Bringing Up Baby: Howard Hawks, Director

by Gerald Mast

Overview

Bringing Up Baby (1938) is the essence of thirties screwball comedy. It is also quintessential Howard Hawks, treating many of the director's favorite themes, particularly the loving war between the sexes. Bringing Up Baby features Katharine Hepburn as a flaky heiress and Cary Grant as an absentminded paleontologist, roles in which they come into their own as stars and deliver particularly fine comic performances. Pauline Kael has called the film the "American movies' closest equivalent to Restoration comedy." The comparison is based on the quick repartee and witty dialogue, a hallmark of Hawks's work and well conveyed here by Gerald Mast's transcription from the screen.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780813513416
Publisher:	Rutgers University Press
Publication date:	11/01/1988
Series:	Rutgers Films in Print series , #10
Edition description:	New Edition
Pages:	332
Product dimensions:	8.50(w) x 6.50(h) x 0.90(d)

About the Author

GERALD MAST was Professor of English at the University of Chicago. He was the author of The Comic Mind: Comedy and the Movies; Film/Cinema/Movie: A Theory of Experience; Howard Hawks, Storyteller; A Short History of the Movies and Can't Help Singin': The American Musical on Stage and Screen. 

Table of Contents

Introduction
Bringing Up Baby
Interviews, Reviews, and Commentaries
Filmography and Bibliography