movie review bringing up baby

Common Sense Media

Movie & TV reviews for parents

• For Parents
• For Educators
• Our Work and Impact

Or browse by category:

• Movie Reviews
• Best Movie Lists
• Best Movies on Netflix, Disney+, and More

Common Sense Selections for Movies

50 Modern Movies All Kids Should Watch Before They're 12

• Best TV Lists
• Best TV Shows on Netflix, Disney+, and More
• Common Sense Selections for TV
• Video Reviews of TV Shows

Best Kids' Shows on Disney+

Best Kids' TV Shows on Netflix

• Book Reviews
• Best Book Lists
• Common Sense Selections for Books

8 Tips for Getting Kids Hooked on Books

50 Books All Kids Should Read Before They're 12

• Game Reviews
• Best Game Lists

Common Sense Selections for Games

• Video Reviews of Games

Nintendo Switch Games for Family Fun

• Podcast Reviews
• Best Podcast Lists

Common Sense Selections for Podcasts

Parents' Guide to Podcasts

• App Reviews
• Best App Lists

Social Networking for Teens

Gun-Free Action Game Apps

Reviews for AI Apps and Tools

• YouTube Channel Reviews
• YouTube Kids Channels by Topic

Parents' Ultimate Guide to YouTube Kids

YouTube Kids Channels for Gamers

• Preschoolers (2-4)
• Little Kids (5-7)
• Big Kids (8-9)
• Pre-Teens (10-12)
• Teens (13+)
• Screen Time
• Social Media
• Online Safety
• Identity and Community

How to Help Kids Build Character Strengths with Quality Media

• Family Tech Planners
• Digital Skills
• All Articles
• Latino Culture
• Black Voices
• Asian Stories
• Native Narratives
• LGBTQ+ Pride
• Best of Diverse Representation List

Multicultural Books

YouTube Channels with Diverse Representations

Podcasts with Diverse Characters and Stories

Bringing up baby.

• Common Sense Says
• Parents Say 8 Reviews
• Kids Say 7 Reviews

Common Sense Media Review

By Nell Minow , based on child development research. How do we rate?

Classic screwball comedy with loads of tame laughs.

Parents Need to Know

Parents need to know that while there are a lot of physical misadventures in Bringing Up Bab y there no injuries in this madcap comedy. And except for a few shots of a roaring, teeth-baring leopard nothing is frightening or threatening in a real way. Characters are clumsy -- fall, bump into walls, drive…

Why Age 8+?

A family gardener drinks from a flask each time he appears; his constant tipplin

Flirting, some embracing, a few instances of gentle sexual innuendo. When the ma

In this “screwball comedy” all action sequences are cartoonish and p

Any Positive Content?

Even the most uptight people -- in this case, a single-minded scientist who appe

Katherine Hepburn's feisty, bright independence in this film celebrates wome

Drinking, Drugs & Smoking

A family gardener drinks from a flask each time he appears; his constant tippling is played for humor. Moderate alcohol consumption during dinner and at some social events.

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Drinking, Drugs & Smoking in your kid's entertainment guide.

Sex, Romance & Nudity

Flirting, some embracing, a few instances of gentle sexual innuendo. When the male lead is forced to wear a woman’s frilly robe, he ironically asks someone who is gawking at him: “You think I just went gay all of a sudden?”

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Sex, Romance & Nudity in your kid's entertainment guide.

Violence & Scariness

In this “screwball comedy” all action sequences are cartoonish and played for comic effect. A dog and a leopard scuffle on the grass with some growling and incidental biting. Two characters fall and slide down a short precipice. Lots of pratfalls –- slipping, falling, minor car accidents with dented bumpers and fenders, clothing gets torn, chickens escape and run rampant, a young woman hangs from a platform, and a museum dinosaur exhibit crashes to the ground. There’s a case of mistaken identity when a wild leopard is thought to be tame. The leopard bares his fangs, roars. Some non-threatening gun play as the characters try to catch the wild leopard.

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Violence & Scariness in your kid's entertainment guide.

Positive Messages

Even the most uptight people -- in this case, a single-minded scientist who appears to have no room in his life for emotion or pleasure -- can learn to live with spontaneity, passion, and joy.

Positive Role Models

Katherine Hepburn's feisty, bright independence in this film celebrates women on equal footing with their male counterparts. Though she's a non-working "society girl" and occasionally plays helpless, she's actually strong-willed, competent, and tenacious. As is common in many farcical movies of the era, law enforcement officers are depicted as dense, gullible, and inept.

Parents need to know that while there are a lot of physical misadventures in Bringing Up Bab y there no injuries in this madcap comedy. And except for a few shots of a roaring, teeth-baring leopard nothing is frightening or threatening in a real way. Characters are clumsy -- fall, bump into walls, drive incompetently, and more. "Baby," a tame leopard, is confused with a wild leopard which results in some chasing, erratic gun play, and more pratfalls. A character drinks to excess, also as a source of humor. There's one throwaway reference to going "gay." To stay in the loop on more movies like this, you can sign up for weekly Family Movie Night emails .

Where to Watch

Videos and photos.

Parent and Kid Reviews

• Parents say (8)
• Kids say (7)

Based on 8 parent reviews

A Classic Comedy for the whole family.

Omg so good, what's the story.

In BRINGING UP BABY, shy paleontologist David Huxley ( Cary Grant ) is hoping for three things: a rare dinosaur bone fossil, a million dollar research grant, and his marriage to colleague Miss Swallow. Madcap heiress Susan Vance ( Katharine Hepburn ), instantly smitten with David when he objects to her playing his golf ball and driving off in his car, manages to disrupt his life completely when she asks him to help her transport a leopard named "Baby" to her aunt's estate in Connecticut. Complications include Susan's dog George taking the irreplaceable bone fossil to bury somewhere, serenading the leopard to get him down from a neighbor's roof, being thrown in jail, confusing Baby with a vicious circus leopard, and the destruction of an entire dinosaur skeleton. David does not ultimately get the million dollars (it turns out that Susan's aunt was the prospective donor), but Susan does, so everyone lives happily ever after, including Baby.

Is It Any Good?

This is generally considered to be the ultimate example of the screwball comedy, which reached its apex in the 1930s, and director Howard Hawks proves his mastery of the genre. He pulls off an outlandish plot at breakneck speed with fabulous witty repartee and romantic tension between the perfectly cast leads, Grant and Hepburn (who are divine here). Bringing Up Baby may inspire them to take a look at dinosaur skeletons in a museum, though there is no such thing as an "intercostal clavicle."

Talk to Your Kids About ...

Families can talk about comedies. What are the elements of a "screwball comedy"? What are other comedic styles? Which do you prefer? Do you think Bringing Up Baby is funny?

How have movies changed over time? What sticks out in this movie as from another era? What elements of old-fashioned movies are missing from contemporary film? Have movies improved?

Alcohol drinking is played for laughs in this movie. What role do movies and other media have in our attitudes toward drinking?

Movie Details

• In theaters : February 18, 1938
• On DVD or streaming : October 14, 1997
• Cast : Cary Grant , Charles Ruggles , Katharine Hepburn
• Director : Howard Hawks
• Inclusion Information : Female actors
• Studio : RKO
• Genre : Comedy
• Run time : 102 minutes
• MPAA rating : NR
• Last updated : July 30, 2024

Did we miss something on diversity?

Research shows a connection between kids' healthy self-esteem and positive portrayals in media. That's why we've added a new "Diverse Representations" section to our reviews that will be rolling out on an ongoing basis. You can help us help kids by suggesting a diversity update.

Suggest an Update

What to watch next.

The Philadelphia Story

It Happened One Night

What's Up, Doc?

Best classic comedy films, classic books for kids.

Common Sense Media's unbiased ratings are created by expert reviewers and aren't influenced by the product's creators or by any of our funders, affiliates, or partners.

Log in or sign up for Rotten Tomatoes

Trouble logging in?

By continuing, you agree to the Privacy Policy and the Terms and Policies , and to receive email from the Fandango Media Brands .

By creating an account, you agree to the Privacy Policy and the Terms and Policies , and to receive email from Rotten Tomatoes and to receive email from the Fandango Media Brands .

By creating an account, you agree to the Privacy Policy and the Terms and Policies , and to receive email from Rotten Tomatoes.

Email not verified

Let's keep in touch.

Sign up for the Rotten Tomatoes newsletter to get weekly updates on:

• Upcoming Movies and TV shows
• Rotten Tomatoes Podcast
• Media News + More

By clicking "Sign Me Up," you are agreeing to receive occasional emails and communications from Fandango Media (Fandango, Vudu, and Rotten Tomatoes) and consenting to Fandango's Privacy Policy and Terms and Policies . Please allow 10 business days for your account to reflect your preferences.

OK, got it!

