Bringing Up Baby's Best Moments Came From The Mind Of Cary Grant
The undisputed king of the screwball comedy is Cary Grant, and frankly, I don't think it's close. With classics of the genre like "His Girl Friday," "The Awful Truth," and "Holiday" under his belt, the most dapper man in Hollywood was also one of its funniest. Honestly, it's a little unfair that one person could be that handsome and that funny at the same time. Those two qualities should be at complete odds with one another. That's only fair.
If someone wanted to understand what the archetypical screwball comedy is, the film I would most likely show them is Howard Hawks' 1938 classic "Bringing Up Baby," starring Grant with his frequent screwball partner Katharine Hepburn. Its brand of antics is particularly wacky even by the standards of the best screwball comedies, and every single time I throw on the movie, whether I'm watching it in full or just looking at individual scenes, it never fails to make me laugh uproariously. Some of the set pieces are verbal and physical comedy at their finest that escalate to the perfect crescendo.
As it turns out, a number of those sequences that I come back to watching time and time again were not the invention of director Howard Hawks or screenwriters Dudley Nichols and Hagar Wilde, but they were generated by the actor who would be performing them: Grant himself. When we think of the studio system era of Hollywood, we tend to think about the day's movie stars as plug-and-play performers who the studio assigned to various projects. That doesn't mean they weren't ever part of the collaborative creative process in crafting the story — and in this case, the gags — of the film.
A torn dress, ad-libs, and circus grips
At the time, one of the most powerful figures in Hollywood was Howard Hughes. Though he hadn't officially produced a movie since 1932's "Scarface," his influence and connections loomed large, and he happened to be friends with Howard Hawks and convinced him to cast Cary Grant — who was under contract with RKO — in "Bringing Up Baby." According to "Cary Grant: A Biography" by Marc Eliot, it was Grant's direct collaboration with the mogul that led to the creation of so many of the best gags in "Bringing Up Baby," as the two would discuss the character of Dr. David Huxley in meeting after meeting.
For my money, the finest set piece in the film is when Grant's Huxley accidentally tears the back of Katharine Hepburn's dress, and he frantically tries to cover her exposed undergarments with his body or top hat. The two actors are in complete sync with one another and perform this beautifully choreographed near-dance of covering up beautifully. That scene was Grant's idea.
The invention doesn't stop there. Huxley in a frilly woman's bathrobe, saying, "I've gone gay all of a sudden." That's from Grant, which slyly pokes at his much-debated and discussed sexuality. In one scene, the heel of Hepburn's shoe breaks, and Grant immediately had the perfect one-liner for her and whispered it in her ear. He even got Hepburn to perform a stunt at the end of the movie that utilized a "circus grip" technique that he learned growing up as a vaudeville performer.
Cary Grant isn't just integral to the success of "Bringing Up Baby" because of how deft an actor he is, but without his imagination — and Hawks' willingness to collaborate — many of the film's best moments wouldn't exist. Talk about being indispensable.