Bringing Up Baby · reception & legacy

1938 · Howard Hawks

How Bringing Up Baby has been received, argued over, and remembered.

The arc

A box-office disappointment in 1938 that got Katharine Hepburn branded 'box office poison' by exhibitors soon after — today it's routinely called the definitive screwball comedy, one of Hollywood's great flop-to-classic stories.

What's debated

The perennial fight: is Hepburn's relentless Susan delightful or exhausting — the film's breakneck chaos is either screwball perfected or ninety minutes of being yelled at, depending who you ask.

Its footprint

Cary Grant's flustered 'I just went gay all of a sudden!' — reportedly an ad-lib — is one of the most-discussed lines in classic Hollywood, and Peter Bogdanovich's What's Up, Doc? (1972) is essentially a feature-length love letter to it.

Where it stands

A 'you must have seen this' pillar of the screwball canon — the standard answer when someone asks where to start with 1930s comedy.

★ Did you know? Hepburn worked closely with a real leopard named Nissa (with a trainer wielding a whip just off-camera) and grew quite comfortable with her — Cary Grant, on the other hand, wanted nothing to do with the cat, so doubles and trick shots were used for many of his scenes with it.