• About Rotten Tomatoes®
• Login/signup

Movies in theaters

• Opening this week
• Top box office
• Coming soon to theaters
• Certified fresh movies

Movies at home

• Fandango at Home
• Prime Video
• Most Popular Streaming Movies
• Certified Fresh Movies
• What to Watch New

Certified fresh picks

• 81% Alien: Romulus Link to Alien: Romulus
• 88% Between the Temples Link to Between the Temples
• 100% Daughters Link to Daughters

New TV Tonight

• 93% Chimp Crazy: Season 1
• 100% Pachinko: Season 2
• -- That '90s Show: Season 3
• -- OceanXplorers: Season 1
• -- Classified: Season 1
• -- Reasonable Doubt: Season 2
• -- The Anonymous: Season 1
• -- Face to Face With Scott Peterson: Season 1
• -- Wyatt Earp and the Cowboy War: Season 1

Most Popular TV on RT

• 92% Bad Monkey: Season 1
• 78% Star Wars: The Acolyte: Season 1
• 96% Industry: Season 3
• 86% Average Joe: Season 1
• 54% The Umbrella Academy: Season 4
• 100% Dark Winds: Season 2
• 100% Supacell: Season 1
• 82% A Good Girl's Guide to Murder: Season 1
• 78% Presumed Innocent: Season 1
• Best TV Shows
• Most Popular TV
• TV & Streaming News

Certified fresh pick

• 92% Bad Monkey: Season 1 Link to Bad Monkey: Season 1
• All-Time Lists
• Binge Guide
• Comics on TV
• Five Favorite Films
• Video Interviews
• Weekend Box Office
• Weekly Ketchup
• What to Watch

Andrew Garfield Movies and Series Ranked by Tomatometer

30 Most Popular Movies Right Now: What to Watch In Theaters and Streaming

What to Watch: In Theaters and On Streaming

Awards Tour

Renewed and Cancelled TV Shows 2024

Edgar Wright Surprises Shaun of the Dead Superfans

• Trending on RT
• Re-Release Calendar
• Popular TV Shows
• Renewed and Cancelled TV
• Best New Horror Movies

Bringing Up Baby Reviews

Howard Hawks directs with his usual zip, leading us effortlessly through every silly set piece.

Full Review | Original Score: 5/5 | Jun 7, 2024

I am happy to report that Bringing Up Baby is funny from the word go, that it has no other meaning to recommend it, nor therapeutic qualities, and that I wouldn’t swap it for practically any three things of the current season.

Full Review | Dec 26, 2023

Bringing Up Baby delves joyfully beyond the stiff pretences of modern life to reveal the wild and lustful animal that still lies beneath the surface.

Full Review | Dec 12, 2023

One of the funnest films of the season that is worth a watch. [Full review in Spanish]

Full Review | Jul 26, 2023

Unfortunately the narrative is too heavy with action. Movement and dialogue are so incessantly rapid that they occasionally become overwhelming. But the clean, fast fun of the film cannot be denied.

The story is clever, with witty dialogue and a wealth of hilarious sequences that provide for the best of entertainment.

Calculated easily to make even the scrupulously honest man forget his income-tax problems, Bringing Up Baby... is the giddiest, goofiest concoction of movie fare that ever tickled fandom.

Full Review | Jul 25, 2023

This is "down-to-earth" farce with liberal flashes of slapstick, and the surprise performance comes from Katharine Hepburn. She turns in a breezy performance that is different and incomparable with anything she has done before.

It is Cary Grant's film chiefly, with Charlie Ruggles all too briefly amusing in his jungle calls.

It is so funny, from first to last reel, that you will ache with laughter.

Every type of audience will be highly amused and entertained with this new RKO pix, literally a riot from beginning to end, with the laugh total heavy and the action fast. Katharine Hepburn is very funny in a comedy role and Cary Grant scores heavily.

Katherine Hepburn, of all people, has also gone slapstick. And, dash it, if we don't like her that way.

The director, Howard Hawks, keeps all this trifling nonsense in such artful balance that it never impinges on the real world; it may be the American movies' closest equivalent to Restoration comedy.

The dialogue sparkles and the acting shines as the big cat escapes and mishap follows mishap in swift succession.

Full Review | Original Score: 4/4 | Jul 25, 2023

Countless films have imitated Bringing Up Baby, most famously Peter Bogdanovich's homage What's Up, Doc?, but it is futile to look for its equal.

Full Review | Original Score: 5/5 | Jul 25, 2023

If you haven’t seen it, it’s impossible to overemphasize how truly bizarre Bringing Up Baby is -- less a film than a series of nonstop comedy sketches, loosely tied together by a kooky plot and even kookier characters.

Cary Grant handles the role of the paleontologist with his usual comic skill but the real surprise of the picture is Katharine Hepburn.

If you catch me on the right day and ask what I think the best comedy of all time is, it’s very likely I’ll say it’s 1938’s screwball classic Bringing Up Baby.

Full Review | Original Score: 4/4 | Mar 30, 2023

One of the all-time great screwball comedies in the era...

Full Review | Feb 28, 2023

It’s a shame that it can’t quite maintain the pace that it sets up during the first two acts but it puts in a damn good effort.

Full Review | Feb 3, 2023

Find anything you save across the site in your account

Bringing Up Baby

The enduring fascination of this 1938 screwball comedy is due to much more than its uproarious gags. Having already helped launch the genre, the director Howard Hawks here reinvents his comic voice, establishing archetypes of theme and performance that still hold sway. He turned Cary Grant into an extension of his own intellectual irony, an absent-minded professor who seems lost in thought but awaits the chance to unleash his inner leopard. He refashioned Katharine Hepburn as a sexually determined woman who hides her aggression under intricate scatterbrained schemes that force the deep thinker to deploy his untapped humor and virility. And Hawks brought to fruition his own universe of hints and symbols to conjure the force that rules the world: she tears his coat, he tears her dress, she steals his clothes, she names him “Bone,” and the mating cries of wild animals disturb the decorum of the dinner table, even as a Freudian psychiatrist in a swanky bar gives viewers an answer key. (Anthology Film Archives, Nov. 24, and streaming.)

Bringing Up Baby (1938)

• User Reviews

Awards | FAQ | User Ratings | External Reviews | Metacritic Reviews

• User Ratings
• External Reviews
• Metacritic Reviews
• Full Cast and Crew
• Release Dates
• Official Sites
• Company Credits
• Filming & Production
• Technical Specs
• Plot Summary
• Plot Keywords
• Parents Guide

Did You Know?

• Crazy Credits
• Alternate Versions
• Connections
• Soundtracks

Photo & Video

• Photo Gallery
• Trailers and Videos

Related Items

• External Sites

Related lists from IMDb users

Recently Viewed

• Filmsite Home
• About & Contact
• Privacy Policy
• Terms of Use

Copyright © 1996-2024 Filmsite LLC. All rights reserved.

Bringing Up Baby

• Blu-ray edition reviewed by Chris Galloway
• August 09 2021

See more details, packaging, or compare

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.

Picture 7/10

The Criterion Collection brings Howard Hawks’ screwball classic Bringing Up Baby to Blu-ray, presenting the film in its original aspect ratio of 1.37:1 on a dual-layer disc. The 1080p/24hz high-definition encode is sourced from a new 4K restoration performed by Criterion.

Warner’s original DVD edition, while decent for what it was, showed a film that had seen better days. The general consensus at the time seemed to be that suitable elements for the film were few and far between (if they even existed at all), so I wasn’t sure what to expect from Criterion’s all-new restoration. According to the notes Criterion provides with this release they worked with Warner Bros. to track down the best possible elements for the film, and their search managed to yield a couple of decent finds: a 35mm nitrate duplicate negative (from the British Film Institute) and then a 35mm safety fine-grain positive. The latter was later generation and not optimal, while the former was still littered with mold. The notes say scanning the negative through a wet-gate scanner eliminated most of the mold, and the film could then be rescanned at 4K.

The lengthy search and efforts have paid off miraculously as the presentation does go well and beyond what I could have probably hoped for. There are still some source issues present, but they’re really of minimal concern in the end. Grain is fairly heavy, getting a bit thicker at times (maybe they had to alternate between the other source, but the notes don’t state whether that ended up being the case), but it’s rendered nicely here, retaining a natural look. This leads to some sharp looking details, the spots on the leopard looking pretty distinct, and the various outfits (including that nightgown work by Grant briefly) showing the finer details rather effortlessly.

The black and white image looks nice with excellent contrast and clean grayscale. Blacks look good and lead to nice looking shadow details, while whites can still look pretty sharp without blooming. Marks and such still remain, including some minor scratches, and there are a few dupier looking shots, but the damage is rarely intrusive. On the whole, the restoration work has managed to pull off a bit of a miracle; the film looks surprisingly clean, all things considered, and it’s delivered cleanly on this disc.

The lossless PCM 1.0 monaural soundtrack is a product of its time but it still manages to sound better than I was expecting. Dialogue is clean and sharp, managing to have some decent fidelity behind it. Range isn’t too bad, though the higher ends border on coming off edgy. But there is no severe damage to speak of, no drops, pops, or cracks.

Extras 8/10

Criterion packs on a decent amount of material, starting things off with director Peter Bogdanovich’s audio commentary , which was recorded for Warner’s DVD back in 2005. Bogdanovich’s What’s Up Doc? —an ode to the screwball comedies of Hollywood’s Golden Age—takes a lot from Hawks’ film so I guess he’s a natural go-to to talk about the film and its frantic humour. He studied the gags for his own film (he points out ones he lifted) and talks a bit about their construction, and comments on elements that he feels were probably ahead of their time (Grant’s “I just went gay all of a sudden” line). He also interviewed Hawks about the film, and he recounts those discussion here, though does so with his own impersonation of Hawks.

