This week's Classic American Film: "Bringing up Baby" (1938)

directed by Howard Hawks

starring Katherine Hepburn and Cary Grant

Susan Vance: There *is* a leopard on your roof and it's my leopard and I have to get it and to get it I have to sing.
David Huxley: Now it isn't that I don't like you, Susan, because, after all, in moments of quiet, I'm strangely drawn toward you, but - well, there haven't been any quiet moments.
Susan Vance: You mean you want *me* to go home?
David Huxley: Yes.
Susan Vance: You mean you don't want me to help you any more?
David Huxley: No.
Susan Vance: After all the fun we've had?
David Huxley: Yes.
Susan Vance: And after all the things I've done for you?
David Huxley: That's what I mean.

 

This week it's Hollywood royalty in a comic romp: a leopard is loose in the wilds of Connecticut--in the very woods where an eccentric heiress is leading a paleontologist on a search for his missing "intercostal clavicle." (And by the way, the leopard answers to the tune, "I Can't Give You Anything But Love, Baby.")

Watch Katherine Hepburn swing a golf club, flip olives into her mouth, pretend she's a gangster's moll, and fall in love; watch Cary Grant slip on the olive, wear a woman's negligee, keep his dignity, and fall in love.

For a YouTube video of Cary Grant in the negligee, click here.

Click here to read a l975 New Yorker Profile of Cary Grant, "The Man From Dream City"

Click here for an appreciation of Katherine Hepburn on what would have been her 100th birthday.