Bringing Up Baby

UPC: 883929175062

Studio: Turner Home

MPAA Rating: NR   Contains:[Suitable for Children]

Summary: Katharine Hepburn and Cary Grant star in this inspired comedy about a madcap heiress with a pet leopard who meets an absent-minded paleontologist and unwittingly makes a fiasco of both their lives. David Huxley (Grant) is the stuffy paleontologist who needs to finish an exhibit on dinosaurs and thus land a $1 million grant for his museum. At a golf outing with his potential benefactors, Huxley is spotted by Susan Vance (Hepburn) who decides that she must have the reserved scientist at all costs. She uses her pet leopard, Baby, to trick him into driving to her Connecticut home, where a dog wanders into Huxley's room and steals the vital last bone that he needs to complete his project. The real trouble begins when another leopard escapes from the local zoo and Baby is mistaken for it, leading Huxley and Susan into a series of harebrained and increasingly more insane schemes to save the cat from the authorities. Inevitably, the two end up in the local jail, where things get even more out of hand: Susan pretends to be the gun moll to David's diabolical, supposedly wanted criminal. Naturally, the mismatched pair falls in love through all the lunacy. Director Howard Hawks delivers a funny, fast-paced, and offbeat story, enlivened by animated performances from the two leads, in what has become a definitive screwball comedy. ~ Don Kaye, Rovi

Category: Comedy

Awards: U.S. National Film Registry – Library of Congress 100 Greatest American Movies – American Film Institute

Features: Commentary by Director/Writer Peter Bogdanovich
Howard Hawks Movie Trailer Gallery

Bringing Up Baby

Format: DVD

Release Date: 02/08/2011

Aspect Ratio: 1.33:1 Pre-1954 Standard

Audio: DD1 Dolby Digital Mono

Runtime: 102 Minutes

Sides: 1

Number of Discs: 1

Language(s) English

Subtitles: English,French,Spanish

Region: USA & territories, Canada

Chapters: Disc #1 -- Bringing Up Baby
1. Credits [1:13]
2. No Bones About Marriage [2:50]
3. She Has His Things [4:48]
4. Olives And The Love Impulse [5:52]
5. Rear Views [2:17]
6. Man Of Some Dignity [4:01]
7. Want A Leopard? [3:20]
8. Meeting Baby [3:58]
9. Poultry Dinner [2:26]
10. Lawbreakers [2:52]
11. Shortage Of Clothes [2:09]
12. Gay All Of A Sudden [1:54]
13. Bone Dry [3:08]
14. Hunting With George [4:19]
15. The Major And Mr. Bone [3:33]
16. Dinner On The Move [3:36]
17. Leopard Calling [2:40]
18. Pear-Shaped Mating Cry [4:34]
19. Wet In The Woods [5:00]
20. Leopard #2 [3:48]
21. Here, Kitty [4:16]
22. Please, David [2:23]
23. Moonlight Quartet [2:40]
24. Jailbirds [2:45]
25. Who's In Charge Here? [3:56]
26. The Leopard Gang [2:43]
27. "Name Anything And I've Done It" [4:38]
28. Her Hero [2:02]
29. A Mess Of Everything [3:37]
30. Cast List [4:03]

Bruce Eder

Bringing Up Baby is the quintessential screwball comedy, and one of the crowning comic achievements in the careers of director Howard Hawks and stars Katharine Hepburn and Cary Grant. It may also be one of the defining examples of comedy feature film at its purest and most basic. At the time of its release, it seemed to close out the screwball genre: the portrayals in film inflated and punctured an array of movie (and social) stereotypes in as fine a style had ever been accomplished. The screwball comedy originated in the depths of the Great Depression as a reaction to the despair of everyday life, as well as to the publicized antics of wealthy fops and heiresses who seemed oblivious to the fact that people were literally starving to death. The idle rich were the genre's essential ingredient, from satirical pre-screwball efforts such as Zoltan Korda's Cash (an especially offbeat example since it was made in England) to pioneering Hollywood screwball comedies like Gregory La Cava's My Man Godfrey. As time passed, however, other targets became acceptable, including intellectual "eggheads" and eccentric members of officialdom. Bringing Up Baby skewers all of them and more -- including over-zealous psychiatrists and blustery, pretentious upper-class stuffed shirts -- hitting the bullseye with each one. Apart from its acting, pacing, and verbal acrobatics (an essential element of any Howard Hawks talking picture), Bringing Up Baby is a masterful achievement precisely because it distills its diverse ingredients down to the characters. The plot, such as it is, deals with mistakes and mistaken identities (right down to heiress Hepburn's pet leopard) but is really about nothing -- absolutely nothing, to paraphrase a standard articulated by Jerry Seinfeld in the 1990s. Even the one main element of the "story" -- the search for a missing dinosaur bone belonging to the museum where Cary Grant's character works -- is such an obvious, ridiculous comic device, a comedic equivalent to Hitchcock's "MacGuffin" concept. The screwball comedy was never quite the same, nor was any filmmaker or cast able to build a film on such slight material so successfully ever again. Indeed, most attempts that followed -- and there were ever fewer as the 1930s gave way to the 1940s -- seemed increasingly more pallid, awkward, and unimpressive. ~ Bruce Eder, Rovi

Cast and Crew: Jonathan Hale  Actor 
Judith Ford  Actor 
Pat O'Malley  Actor 
Buster Slaven  Actor 
William Benedict  Actor 
Frank M. Thomas  Actor 
Vernon Walker  Actor 
Edward Gargan  Actor 
Jeanne Martel  Actor 
John Kelly  Actor 
Asta the Dog  Actor 
D'Arcy Corrigan  Actor 
George Humbert  Actor 
Buck Mack  Actor 
Jack Carson  Actor 
Geraldine Hall  Actor 
Ruth Alder  Actor 
Billy Bevan  Actor 
Frank Marlowe  Actor 
Pat West  Actor 
Stanley Blystone  Actor 
Nissa  Actor 
Richard Lane  Actor 
Howard Hawks  Director 
Howard Hawks  Producer 
Dudley Nichols  Screenwriter 
Roy Webb  Composer (Music Score) 
Hagar Wilde  Screenwriter 
Katharine Hepburn  Actor 
Cary Grant  Actor 
Charlie Ruggles  Actor 
Barry Fitzgerald  Actor 
May Robson  Actor 
Ward Bond  Actor 
Walter Catlett  Actor 
Fritz Feld  Actor 
Leona Roberts  Actor 
George Irving  Actor 
Tala Birell  Actor 

Country: USA