Bogdanovich’s impersonation isn’t terrible —and a bit funny, I guess—but it can be a little much; I would almost prefer it if he just simply told what Hawks had told him. Thankfully, Criterion does include 15-minutes’ worth of audio excerpts from that 1972 interview between Bogdanovich and Hawks  referenced in the commentary, where Hawks talks about the film’s production and its eventual lackluster reception, which Bogdanovich also goes into on the commentary; Hawks felt if there were "a few sane" characters in the film it would have done better at the box office, feeling all of the characters were nuts. It's an interesting discussion with some funny moments, like when Hawks shoots down Bogdanovich’s reading of the film’s ending.

Outside of the original trailer nothing else from Warner’s DVD gets ported over, the rest of the material appearing to be exclusive to this release. Criterion first includes a new video essay by author Scott Eyman , who uses his 18-minutes to explore the development of Cary Grant’s onscreen persona, starting with his apparently disastrous turn in the short Singapore Sue (and I’ll take Eyman’s word on that as I haven’t seen it) through his more modest, mostly straight dramatic work for Paramount, until finally hitting where he started to hone his comedic side. That showed through in  Sylvia Scarlett  (where he stole the film from star Katharine Hepburn) and then seeming to hit that sweet spot with the streak of films consisting of The Awful Truth , Bringing Up Baby , and Holiday , Eyman ultimately attributing Grant’s success to the freedom that directors like McCarey, Hawks, and Cukor allowed him.

It's an okay essay, doing a good job of charting through Grant’s early work and examining how his performances and on-screen character(s) morphed, but it’s not terribly eye-opening. Still, I enjoyed it more than a select-scene commentary by costume historian Shelly Foote, who talks over 22-minutes’ worth of footage from the film, covering the work of costume designer Howard Greer. She goes over details of the various costumes found in the film (like Grant’s nightgown) but it is more of look at Greer’s career as a whole. It’s ultimately fine for what it is but a visual essay format may have worked a bit better.

To accompany all of that Criterion then includes two new interviews focusing around the film’s “look” and effects. Cinematographer John Bailey  first pops in for 11-minutes to discuss Russell Metty’s work on the film. It ends up being a bit odd to look at Metty’s photography for this film since it doesn’t stand out as much as what he did for, say, some of Douglas Sirk’s films, but Bailey still uses the opportunity to examine how the comedic moments are filmed and edited. In the end, it primarily comes down to long, static takes. A bit better is Craig Barron ’s 12-minute contribution around the film’s effects, most of which revolved around the leopard and separating it from its stars… where needed. I always like Barron’s contributions to Criterion’s releases as he clearly explains—with the help of visual aids—how the effects in the film were pulled off, even going as far as pointing out the mistakes. It’s my favourite addition of Criterion’s newly produced material.

The remaining two supplements are of the archival kind, starting with the 1977 documentary Howard Hawks: A Hell of a Good Life , running 56-minutes. The German produced film features lengthy interviews with Hawks—a month before his death—going over his work and his thoughts behind filmmaking, describing himself as simply being a “storyteller,” not considering himself an artist. He also shares some great stories around some of his films, including his “talk” with Carole Lombard on Twentieth Century  after a disastrous first day of filming.

It's a great addition to the release unto itself, Hawks being very forthcoming, but the audio recording of a Q&A featuring Cary Grant ends up being just a delight. Recorded in 1969 after a screening of Bringing Up Baby , Grant takes questions from the audience and manages to use them to work his way through his career and his work, sharing stories around the directors he has worked with and recounting his work with Hepburn through the years, the actress he has most enjoyed working with. It’s a fun recording and maybe my favourite feature on here.

The 40-page booklet also packs in some other good material. Sheila O'Malley provides an essay around the film, placing it in the context of the time period in guessing why it didn't do well (was probably just way too chaotic) and goes over the career of the film's stars up to that point. The booklet also feature Hagar Wilde's short story the film is  loosely  based on. The notes for it also warn of "anti-asian stereotypes" and yep , right there even before the end of the first paragraph.

Criterion doesn't carry over a couple of things from the DVD: missing are the short film  Campus Cinderella  and the Looney Tunes short A Star is Hatched , along with documentaries around Hawks and Grant. Not huge losses, though, the two shorts having  nothing  to do with the film and the two documentaries being fairly generic, their respective gaps filled in (adequately enough at least) by other material on here.

Overall, this edition manages to offer a solid upgrade over Warner's previous DVD edition.

Criterion's new edition improves upon Warner's old DVD in every way, providing a better selection of supplements and a significantly better visual presentation. Certainly worth the upgrade.

You Might Like

The Philadelphia Story (Blu-ray)

Only Angels Have Wings (Blu-ray)

Charade (Blu-ray)

Reel Classics - Where Black Meets White

Bringing up baby: the criterion collection (1938).

"I've got my head. I've lost my leopard!"

As far as screwball comedies go, the pairing of Cary Grant and Katharine Hepburn was probably seen as an odd choice in 1938. She didn’t have a hit film and Grant , hitting his comedic stride, was just coming off of The Awful Truth to rave reviews. Sure, he would define his persona with this genre and it was usually the women co-starring alongside him which would help him do it due to the chemistry, but Hepburn was indeed a risk.

In fact, it was with the box office failure of Bringing Up Baby which led to her being labeled as box office poison.  That’s right, this beloved comedy was, in fact, an absolute dud upon its original release.  Maybe it was Grant ad libbing, while wearing a woman’s négligée, that he’s suddenly gone gay which turned audiences off.  Of course, the meaning of the term was different in the ‘30s, but still . . . the fault can’t all be laid at Hepburn ’s feet.  Right?  Was it the editing? 

Hepburn ’s role in Bringing Up Baby as Susan Vance, a hot-to-trot heiress with a leopard named Baby in tow, might have been written with her in mind, but her comedic timing still needed some work during the filming. Good thing she had Grant and co-star Walter Catlett to lean on as their vaudeville backgrounds must have aided her comedic timing in the back-and-forth banter between her and Grant .  

Certainly, the cast - whose outbreaks and fits of laughter caused many delays in the completion of filming - was having a blast, but would the audience? It certainly seemed like it and with co-stars Charles Ruggles, May Robson , and Virgina Walker as David's fiancée all in, Bringing Up Baby - pets and all - seemed like it was a sure thing.

But, thanks to a re-release and the advent of television, Bringing Up Baby did indeed find an appreciative audience and the sidesplitting comedy - in which David Huxley ( Grant ), a (usually) reserved paleontologist, finds himself in a series of frustrating and funny situations involving the scatterbrained Vance, her pet leopard, and a buried dinosaur bone (thanks to a dog) that he needs for his brontosaurus display.  He’s going to lose it for sure, but can he keep it together long enough to secure a million dollar donation for his museum?

Bringing Up Baby , while not the quickest of screwball families, has the answer.  The laughter and the chemistry is nonstop as Huxley finds himself at the beck and call of Vance, who tries to keep him from his own wedding.  Her plan might even work, too.  With no straight man in sight, Bringing Up Baby is often choppy and chaotic, but there is poetry in that kind of dusting which eventually leads to SOLID GOLD .

Bringing Up Baby is a REEL CLASSIC and, thankfully, it is now on blu-ray with a newly restored 4K digital transfer, with uncompressed monaural soundtrack! The screwball sparks will fly!

Home Video Distributor: Criterion Available on Blu-ray - July 6, 2021 Screen Formats: 1.37:1 Subtitles : English SDH Audio: LPCM Mono Discs: Blu-ray Disc; single disc Region Encoding: Locked to Region A

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 .

The grace!  The elegance!  Hepburn and Grant together again in 4K!  Criterion Collection , with a 1.37:1 aspect ratio, presents Bringing Up Baby with a glorious 4K transfer that sweeps away sour memories of watching the old DVD copies of the film.  Thank goodness!  This crisp transfer absolutely crackles with depth, definition, and details as we get looks at nightclubs, apartment buildings, and even a courtroom and it all looks amazingly handled.  Even the night scenes are pocketed with details.  The black-and-white photography here sizzles and the blacks and grays are handled expertly by the transfer. 

You’ll be heard laughing over the DTS-HD Master Audio 2.0 track which accompanies this film.

Supplements:

Commentary :

• See special features

Special Features:

Complete with an essay by critic Sheila O’Malley and, for the Blu-ray, the 1937 short story by Hagar Wilde on which the film is based, the special features on this release are definitely interesting. We get interviews, audio excerpts, video essays, plus the 4K restoration. Fans are going to love this release!

• 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 featuring 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
• English subtitles for the deaf and hard of hearing

MPAA Rating: Unrated. Runtime: 102 mins Director : Howard Hawkes Writer: Dudley Nichols; Hagar Wilde Cast: Katharine Hepburn; Cary Grant; Charles Ruggles Genre : Comedy | Romance Tagline: And so begins the hilarious adventure of Professor David Huxley and Miss Susan Vance, a flutter-brained vixen with love in her heart! Memorable Movie Quote: "Well, I've heard that if you throw pebbles up against a window, the people think it's hail and then they come and close the windows." Theatrical Distributor: RKO Pictures Official Site: Release Date: February 18, 1938 DVD/Blu-ray Release Date: July 6, 2021. Synopsis : While trying to secure a $1 million donation for his museum, a befuddled paleontologist is pursued by a flighty and often irritating heiress and her pet leopard, Baby.

