1085 Bringing Up Baby

[DarkImbecile]

Bringing Up Baby



Screwball sparks fly when Cary Grant and Katharine Hepburn let loose in one of the fastest and funniest films ever made—a high-wire act of invention that took American screen comedy to new heights of absurdity. Hoping to procure a million-dollar endowment from a wealthy society matron for his museum, a hapless paleontologist (Grant) finds himself entangled with a dizzy heiress (Hepburn) as the manic misadventures pile up—a missing dinosaur bone, a leopard on the loose, and plenty of gender-bending mayhem among them. Bringing Up Baby’s sophisticated dialogue, spontaneous performances, and giddy innuendo come together in a whirlwind of comic chaos captured with lightning-in-a-bottle brio by director Howard Hawks.

SPECIAL FEATURES

• New, restored 4K digital transfer, with uncompressed monaural soundtrack on the Blu-ray
• Audio commentary from 2005 featuring filmmaker Peter Bogdanovich
• New video essay on actor Cary Grant by author Scott Eyman
• New interview about cinematographer Russell Metty with cinematographer John Bailey
• New interview with film scholar Craig Barron on special-effects pioneer Linwood Dunn
• New selected-scene commentary about costume designer Howard Greer with costume historian Shelly Foote
• Howard Hawks: A Hell of a Good Life, a 1977 documentary by Hans-Christoph Blumenberg featuring the director’s last filmed interview
• Audio interview from 1969 with Grant
• Audio excerpts from a 1972 conversation between Hawks and Bogdanovich
• Trailer
• English subtitles for the deaf and hard of hearing
  PLUS: An essay by critic Sheila O’Malley

[DandyDancing]

Those crazy bastards they actually did it.

[Randall Maysin]

It seems like someone at Criterion might have heard this forum's complaint about the lack of actor/technician-centred bonus features on their classic Hollywood releases.

[Ribs]

Really disappointed that Katherine Hepburn's doc about herself, Katherine Hepburn: All About Me, didn't make the cut, as I believe WB included it on one of the relevant DVDs and this seemed the last big place it might appear. It plays on TCM all the time and I've watched it repeatedly, I find it extremely entertaining. Still obviously wonderful this has finally, finally, finally appeared, 15 years after the format debuted.

[FrauBlucher]

Could they be saving it for another Hepburn release? This seems pretty loaded

[Ribs]

I guess it’s possible they’re doing Adam’s Rib as that despite being ostensibly the best one it weirdly hasn’t appeared even though WAC was diving deep on the Hepburn/Tracy releases, I just for whatever reason in my head had thought of this as the natural pair for that feature.

[Rayon Vert]

Great news.

[knives]

Nice way to close out our Cary Grant list.

[hearthesilence]

I'm sure the Hepburn doc is generally good, but the first thing it brings to mind is Werner Herzog. When he released his film manifesto, it conspicuously stated "And don’t you listen to the Song of Life." Someone asked him about it and he said it was a direct response to that moment in the doc - after clarifying that he really likes Hepburn as an actress, he expressed disappointment in her tendency for "vanilla ice cream" philosophy, and after seeing the doc, it became a running joke between him and someone else where they'd tell each other "don’t you listen to the Song of Life."

Regardless, I love this film - I figured it would get a BD release, but this sure took a LONG time. I last saw it at BAM like eight years ago, thinking a release was imminent.

[hanshotfirst1138]

FINALLY! TCM runs this in HD, and I knew from Vudu that there was an HD master.

Now can we ever get The Thief of Baghdad in HD?

[movielocke]

after I watched the marvelous criterion bluray of Philadelphia Story, I wound up rewatching my old WB dvd of Bringing up Baby, and was stunned at how poor the quality now seemed. When the DVD came out I remember I was blown away at how much better it was than the VHS/TCM, but now it looks rather shabby. Can't wait to upgrade this.

[Rayon Vert]

Same here about the DVD quality, so I can't wait to see this.

[Jonathan S]

The Warner DVD also has a small but jarring cut at 1:31:40, omitting Susan's line that Jerry "knocks my block off" if she doesn't go where he goes.

This leaves ADAM'S RIB as the only one of the seven "comedies of remarriage" discussed at length in Stanley Cavell's book Pursuits of Happiness that Criterion hasn't released...

