silver nitrate notes

Bringing Up Baby and the Speed of Hawks Without His Usual Lighting

19 apr 2017

Howard Hawks directed Bringing Up Baby (1938) for RKO with Russell Metty (whom we will meet later on Touch of Evil) as cinematographer. The film was a commercial failure on release. The studio cut Hawks's contract immediately afterwards. The film was rediscovered in the 1960s and has since been entered into every list of the great American comedies.

The premise is a screwball reversal. Cary Grant plays a stuffy palaeontologist who is about to marry his proper fiancée and complete his brontosaurus skeleton. Katharine Hepburn plays a woman who arrives in his life with a leopard named Baby and proceeds, over the course of one extended weekend, to destroy his fiancée, his skeleton, and his sense of self. Grant ends the film standing on the wreckage of his life, in love with Hepburn, holding the bones of his dinosaur.

What Hawks does with the pace is what Hawks usually does with the pace, which is push it past the dialogue speed of 1930s American cinema. Metty's photography is what is unusual. Where Hickox would have lit the film conventionally, Metty uses harder, lower-key sources than the screwball genre would have called for. The night sequences are shot with such low key lighting that some scenes are almost unreadable on contemporary television transfers. Metty was attempting, on Hawks's instructions, to make the comedy look slightly off-kilter visually as well as verbally.

The pacing is the technical achievement most often discussed. Grant and Hepburn deliver lines on top of each other, talk over each other in three layers, complete each other's sentences accidentally. Hawks shot most of the dialogue in long two-shots with the camera just close enough to catch facial expressions but wide enough to keep both actors continuously visible. The cuts in the editing room are minimal. We see Grant losing his composure in real time across most of the film.

Hepburn was twenty-nine. Grant was thirty-three. Neither of them needed the work; neither of them was ever again paired with the other on this kind of material. Bringing Up Baby exists as a single extended demonstration of what two A-list actors can do together when a director gives them the room.

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sources
[1] McCarthy, Todd. Howard Hawks: The Grey Fox of Hollywood. Grove, 1997.
[2] Mast, Gerald. Howard Hawks, Storyteller. Oxford UP, 1982.
[3] Cavell, Stanley. Pursuits of Happiness: The Hollywood Comedy of Remarriage. Harvard UP, 1981.
[4] Nichols, Dudley and Hagar Wilde. Screenplay (Studio archives, 1937).