New in Theaters/VOD

New on Home Video

• Godzilla (1954) The Criterion Collection - Blu-ray Review
• Island of Lost Souls (1932) - Blu-ray Review
• The Phantom Carriage - Blu-ray Review
• The Great Dictator - Blu-ray Review
• 8 1/2 - Blu-ray Review

Movie Trailers

• Trailer Watch - OUT COME THE WOLVES (2024)
• Trailer Watch - CHARLIE TANGO
• Trailer Watch - SLINGSHOT (2024)
• Trailer Watch - PACHINKO - Season Two
• Trailer Watch - KNOCK OUT BLONDE: THE KELLY MALONEY STORY

Movie Reviews

Morbidly Hollywood

• Colorado Street Suicide Bridge
• Death of a Princess - The Story of Grace Kelly's Fatal Car Crash
• Joaquin Phoenix 911 Call - River Phoenix - Viper Room
• Screen Legend Elizabeth Taylor Dies at 79
• Suicide and the Hollywood Sign - The Girl Who Jumped from the Hollywood Sign
• The Amityville Horror House
• The Black Dahlia Murder - The Death of Elizabeth Short
• The Death of Actress Jane Russell
• The Death of Brandon Lee
• The Death of Chris Farley
• The Death of Dominique Dunne
• The Death of George Reeves - the Original Superman

The Criterion Collection

• My Collection

Bringing Up Baby : Bones, Balls, and Butterflies

By Sheila O’Malley

Jul 6, 2021

• Icon/Share/Facebook
• Icon/Share/Twitter
• Icon/Share/Email

“T his is probably the silliest thing that ever happened to me,” tut-tuts stuffy paleontologist David Huxley (Cary Grant), in Howard Hawks’s 1938 classic Bringing Up Baby. As A. O. Scott has observed, Bringing Up Baby is the “screwiest screwball of them all.” It is so divorced from normal society that its scenes taking place in the civilized daylight can be counted on one hand, while night scenes dominate. All hell breaks loose at night in the form of a couple of leopards terrorizing the countryside, wreaking physical, emotional, and societal havoc. Bringing Up Baby is the silliest thing to happen to American comedy, too, and has been a reminder for eighty-three years (and counting) of how necessary and sneakily profound silliness can be. The film opens with an exchange the Production Code censors missed. David—sitting on a scaffold above a brontosaurus skeleton, holding an enormous bone—calls to his fiancée, the humorless Alice Swallow (Virginia Walker), “Alice, I think this one must belong in the tail.” Alice, probably unaware of the double entendre of her last name, says, “Nonsense. You tried it in the tail yesterday.” Alice sends him off to golf with Mr. Peabody (George Irving), who is considering securing a million-dollar donation to David’s museum. But David gets sidetracked by a breezy whirlwind named Susan Vance (Katharine Hepburn), who first steals his golf ball and then steals his car (it won’t be her last car theft), causing David to abandon Mr. Peabody on the golf course and chase her down. In one of the funniest visual gags in the movie, David stands on the car’s running board, hanging on for dear life as this crazy woman careens out of the lot. The next day—after Susan and David cause multiple scenes at a supper club that result in the two literally, if unintentionally, ripping off each other’s clothes—they both receive packages: for David, it’s the “intercostal clavicle,” the bone needed to complete his dinosaur, and for Susan, it’s Baby, a leopard with a yen for the song “I Can’t Give You Anything but Love, Baby.” With all those bones, balls, and cats running around, it’s obvious the censors were sleeping on the job. Over the next twenty-four hours, Susan loses David’s bone, breaks up his engagement, and destroys his brontosaurus. David, pulled along in her wake, wrestles with a leopard in a pond, sings at the top of his lungs underneath a psychiatrist’s window—showing pride in his harmony line—and races around in a negligee, all while trying to maintain what Molly Haskell has called “the ossified shell of his dignity.” The duo collect a cast of eccentrics along the way, including Susan’s judgmental battle-ax of an aunt (May Robson), perpetually horrified by her niece’s shenanigans, and big-game hunter Horace Applegate (Charles Ruggles), who blunders through life in a welter of confusion mixed with a misguided superiority complex. The gardener (Barry Fitzgerald) is a drunk, and the constable (Walter Catlett) gets so befuddled he throws the entire lot of them in jail, threatening to put everyone “on bread and water for thirty days.” In an interview with Peter Bogdanovich, Hawks theorized about the film’s “great fault”: “There were no normal people in it. Everyone you met was a screwball . . . I think it would have done better at the box office if there had been a few sane folks in it.” Perhaps, but the issue could run deeper: surrendering to chaos without the reassurance of a rebuilt world at the end may not have been what audiences wanted in 1938, exhausted by a decade of financial ruin and looking with anxiety at the clouds of war darkening over Europe yet again.

Hawks, Grant, and Hepburn were all at professional and creative crossroads when they made Bringing Up Baby. Hepburn’s career was in a nosedive after her initial triumphs gave way to a series of flops. She had made her film debut as a full-blown lead, in 1932’s A Bill of Divorcement, then won a best actress Oscar for her third film, the following year’s Morning Glory, and was nominated in the same category two years later. Being embraced by the industry that quickly is almost unprecedented, and perhaps her early success made her a bigger target for backlash. By the midthirties, her stylized high-class persona was wearing thin with audiences, and her forays into different types of material fell flat.

If all you saw of Hepburn’s work was Bringing Up Baby, you would think screwball was her forte, but the film is an anomaly in her career. She went on to give funny performances, including in her next two films, the adaptations from Philip Barry plays Holiday (1938) and The Philadelphia Story (1940)—the latter being the picture that really turned her run of bad luck around—and then in her witty collaborations with Spencer Tracy; even the way she lands her cutting quips in a historical drama like The Lion in Winter (1968) shows her tuning-fork ear for comedy. Screwball shenanigans did not come naturally to her, though, and after Bringing Up Baby she never played such an agent of chaos again. In the first days of rehearsal for the film, she struggled with the slapstick material, and Hawks saw that she was “trying to be funny.” He asked Catlett, a vaudeville veteran, to give her some tips. To Hepburn’s credit, she did not balk at this interference but took Catlett’s coaching and ran with it, as though she were born to the genre. Hepburn often played very uptight, high-strung characters. Here, she is an irresistible engine of fun. To watch her sitting at the bar, giggling as she tries to pop an olive into her mouth, a glittering ribbon spiraling around her face in unruly corkscrews, is to enter Susan’s reality-distortion field.

She got mostly positive reviews. Otis Ferguson wrote in the New Republic that she was “triumphant in illogic and serene in the bounding brassy nerve possible only to the very, very well-bred.” Variety called her “invigorating.” However, audience response was erratic: the film did well in some cities, flopped in others. It was pulled from Radio City after just a week. The shoot ran long and went over budget, so RKO lost money on the unpredictable ticket sales. Hepburn took much of the blame, and ended up on the infamous “box office poison” list compiled by Harry Brandt, president of the Independent Theater Owners Association. Hepburn was in good company on the list: Joan Crawford, Greta Garbo, Marlene Dietrich, and Kay Francis were also labeled “poison.” While Hepburn was going through a rough patch, Grant, having just become a big star with 1937’s The Awful Truth, was on the ascent. It had taken him a while to find his way, experimenting with different styles, gestures, accents. He was calculated about remaking himself, saying, “I invented an accent . . . The rest I stole from Noël Coward.” He made his screen debut the same year Hepburn did, but despite appearing in eight films in 1932 alone, he didn’t make much of an impression, as hard as that is to believe now. Mae West used him twice, in She Done Him Wrong and I’m No Angel (both 1933), as pretty-boy eye candy, but in those films he is almost amorphous and indistinct, lacking the sharp boundaries necessary for his eventual sui generis movie magic. That would finally arrive in 1935’s Sylvia Scarlett, directed by George Cukor. Playing opposite Hepburn, Grant is not the lead, but he steals the movie. Cukor himself said, “ Sylvia Scarlett was the first time Cary felt the ground under his feet as an actor. He suddenly seemed liberated.”

“Hawks’s sense of humor was silly and cynical, and screwball would prove to be the perfect landscape in which to play out his fantasies of the battle of the sexes.”

David Huxley was a radical shift for Grant: he had never before played a workaholic, sexless nerd. Hawks told Grant to think of everyman silent film star Harold Lloyd, who often played a resourceful boy next door eager to do well, and Grant understood instantly, even adopting Lloyd’s signature thick glasses for the role. In David, Grant almost single-handedly created the prototype of the absentminded professor. His posture is ramrod-straight, arms hanging like inert logs as he runs after Hepburn in an anxious little trot, his steps tiny and filled with fear. The dam bursts when, clad in Susan’s negligee (three feathery poufs on each arm, like rings around a rogue planet), he bumps into her aunt, who demands to know why he is wearing those clothes. Grant explodes, “Because I just went gay all of a sudden,” leaping into the air on “gay,” his tall frame bent at the waist, arms outstretched. It is difficult to imagine another actor playing the moment the way Grant plays it, with that much freedom and a willingness to acknowledge the elephant of fluid sexuality in the room. There have been reams of commentary on that line, particularly because of the long-standing, well-founded speculation that Grant himself was on the gay side of the sexuality spectrum, rumors he was well aware of at the time. Whatever the truth may be about his personal life, the result is electrifying. Even in screwball, leading men didn’t, in general, go that crazy.