[Gerald Christie]

Fucking finally!!!! The Lady Eve, Twentieth Century and now this?! Wow, the last couple years have been great for us screwball fans, not to mention that I can finally cross off another title from my blu-ray wishlist. I had a feeling Criterion would end up releasing it considering their Hawks output and relationship with Warner Bros. I'm not surprised this took so long to come out as the restoration must have been a massive undertaking and those take time and money especially for problematic titles like this one. This may end up being a title, like Philadelphia Story, where Criterion created a master from a source outside of whatever holdings Warner had. It’ll be interesting to see when the “about the transfer” notes come out what the actual source element used was. Bringing Up Baby looked terrible on the dvd and much like the recent The Thing from Another World, is part of the RKO library. Those films are notorious for being compromised, being in poor condition or having film element problems. Surely, this restoration will be a revelation. Here's hoping Criterion can work their magic on other problematic RKO titles like Freaks and the final Cary Grant and Hepburn collaboration yet to be released, Sylvia Scarlett (a film I haven't seen, but that certainly looks interesting with its ahead of its time sexual politics). With Bringing Up Baby finally released, there's only two Grant comedies left that I want released: the underrated My Favorite Wife (here's hoping Criterion releases it, but I see it as more of a Warner Archive title) and Arsenic and Old Lace (I could definitely see Criterion releasing this one), I don't particularly care for The talk of the town.
Oh and just because I have to complain about something, as per usual with Criterion the commissioned cover is terrible.

[black&huge]

i think it's one of the best covers they've ever put out

[yoloswegmaster]

The 1937 short story that the film was based on has been added to the blu-ray.

[L.A.]

Beaver.

[JakeStewart]

Looks incredible. I admittedly wasn’t a huge fan of this when I saw it for the first time on Filmstruck, but this new scan could make it a totally different experience.

[Gerald Christie]

Wow, you can certainly tell by the caps the amount of work, time and money that Criterion put into this restoration. It looks great and a revelation compared to the awful DVD and the Japanese bluray. I certainly can't see it looking any better than this. Now bring on another screwball classic, My Favorite Wife!!!

[hearthesilence]

To be fair, for an SD presentation the WB DVD doesn't actually look bad - it looks like the same film elements were used by both WB and Criterion. But yeah, this is clearly an upgrade.

[Mr Sausage]

"Hepburn and Grant: On the Funniest Comedy—and Comedic Heroine—of Hollywood’s Golden Age".

[FrauBlucher]

bluray.com

[Michael Kerpan]

"Hepburn and Grant: On the Funniest Comedy—and Comedic Heroine—of Hollywood’s Golden Age".

This movie has been my favorite of this sort of film (and my favorite Hepburn film and myu favorite Hawks film) ever since I first encountered it. It always leaves me with a smile on my face.

[domino harvey]

It seems like someone at Criterion might have heard this forum's complaint about the lack of actor/technician-centred bonus features on their classic Hollywood releases.

Working my way through the extras, I think they still need help in this regard. Hard to imagine a less engaging way to talk about Cary Grant than what he gets in the extra here-- though it is admirably surreal that Singapore Sue gets more talking time than Hitchcock in the piece! The total sanitation and bland-ing of Cary Grant does him and his work a huge disservice. The interview on the visual effects was okay, but I already saw the most interesting parts in the RKO Story doc. The Metty piece is bizarre, since as they admit, the film doesn't really operate on an aesthetic level. Such a great movie, but a potent reminder that sheer volume of extras doesn't necessarily translate to worth

[cdnchris]

Eh, I always like Barron's contributions and how they're laced with visual aides, and I liked this one here.

To be fair on the piece about Grant it's more about his early work and building his persona/comic timing/etc. than a career retrospective. I haven't seen it, but I'm positive Singapore Sue was being used as an example to showcase his more "extreme" on screen presence that he severely toned down for the Paramount films that followed, only to then find that "sweet spot" later thanks to both co-stars and directors. Hitchcock only gets a brief mention I think because it's not covering that period. The piece isn't great, but I think it did what it aimed to do.

Bailey's contribution is weird, as you said, in that he probably spends more time talking about Metty's other work than this one, for fairly obvious reasons. His discussion around this film comes down to how to shoot and frame comedies of the time, which seemed to be stick a camera somewhere and then do long takes. So... yeah. It's interesting they had Bailey talk about Metty for this film rather than ANY of the Sirk films they released.