut. Susan takes a shine to David and sets out to keep him at the house, hiding his clothes so that he cannot leave for his wedding.
Cast
Show all 20 cast
- Judith Fordas Hatcheck Girl (uncredited)
Did you know?!Facts and trivia about Bringing Up Baby (1938)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
- It has been debated whether this is the first fictional work apart from pornography to use the word gay in a homosexual context: wearing a woman's marabou-trimmed negligee and asked why, Cary Grant's character replies exasperatedly, "Because I just went gay all of a sudden!"
- Nissa once lunged at Hepburn when her skirt twirled and had to be subdued by Celeste cracking her whip; Grant was so terrified that most scenes of the two interacting were done in close-up with a stand-in, and Hepburn played on his fear by throwing a toy leopard through the roof of his dressing room.
- Grant and Hepburn often ad-libbed their dialogue and frequently delayed production by making each other laugh: the scene where Grant frantically asks Hepburn where his bone is was shot from 10 am until well after 4 pm because of the stars' laughing fits.
- The film had the reputation of a flop on release, although it eventually made a small profit after its re-release in the early 1940s; labeled "box office poison" by the Independent Theatre Owners of America, Hepburn saw her career wane until The Philadelphia Story two years later.
- Both leopards in the story were played by Nissa, supervised by her trainer Olga Celeste of the Luna Park Zoo in Los Angeles, who stood by with a whip during shooting and used perfume as her main training technique, since Nissa was soothed by anything fragrant.
- Hawks and producer Pandro S. Berman could not agree on who should play David Huxley: Hawks wanted the silent-film comedian Harold Lloyd, while Berman rejected Lloyd and Ronald Colman and offered the role to Robert Montgomery, Fredric March and Ray Milland, all of whom turned it down.
- Because Bringing Up Baby was seen as a commercial failure, Hawks was released early from his two-film contract with RKO, and Gunga Din was handed over to George Stevens.