The screwball-comedy era had dawned in 1934 with the one-two punch of Frank Capra’s It Happened One Night and Hawks’s own madcap Twentieth Century, a film that broadened the scope of his talent. Though Hawks worked in all genres—his second film had been a sex comedy about Adam and Eve, with cameos by dinosaurs, in a little foreshadowing—his main interest was the world of men. Many of his films show men working together to solve mechanical problems, bonding through camaraderie and cooperation. But his sense of humor was silly and cynical, and screwball would prove to be the perfect landscape in which to play out his fantasies of the battle of the sexes. It would take a few years for Hawks to make a proper screwball follow-up to Twentieth Century. He worked a lot in the midthirties, but in retrospect, one senses that he was spinning his wheels. Samuel Goldwyn fired him in the middle of shooting Come and Get It (William Wyler stepped in to finish the film), and he spent a good deal of time developing Rudyard Kipling’s Gunga Din for the screen (George Stevens ended up directing the project). It was during this aimless time that Hawks came across a short story by Hagar Wilde in the RKO story department, with a note attached: “Hilariously funny, and the possibilities for further comedy complications are limitless.” Hawks agreed.

Wilde had some experience in show business, with a previous stint in Hollywood writing dialogue for The Age for Love for Howard Hughes in the early thirties. Hawks brought her back to adapt her story for the screen, with help from Dudley Nichols—an interesting choice, since he was known for dramas (he had recently won the Oscar for John Ford’s The Informer ). Some of the dialogue is taken word for word from the source, but major changes were made. In the story, there is no brontosaurus and David is not a paleontologist. He and Susan are engaged, and Susan’s aunt is coded as a lesbian, living for years with an ex–opera singer named Drusilla. Nichols removed Drusilla and added the complications of Alice and the intercostal clavicle, all while maintaining Wilde’s dizzy tone. In the many interviews Hawks gave later in life, he said he didn’t care about funny dialogue. Humor came from the situation. More specifically, the characters in his comedies don’t know they’re in a comedy. They think they’re in a tragedy. To David Huxley, losing the intercostal clavicle is a devastating disaster. To Susan, the thought of losing David throws her into a panic. “He’s the only man I’ve ever loved!” she sobs to her aunt. When David keeps getting up from the dinner table to follow the dog around, it’s hilarious not thanks to any verbal jokes but because of the logic underneath the absurd behavior.

“It may end in an embrace, but it is impossible to imagine David and Susan in a conventional domestic relationship.”

Bogdanovich asked Hawks if David “abandoned his scientific life” at the end. Hawks replied, “Well, let’s say he mixed it . . . He becomes more normal as the picture goes along, just by his association with the girl.” (It’s illuminating that, in Hawks’s view, Susan is the normal one.) Marriage barely exists in Hawks’s films, and when it does show up, it’s not exactly a blessing. Children are also nearly nonexistent, and the proverbial white picket fence is nowhere to be found in his capacious dreamspace. When David realizes Susan is the one for him, he exclaims, “I love you, I think!” The “I think” is classic Hawks. Bringing Up Baby may end in an embrace, but it is impossible to imagine David and Susan in a conventional domestic relationship.

When compared with other screwballs of the era—even with the ones Hawks went on to direct— Bringing Up Baby seems almost like the genre’s feral stepchild. The film doesn’t just go off leash; it questions the concept of leashes altogether. The law of the jungle reigns. Bringing Up Baby has much in common with Shakespeare comedies such as A Midsummer Night’s Dream and As You Like It, in which the characters leave the rule-bound court and enter the forest. In the forest, love, lust, gender-bending, and magic all flourish. At the end, the characters return to the court, ready to rejoin society. Order is restored. In Bringing Up Baby, though, order is not restored: the brontosaurus collapses, and so does civilization. Maybe it deserves to go down. Bringing Up Baby was rediscovered in the fifties and sixties with the advent of television and the Cahiers du cinéma crowd, who adored Hawks, lifting him into the pantheon. The film quickly shot to the top of everyone’s list as one of the funniest comedies of all time. Its initial reputation as a flop continues to puzzle, and points to the pitfalls of deciding what is or is not a classic in real time. Sometimes you just have to wait. Hawks lived to see his film vindicated. A cautionary tale embeds itself in Bringing Up Baby in the form of Horace Applegate. If Susan hadn’t barged into David’s life, David might have become a pedantic, celibate bore like Horace. This is romantic and hopeful, yes, but a little disturbing too. What a close call! We like to think of our identities as solid, that we are in charge of our destinies and can course-correct on our own if necessary. Hawks chuckles and says, “Wanna bet?” Through the pandemonium, David becomes a real person. Alice dumps him, saying, “You showed yourself up in your true colors. You’re just a butterfly.” Alice, of course, misses the point, as the Alices of the world always do. A butterfly doesn’t symbolize irresponsibility. A butterfly symbolizes transformation. Susan forces David out of his chrysalis, and he emerges into the limitless night air, where a man can breathe, where a woman not only loves him but returns his bone to him, at last.

More: Essays

Not a Pretty Picture: An Act of Reckoning

In her formally daring debut feature, Martha Coolidge stages a confrontation with the subject of date rape that questions the kind of “closure” required in conventional storytelling.

By Molly Haskell

Two Films by Kira Muratova: Restless Moments

In films that elude categorization, the Ukrainian director developed a boldly experimental aesthetic that evokes her mercurial inner dialogue and the leaps and stutters of her imagination.

By Jessica Kiang

Risky Business: Coming of Age in Reagan’s America

Unlike the string of early-1980s sex comedies that it superficially resembles, Paul Brickman’s debut feature fuses fierce social satire and dark, dreamy eroticism with unexpectedly rich and ambiguous results.

By Dave Kehr

Farewell My Concubine: All the World’s a Stage

Chen Kaige’s sweeping epic chronicles the history of twentieth-century China through the story of two childhood friends, contrasting the unchanging traditions of their Beijing-opera milieu with the nation’s swift and turbulent transformation.

By Pauline Chen

You have no items in your shopping cart

Bringing Up Baby (1938)

Directed by howard hawks.

• AllMovie Rating 6
• User Ratings ( 0 )
• Your Rating
• Overview ↓
• User Reviews ↓
• Cast & Crew ↓
• Streams ↓
• Related ↓

Description by Wikipedia

Bringing Up Baby is a 1938 American screwball comedy film directed by Howard Hawks, starring Katharine Hepburn and Cary Grant, and released by RKO Radio Pictures. The film tells the story of a paleontologist in a number of predicaments involving a scatterbrained woman and a leopard named Baby. The screenplay was adapted by Dudley Nichols and Hagar Wilde from a short story by Wilde which originally appeared in Collier's Weekly magazine on April 10, 1937.

The script was written specifically for Hepburn, and was tailored to her personality. Filming began in September 1937 and wrapped in January 1938; it was over schedule and over budget. Production was frequently delayed due to uncontrollable laughing fits between Hepburn and Grant. Hepburn struggled with her comedic performance and was coached by her co-star, vaudeville veteran Walter Catlett. A tame leopard was used during the shooting; its trainer was off-screen with a whip for all its scenes.

Although it has a reputation as a flop upon its release, Bringing up Baby was moderately successful in many cities and eventually made a small profit after its re-release in the early 1940s. Shortly after the film's premiere, Hepburn was infamously labeled box-office poison by the Independent Theatre Owners of America and would not regain her success until The Philadelphia Story two years later. The film's reputation began to grow during the 1950s, when it was shown on television.

Since then, the film has received acclaim from both critics and audience for its zany antics and pratfalls, absurd situations and misunderstandings, perfect sense of comic timing, completely screwball cast, series of lunatic and hare-brained misadventures, disasters, light-hearted surprises and romantic comedy. Nowadays, it is considered one of the greatest films ever made.

In 1990 Bringing Up Baby was selected for preservation in the National Film Registry of the Library of Congress as "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant", and it has appeared on a number of greatest-films lists, ranking at 88th on the American Film Institute's 100 greatest American films of all time list.

Official Site

Part of collection, related movies.

Alternate Titles

Bringing Up Baby Review

18 Feb 1938

102 minutes

Bringing Up Baby

Screwball comedy is defined by the eccentric characters, unconventional situations, slapstick, mishaps, sexual chemistry and snappy repartee of this landmark jape. Staples of the genre — an absent-minded professor, a madcap heiress, a contrary animal (or three in this case), a large sum of money being sought, pratfalls, cocktails, false identity, a pursuit, a car crash, an unwanted fiancee, and absurd confusion — are all present in mint condition in Howard Hawks' breakneck-paced, maniacally funny picture; written by one of the top screenwriters of the 30s, Dudley Nichols (an Oscar winner for the John Ford drama The Informer (1935).

The earnest, easily muddled palaeontologist in need of some fun, Dr. David Huxley (Grant) is awaiting the last bone to complete the brontosaurus he has laboured four years to reconstruct. It is to arrive on the morrow, his wedding day. Fiancee and assistant Alice Swallow (Virginia Walker), a prim bluestocking scold, sends him off to play golf with the lawyer of a potential benefactor, to schmooze for a million dollar grant to continue his project at the natural history museum. But Huxley's efforts on the golf course become a shambles when he encounters blithe and playful, "conceited, spoiled little scatterbrain" Susan Vance (Hepburn). And that's just the first five minutes. Give her 24 hours and disaster instigator Susan is going to turn David's life upside down.

Baby is the tame leopard Susan's brother has shipped from his hunting expedition in Brazil (just the sort of thing the idle rich do in 30s films). The only information that comes with him is that Baby likes dogs (whether as food or for companionship poses a later relevant question) and music, particularly I Can't Give You Anything But Love. He also likes mauling the hapless professor Huxley, as does Susan, who is determined to have him and keep him near when she discovers how handsome he is without his academic specs on.

