bringing up baby (hawks, 1938)

[AFlickering]

hawks puts the "screw" in screwball, whipping up his sexually-loaded motifs (wild animals, guns, cars, bones, golfing, torn clothes, gardens and forests, day/night) into an orgy of double-entendres. susan succeeds not only in her conquest of grant's emasculated paleontologist, but over all of cinema; indeed, we've become so influenced by the dionysian whirlwind she and her leopard represent that the film's innuendo lacks function in the modern world, and ironically seems more subtle and ingenious as we become less trained to recognise it. similarly, grant's giddily uncomfortable relationship with carnality has slowly become more appealing in our increasingly over-sexed, desensitised, godless society.

hawks anticipated this; while grant's epiphany culminates in the completion of his transformation into "a butterfly" and the collapse (the last of several Falls) of a dinosaur, an obliteration of an outmoded moral order ushering in a sexual awakening that would only blossom further in hawks' '40s works, there is also a side to the film that dave kehr called "pessimistic". while he revels with nervous glee in hepburn's anarchy, he's also anxious about the untempered dissolution of grant's stuffy conservatism -- grant is essentially his stand-in, and the two leopards represent his mixed feelings about the brave new world into which we're headed.

the power dynamics between the couple become more evenly measured in the final act as hawks arrives at an understanding that hepburn's chaos needs grant's order just as much as the other way around. this is reflected in hawks' struggle to tame his runaway script and ebullient actress, who at times seems to drag the camera along in her wake despite the brilliance of hawks' formal machinations (nothing happens in isolation; an array of ostensibly throwaway images and motifs are echoed, re-configured or subverted during its course, while almost every line has a double or triple meaning). this push-pull is the life of the piece, and if one or the other came to dominate proceedings the film's greatness would surely be lost.