BRINGING UP BABY (DVD/2 DISC/SPECIAL EDIT/P&S-1.37/ENG-FR-SP SUB/O-SLEEVE) DVD

Bringing Up Baby
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, All Movie Guide

Cast Katharine Hepburn as Susan Vance Cary Grant as David Huxley Charlie Ruggles as Maj. Horace Applegate Barry Fitzgerald as Mr. Gogarty May Robson as Aunt Elizabeth Ward Bond as Motorcycle Cop Walter Catlett as Constable Slocum Fritz Feld as Dr. Lehman Leona Roberts as Hannah Gogarty George Irving as Alexander Peabody Tala Birell as Mrs. Lehman

Crew Perry Ferguson - Art Director Van Nest Polglase - Art Director Cliff Reid - Associate Producer Howard Greer - Costume Designer Howard Hawks - Director George Hively - Editor Roy Webb - Composer (Music Score) Russell Metty - Cinematographer Howard Hawks - Producer Darrell Silvera - Set Designer Linwood G. Dunn - Special Effects Vernon Walker - Special Effects John L. Cass - Sound/Sound Designer Hagar Wilde - Screenwriter Dudley Nichols - Screenwriter

Bringing Up Baby
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, All Movie Guide
 

American Film Institute, 100 Greatest American Movies (winner) Library of Congress, U.S. National Film Registry (winner)

General Specifications: Language Options: English Subtitle Options: English, French, Spanish Sound Processing: DD1: Dolby Digital Mono Additional Features: Disc One: Digitally remastered movie with commentary by filmmaker Peter Bogdanovich Howard Hawks movie trailer gallery Disc Two: Two revealing documentaries about the star and director: Acclaimed feature-length Cary Grant: A Class Apart and The Men Who Made the Movies: Howard Hawks Two vintage vault treasures: Comedy short Campus Cinderella and cartoon A Star Is Hatched DVD Aspect Ratio: 1.33:1: Pre-1954 Standard MPAA Rating: NR DVD Discs Included: 2 DVD Sides: 2 DVD DVD Region Code: 1 Content Length: 102 min   DVD Chapters: Side #1 -- Bringing Up Baby: Disc One 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] Side #2 -- Bringing Up Baby: Disc Two 1. The Grant Personal [2:45] 2. The Pender Troupe [3:49] 3. A Future in Film [5:27] 4. Breakthroughs and Reunions [6:58] 5. Bringing Up Baby, Holiday [5:08] 6. Male Bonding [5:24] 7. His Girl Friday [2:21] 8. The Philadelphia Story [4:12] 9. Penny Serenade, Suspicion [5:34] 10. Cash and Cary [2:35] 11. None But the Lonely Heart [2:01] 12. Notorious [2:59] 13. A Commodity [5:20] 14. Betsy Drake; Time Off [4:10] 15. A Thief and an Affair [3:32] 16. Sophia Loren [3:01] 17. North By Northwest [5:31] 18. Hell of a Wrench [1:45] 19. Charade [2:32] 20. Time to Quit [2:39] 21. Getting it Right [4:49] 22. Full Circle [3:42] 23. End Credits [:34] 1. Introduction [2:25] 2. The Dawn Patrol, The Crowd Roars [3:01] 3. Scarface [2:19] 4. Twentieth Century [2:03] 5. Bringing Up Baby [4:01] 6. His Girl Friday [6:47] 7. Only Angels Have Wings [3:45] 8. Sergeant York [1:44] 9. Air Force [4:19] 10. To Have and Have Not [3:40] 11. The Big Sleep [4:02] 12. I Was a Male War Bride [3:51] 13. Monkey Business [2:05] 14. Red River [4:11] 15. Rio Bravo [5:59] 16. End Credits [:41]