Thus he is shanghaied to convey Baby to Susan's aunt's farm in Connecticut where — after the obligatory collision with a poultry truck, car theft and the swiping of David's clothes — she is revealed as the wealthy philanthropist. Meanwhile, her fiendish fox terrier George steals and buries the brontosaurus clavicle (somewhere in a 26-acre garden), Susan frees a man-killing leopard she's mistaken for the missing Baby and most of the ensemble are jailed in noisy pandemonium.

Countless films have imitated Bringing Up Baby, most famously Peter Bogdanovich's homage What's Up, Doc? (1972), but it is

futile to look for its equal. Hawks, a master of any genre, was one of the innovators of deliriously frantic, overlapping dialogue; only His Girl Friday (1940 — also Hawks) can claim faster talking. Hepburn and Grant, who made four films together, are a peerless partnership in the departments of good looks, charm and comic timing, throwing themselves down slopes, into water holes, atop a dinosaur and into love like no-one else. Highlights include Susan, unaware David's foot is on her hem, stomping off minus the back of her lame gown, forcing a tandem silly walk out of a club to cover her exposed drawers; Susan and David harmonizing I Can't Give You Anything But Love to a sulking Baby on the roof, over a Viennese psychiatrist who's already convinced they're insane; and the enraged David aggressively accosting stately Aunt Elizabeth (May Robson) while he's wearing nothing but a marabou-trimmed negligee.

The special effects, devised by Linwood Dunn, deserve a mention since, even today, the interplay between Grant, Hepburn, the pooch, the recalcitrant Baby, and his deadly double, looks hilariously real. The leopard was filmed separately and put together with his co-stars by means of a travelling matte, blended split-screen technique. Look very closely when Hepburn drags the snarling beast into the police station (actually she was heaving a prop man tied to her rope), and you may just glimpse the ghost image of another rope (the underlay footage of the trainer pulling the leopard).

Bringing Up Baby, which cost about a million dollars to make, did not find favour with audiences on its first release and actually lost about $365,000. Hepburn's latest of several flops, it ended her work at RKO. She moved back to New York for two years, returning in possession of the rights to film The Philadelphia Story, for which she chose Grant to partner her in a triumphant comeback — at MGM. Ironically, as RKO declined, Bringing Up Baby's popularity grew alongside its reknown as "the definitive screwball comedy". And so did Hepburn's fortune. The savvy star owned a piece of it.

Related Articles

Movies | 19 05 2020

Movies | 08 12 2014

Color Scheme

• Use system setting
• Light theme

Don’t drop the Baby: 85 years since ‘Bringing Up Baby’ changed the course of cinematic comedy

It’s hard to believe, but the classic film “Bringing Up Baby,” released 85-years ago, was a box office bust.

However, “Bringing Up Baby” was embraced during the ‘50s when it was shown on television. A number of beloved movies also were stiffed, but became beloved and hit paydirt years after release, such as “The Wizard of Oz,” “Heathers,” “Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory,” “Blade Runner” and “The Shawshank Redemption.”

Somehow “Bringing Up Baby,” a brilliant screwball comedy, which landed on the American Film Institute’s Top 100 movies of all-time list, failed to connect with the general public pre-World War II. Critics claimed that Katherine Hepburn, who co-starred with Cary Grant, was box office poison. That changed with 1940’s “The Philadelphia Story,” which hit screens two years later and also co-starred Grant (along with James Stewart).

The word from the “Bringing Up Baby” set was that it was as much fun as the film, which is about a nerdy paleontologist co-existing with a flighty heiress and her leopard named Baby.

Production was often delayed due to uncontrollable laughing fits between Hepburn and Grant. It’s not surprising since the chemistry between the iconic actors is palpable. Hepburn and Grant’s connection is magical, including in 1935’s “Sylvia Scarlett,” and 1938’s “Holiday.”

“Sylvia Scarlett” isn’t a brilliant film, but it’s worth catching Hepburn portray a boy to escape the police and move about in a free manner in society. The movie was made 15 years after women were finally allowed to vote. Grant plays an affable smuggler.

“Holiday” is unadulterated fun. Hepburn portrays an unhappy wealthy woman who falls in love with her sister’s new, forward-thinking fiancée, played by Grant. Their talent for physical comedy during “Holiday” is a nice surprise. “The Philadelphia Story” is a treasure. There is nothing like Hepburn and Grant acting like they despise each other. The dialogue is amusing and biting.

“Bringing Up Baby” is an all-time great feel-good film. Director Howard Hawks’ masterpiece is delightful as the audience falls in love with two characters who get on each other’s nerves in the most amusing way possible. When Baby gets loose the fun begins. No wonder “Bringing Up Baby” has become cinematic comfort food.

“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,” Grant deadpans in one of the film’s oft-quoted lines. Drum roll, please. That was one of the many great lines delivered by Grant, which reflects all of the witty dialogue of the time that propels one of the fastest-paced comedies of all time.

Not only does “Bringing Up Baby” still hold up, it laid down the template for much of modern cinematic comedy. The main characters behave like children. The supporting cast is wacky. An animal plays a prominent part. Grant’s relationship with Baby is reminiscent of Ben Stiller’s back and forth with the dog in the hilarious “Something About Mary.” Both characters have to hide their anger in order to get what they want.

An airhead makes the life of a level-headed character difficult has been the plot of many films, which recalls John Hughes’ “Planes, Trains and Automobiles,” among other movies.

However, the difference between “Bringing Up Baby” and many films, which appropriated elements of the movie, such as “Step Brothers,” “Dinner for Schmucks” and “Dumb and Dumber,” is that there is not a mean bone in the film or the skeleton of the brontosaurus that Grant’s character is constructing.

And they certainly don’t make them like Grant and Hepburn anymore since both actors spoke in a very distinct manner. Most actors today echo those in the world of broadcast news.

Linda Ellerbee summed it up in her illuminating book, “And So It Goes,” by noting that television news anchors sound like they were raised in the same room.

The same goes for contemporary actors. Can anyone distinguish Tom Hanks’ accent and speech pattern from Tom Cruise? And then there were the likes of Stewart, who had a voice that was as distinct as a fingerprint.

Some of “Bringing Up Baby” is dated, but that’s to be expected of a movie made just a few years after the Great Depression arrived. However, the intelligent writing, the joyful silliness and the rapid-fire dialogue between Hepburn and Grant make it a sheer delight and a terrific film for the entire family.

Advancing rural health in Northeast Washington and beyond

Access to health care across rural Washington is a growing challenge.

Suggestions

Blu-ray review: howard hawks’s bringing up baby on the criterion collection.

Howard Hawks’s screwball classic looks and sounds sharper than ever thanks to this magnificent release.

At the center of this comedy of frustration and abnegation is Susan Vance (Katharine Hepburn), a flighty heiress and paragon of privilege who moves about the world as if nothing has a discernible effect on her. The power of her centripetal force is such that it leaves everyone powerless in her wake. Susan’s foil is David Huxley (Cary Grant), a paleontologist eagerly awaiting the arrival of the final bone that will complete his museum’s brontosaurus skeleton, and who’s engaged to his sullen, career-oriented co-worker, Alice Swallow (Virginia Walker). David’s sexual frustration, along with the script’s salacious flair for innuendo, only grows more prominent once he’s swept into Susan’s orbit. David’s hesitance and self-doubt make him putty in her hands, allowing Susan to effortlessly whisk him away from the big city to take Baby, a leopard sent to her by her brother, to her family’s house in Connecticut.

It’s all more than a bit absurd, and more so after Baby gets loose and becomes a mortal danger to the Vance family and their various neighbors. David is even more discombobulated when he finally receives his coveted “intercostal clavicle,” only for the dinosaur bone to be stolen and buried by Susan’s pesky dog George somewhere on the family’s enormous estate. Without his bone or his belle, David becomes even more helpless, even symbolically impotent given the way Susan swats at him as if she’s shooing away a fly. She’s so used to following her own impulses that she never quite realizes the torture she’s putting him through.

As David is put through the wringer time and again, Hawks captures the escalating sexual tension and collective anxiety in David and Susan’s coupling. And David goes from pitching a fit while wearing negligee (Hawks putting Grant in women’s clothes was a favorite, knowing gag of the director’s) to, fittingly, given the screenwriters’ brilliance at innuendo, finding his release once Susan climbs the phallic brontosaurus skeleton and brings it all crashing down.

Love in Bringing Up Baby is a form of insanity—impulsive and irrational, yet completely intoxicating. And the love between David and Susan is evident both in their raucous banter and their physicality, which is rendered cartoonish through slapstick antics, a byproduct of their connection to one another. But their love is also a bit cruel, as Susan always has the upper hand and David is perpetually punch-drunk, unable to resist the charms and cruelties of a woman who’s secretly preventing him from returning to his former life.

For Susan, it’s love at first sight, but for David, falling in love is a much more grueling process, akin to the metamorphosis of a caterpillar into a butterfly, one of several animal metaphors that Bringing Up Baby toys with across its running time. Susan, like Baby, is dangerous, but it’s through her joie de vivre that David is shaken from the listless stupor of his intellectual rigor, awakened to all the thrilling and maddening byproducts of love that, in toto, Hawks renders as an ecstatic symphony of life. Susan may be a touch nefarious in her manipulation of David, but after all, she’s the one who helps him get his metaphorical bone back.

Image/Sound

Criterion’s newly restored 4K transfer boasts a healthy amount of rich, textured grain and strong black levels that lend a crispness and clarity to the film’s many nighttime sequences. The image has a slight softness to it that’s true to the look of so many Hollywood films from the 1930s, meaning that this presentation is a huge improvement to the waxy, over-digitized look of Warner Home Entertainment’s 2005 DVD release. On the audio front, the uncompressed monaural soundtrack is as good as it needs to be, allowing for the almost superhuman speed of the film’s dialogue to come through loud and clear.

In his audio commentary, recorded in 2005, director Peter Bogdanovich lavishes Bringing Up Baby and Howard Hawks’s work in general with mighty praise, but be warned, you have to suffer through Bogdanovich’s occasional and ridiculous impressions of Hawks. He drops fascinating tidbits, such as the relationship between John Ford and Katharine Hepburn during the filming of Mary of Scotland serving as the basis for the one between Hepburn and Cary Grant’s characters in Bringing Up Baby . He also touches on Hawks’s particular approach to comedy and the nature of screwball and farce. In a separate, audio-only extra, Bogdanovich shows up again in a 1972 conversation with Hawks about the genesis of Bringing Up Baby .

The rest of the extra features tackle a wide array of topics, from a new selected-scene commentary in which costume historian Shelly Foote discusses the work of Bringing Up Baby ’s costume designer, Howard Greer, to an interview with film scholar Craig Barron covering the film’s unique special effects, especially those involving the leopard. A new video essay by author Scott Eyman shrewdly covers the often overlooked early years of Cary Grant’s career, including his work in vaudeville, while an interview with cinematographer John Bailey takes a closer look at the deceptively simple visual style of Hawks’s screwball classic.

The final features on disc are the fascinating, nearly hour-long Howard Hawks: A Hell of a Good Life and audio from a Q&A with Grant following a 1969 screening of Bringing Up Baby . This first-rate edition also includes a 40-page booklet with Hagar Wilde’s 1937 short story on which the script for the film was based and a perceptive essay by critic Sheila O’Malley.

Howard Hawks’s screwball classic Bringing Up Baby looks and sounds sharper than ever thanks to this magnificent release that attests to its enduring appeal.

You might be interested in

Review: Anthony Mann’s The Tin Star , Starring Henry Fonda, on Arrow Video Blu-ray

Review: Fritz Lang’s Scarlet Street on KL Studio Classics 4K UHD Blu-ray

Review: John Ford’s The Long Voyage Home on Imprint Films Blu-ray

Derek Smith

Derek Smith's writing has appeared in Tiny Mix Tapes , Apollo Guide , and Cinematic Reflections .

Leave a Reply Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published.

Save my name, email, and website in this browser for the next time I comment.

Review: Danièle Huillet and Jean-Marie Straub’s Sicilia! on Grasshopper Blu-ray

Review: Andrei Tarkovsky’s Autobiographical Masterpiece Mirror on Criterion Blu-ray

Sign Up for Our Weekly Newsletter

Browse links

• © 2024 BuzzFeed, Inc
• Consent Preferences
• Accessibility Statement

14 Sneaky Differences Between The Movie “It Ends With Us” And The Original Novel

Colleen Hoover was responsible for some of the changes in the movie.

BuzzFeed Staff

I and many others waited excitedly for the release of It Ends With Us — the movie adaption of the widely successful book of the same name by author Colleen Hoover. Even if you haven't read the book, you're probably familiar with it thanks to #BookTok .

Movie adaptations of books don't always meet readers' expectations, leading to mixed reviews. This is exactly what happened with It Ends With Us after it hit theaters last weekend. This is mostly because die-hard fans (including myself) noticed several differences between the book and the movie. Here are 14 differences between the It Ends With Us movie and the original novel:

Warning: Spoilers ahead!

1. The movie's opening scene differed from the book's beginning pages.

The book's first few pages begin with Lily sitting on the rooftop of a building she doesn't live in. She just previously buried her late father, and it was in the first few pages when she met Ryle. The opening scene of the movie shows Lily back in her childhood home getting ready for her father's funeral.  

2. Lily's eulogy to her father was changed in the movie.

In the book, Lily stands in front of the crowd at her father's funeral and begins to say there isn't anything good to say about him before a family member removes her. In the movie, Lily stands up there with a crumbled blank napkin that was supposed to have five things she loved about her father written on it. After looking down at the blank napkin, not saying anything, Lily rushes out of the funeral. 

3. The characters appear older in the movie compared to how they were described in the book.

In the book, Lily is 23, Atlas is two-and-a-half years older, making him in his mid-twenties, and Ryle is 30. The characters are older in the movie because Colleen admitted that she aged them wrongly in the book.

In an interview with Today , Colleen said, "Back when I wrote 'It Ends With Us,' the new adult (genre) was very popular. You were writing college-age characters. That's what I was contracted to do. I made Lily very young. I didn't know that neurosurgeons went to school for 50 years. There's not a 20-something neurosurgeon."

4. How and when Lily told Ryle about her father abusing her mother differs from the book and the movie.

On the first night they met on the rooftop in the book, Lily's first "naked truth" to Ryle was telling him about her parents' abusive relationship. In the movie, she told him a while after they were already dating.

5. Lily doesn't have a roommate in the movie like she does in the book.

In the novel, Lily has a roommate named Lucy, and in the movie, there isn't any mention of Lucy, and the audience sees Lily by herself in her apartment. 

6. The name of Atlas' restaurant in the movie was changed.

When Lily and Atlas were teens, Atlas gave Lily a souvenir magnet (which is not portrayed at all in the movie) that said "Better in Boston," which Atlas eventually named his restaurant Bib's. In the movie, his restaurant's name is Roots, which still references his and Lily's relationship as teens, but for a different reason. The movie shows a flashback scene when a younger Lily was teaching Atlas about the importance of plant roots. 

Colleen told E! News that the name change was due to not "having as much time onscreen to develop early conversations."

7. Ryle's proposal in the movie differs from the proposal in the book.

In the movie version, on the day his sister and Marshall gave birth to their daughter, Ryle realizes in the hospital room that he wants to spend the rest of his life with Lily and gets down on one knee — without a ring. 

How Ryle and Lily got married in the book is described as them eloping in Vegas on a completely different day from when Allysa and Marshall had their baby girl. 

8. In the book, Ryle is the one who explains to Lily how his brother died which is portrayed differently in the movie.

In the movie, Ryle's sister, Allysa, is the one who explains to Lily what happened to her and Ryle's brother Emerson, which is that Ryle accidentally shot and killed his brother when they were young children. Allysa tells Lily after learning that Ryle has abused Lily, but by this point, the couple is separated.

In the book, Ryle is the one who opens up about the family's secret, which he blames as his reason for abusing Lily. After learning this, Lily forgives Ryle, and they work to figure out how Ryle can control his anger.  

9. Some domestic violence scenes were portrayed differently in the movie compared to the book.

The domestic violence scenes are some of the toughest parts to read in the popular book. Audiences were curious how these scenes would be portrayed in the movie, and there were definitely fewer in the movie, plus they were portrayed a bit differently. 

Justin Baldoni explained the thought process behind this decision in a Deadline interview, saying, "My fear was that if we were to follow the exact skeleton of the book, that early on, seeing Ryle do what he did would make it very hard for us to accept that she stays with him, because there just wasn’t enough time to establish love or establish the romance." 

In the novel, when Ryle burns his hand, he pushes Lily down to try to cool off the burn under the sink. In the movie, he shoves Lily seconds after he touches the hot surface.

In another difficult scene in the book, when Ryle pushes Lily down the stairs, Lily kicks Ryle out of the apartment, leaving him to sleep in the hallway all night. In the movie, after Lily falls down the stairs, she wakes up groggy in bed, with Ryle taking care of her and asking her questions to ensure she's coherent.

10. Lily's journal entries to Ellen DeGeneres aren't in the movie at all.

In the book, Lily loves Ellen DeGeneres and often dedicates her journal entries to her. Once Lily and Atlas became friends as teens, the two watched  The Ellen DeGeneres Show   after school and loved the famous quote, "Just keep swimming," by DeGeneres' character in the movie Finding Nemo . 

Not only are Lily's journal entries lightly touched upon, but in the movie, it's barely mentioned how much she truly loved the TV host and how that quote comforted Lily and Atlas when times would get tough. 

11. How Lily calls Atlas for help differs from the book and the movie.

In the book, Lily calls Atlas for help after being attacked by Ryle and he comes to pick her up.   In the movie, after the traumatic scene where Ryle questions Lily more about Atlas and he pins her to the couch, Lily shows up in the kitchen at Atlas' restaurant and he takes her to the hospital.

12. In the book, Lily and Ryle didn't know they were having a girl until she was born.

In the book, Lily waited until she gave birth to find out her baby's gender. When she found out she had birthed a girl, she decided then and there that she was going to end the cycle of domestic violence by asking for a divorce from Ryle. In the movie, while she still asked for a divorce after giving birth, Lily knew early that she was having a baby girl. 

13. Lily's baby's name is the same in both the book and movie but the mention of the baby girl's middle name was omitted in the movie.

In the movie, Lily names her and Ryle's baby girl Emerson in honor of Ryle's late brother. While the name Emerson was accurate in the original storyline, in the movie, Lily doesn't mention Emerson's middle name, which was "Dory" in the book (in honor of Ellen DeGeneres' character in Finding Nemo ). 

14. The movie ended with what felt like a cliffhanger compared to how the book ended.

In the book, Lily runs into Atlas while on her way to meet Ryle. After dropping off her daughter with Ryle, Lily rushes to find Atlas and tells him her daughter's middle name is "Dory" and the story behind it. She then tells Atlas she is ready to be loved by him again. The book ends (in probably the most romantic way) with Atlas kissing Lily's heart tattoo on her collarbone and telling her, "You can stop swimming now, Lily. We finally reached the shore."

The movie ends with Lily and Atlas casually running into one another, establishing that neither sees anyone romantically. Audiences don't even see the two kiss or hug before the screen goes black. 

Did you notice any other differences between the book and the movie? If I missed anything, share it with me in the comments below!

If you or someone you know is in immediate danger as a result of domestic violence, call 911. For anonymous, confidential help, you can call the 24/7  National Domestic Violence Hotline  at 1-800-799-7233 (SAFE) or chat with an advocate via the website.

Share This Article

Fede Álvarez Explains Why THAT 'Alien: Romulus' Birth Scene Is a Bloodbath

Your changes have been saved

Email is sent

Email has already been sent

Please verify your email address.

You’ve reached your account maximum for followed topics.

Editor's Note: This article contains spoilers for Alien: Romulus.

The Big Picture

• Alien: Romulus doesn't hold back on the gore, cranking up a twist on the iconic Chestburster scene to a deeply haunting level.
• Director Álvarez focuses on practical effects, making the extraterrestrial menace feel unnervingly lifelike.
• Alien: Romulus twists a real-life miracle into a nightmare with shocking realism in the sci-fi feature.

As expected from the director of the 2013 Evil Dead remake, Alien: Romulus does not hold back on the gore. While Fede Álvarez remained mostly faithful to how the kills in the previous Alien installments, he also wasn't afraid to get incredibly twisted , taking aspects like the iconic Chestburster and cranking them up to eleven. The bloodiest moment, however, comes at the end of the film when the Xenomorph life cycle gets a deeply haunting update. Collider's Steve Weintraub spoke with Álvarez for a spoiler-filled interview in which he discusses that traumatic birth involving Isabela Merced 's Kay and how it was made to be eerily realistic despite the sci-fi horror elements.

Penned by Álvarez with help from his regular collaborator Rodo Sayagues , Romulus follows a group of young space colonists seeking a new start until they run into the greatest threat in the universe while scavenging a derelict space station. Among the group is Kay, the pregnant sister to Archie Renaux 's Tyler, who gets put through the wringer throughout their encounter with the Xenomorphs . Her injuries eventually led her to inject Compound Z-01, the experimental serum extracted from Xenomorphs that Rook ( Ian Holm/Daniel Bettis ) urges the group to bring back to Weyland-Yutani. Unfortunately, it ends up bringing about Kay's demise as she soon gives birth not to a child, but a twisted offspring that is part human and part Xenomorph with a face resembling the Engineers of Prometheus . The scene is bloody and stomach-churning, marking a wicked departure from the typical Chestburster "birth."

Álvarez says the scene caught some audience members off-guard but insists that there's more reality than fiction to the act . Though the Offspring may be an unsettling amalgamation, it is still given relatively accurate proportions for a big baby and its removal was based on his experience during the delivery of his two children. The horror, he says, comes more from the creature's unnatural features and rapid growth:

"Giving birth, I've seen people upset at that scene. Clearly, they’ve never witnessed a real birth because what happened is exactly what happened in real birth, or less sometimes! I witnessed the birth of my two kids, and I've been in rooms where, while I was witnessing those or just being with my wife in the room waiting for the kid to come, and you hear the other rooms. It is a madhouse, and when you look at it, it's a bloodbath. I don't think the character of Kay [Isabela Merced] goes through anything especially bigger than anybody. Even the blood that we see, that's exactly how it works. So, I wanted to be faithful. What I didn't wanna do was make it vanilla and break it down. It is a normal birth of an abnormal thing, but even the proportions and the size and everything, we make sure it was accurate for a big baby."

'Alien: Romulus' Adds to the Horror With Practical Effects

Adding to the realism was Romulus 's focus on practical effects. The director previously explained why the Chestburster scene was easily one of his favorites because of the work of the puppeteers to accurately portray the visceral death of one of the crew members. Even the iconic Xenomorph was fully brought to life at points through the painstaking efforts of crew members. It's all to make the extraterrestrial menace and the horrific acts they inflict upon the unfortunate survivors feel all the more lifelike and enhance the horror in the process. Those principles were carried over to Kay's birth, creating a deeply unsettling ending that twists a real-life miracle into a nightmare.

Alien: Romulus is now playing in theaters. Stay tuned here at Collider for our full spoiler-filled interview with Álvarez. Check out our review here for our thoughts on the franchise's gory return.

Alien: Romulus

In Alien: Romulus, a crew of space explorers lands on a distant, uncharted planet, only to uncover a horrifying secret lurking beneath the surface. As they delve deeper into the alien environment, they encounter deadly creatures and ancient ruins that hint at a terrifying history. The team's survival becomes a desperate battle against the relentless xenomorphs, forcing them to rely on their wits and technology to escape the nightmarish world.

Get Tickets

• Fede Alvarez

With Raunchy New Netflix Movie ‘Incoming,’ Dave and John Chernin Are Trying to Bring Back the Kind of R-Rated Comedies Hollywood Stopped Making

By Brent Lang

Executive Editor

• Lady Gaga and Joaquin Phoenix Sang Live on ‘Joker 2’ Set, Which Made It a ‘Nightmare’ to Edit: ‘We Didn’t Want Perfect Notes’ 22 hours ago
• Todd Phillips Tells All on Making ‘Joker 2’: Musical Numbers, Method Acting and Joaquin Phoenix’s Broadway Dream That Started It All 22 hours ago
• Black Bear Signs ‘The Devil’s Bath’ and ‘Goodnight Mommy’ Filmmaking Duo Veronika Franz and Severin Fiala (EXCLUSIVE) 5 days ago

“You’ve gotta go with a Cheesy Gordita Crunch,” Dave Chernin says as he scrolls through the options on the digital kiosk at a Taco Bell Cantina in Chelsea. “I’m ordering one for you too, “ he assures John Chernin , his older brother (by 15 months) and writing and directing partner.

Related Stories

Take-two earnings emblematic of endless risk-taking in gaming biz, china box office: ‘successor’ reaches $420 million total after fifth weekend win, popular on variety.

The scene, the brothers say, was inspired by an all-too-true story — even if the names and the restaurant have been changed. In fact much of “Incoming,” which follows the kids as they try to score an invite to a blowout bash, draws on the house parties that Dave and John attended growing up. But when they sat down to write the movie, they worried that gravity bongs and beer kegs would seem, well, passé. 

“We spent a lot of time debating if kids even go to parties anymore?” says John. “And then we thought about asking our friend’s teenage children, but then that’s kind of weird. You don’t really want to ask them in front of their parents.” 

The Chernins, whose father is media mogul Peter Chernin, have collaborated for the bulk of their careers, including stints writing on “It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia” and creating “The Mick.” “We just have a shorthand together that goes back decades,” John says. 

Despite the brothers’ comedy pedigree, major studios weren’t interested in backing “Incoming.” Instead, the film was produced independently by Spyglass Media Group and sold to Netflix after it was completed. Part of the issue, the Chernins say, was that studios aren’t producing many R-rated comedies, and there’s greater sensitivity about humor that is boundary-pushing and can go viral for the wrong reasons. 

“We got a lot of feedback like ‘The script was hilarious, but it’s not really what we’re doing right now,’” says Dave. “There were some concerns about the kids taking drugs,” adds John. 

But working on “It’s Always Sunny,” a hugely popular show that has one foot in cringe comedy and the other firmly planted in gallows humor, has helped the brothers learn how to walk the fine line between irreverent and mean-spirited. 

“We’re not afraid to navigate those tricky waters,” says Dave. “‘Always Sunny’ is completely unafraid to go anywhere as long as it’s funny. That’s because there’s an unspoken agreement between the audience and the show’s creators — the people who are making this show are on the right side of things, despite what terrible things the characters are doing. We’re poking fun, not glorifying them.” 

More from Variety

Sony officially says it won’t bid for paramount global to counter skydance deal, ‘existential threat’ of ai central to animation guild negotiations, ‘kraven the hunter’ new trailer: aaron taylor-johnson is out for blood in sony’s r-rated marvel villain origin story, producer andrew form signs first look deal with sony pictures’ screen gems (exclusive), 2024 live music business is driving record revenues, but some data points raise concerns, more from our brands, olivia rodrigo, chappell roan deliver full-circle duet of ‘hot to go’ at l.a. show, a michael jordan card worth over $1 million will lead fanatics and sotheby’s first auction, ncaa memo fuels questions about big-bucks nil hoops event, the best loofahs and body scrubbers, according to dermatologists, 2024 democratic national convention: watch barack and michelle obama, doug emhoff speak on day 2.

Screen Rant

Haikyu the dumpster battle (2024).

Your changes have been saved

Email is sent

Email has already been sent

Please verify your email address.

You’ve reached your account maximum for followed topics.

Your Rating

Susumu Mitsunaka

Reviews (0)

Have You Watched It?

Be the first to leave a community review!

• Directed By (1) Susumu Mitsunaka
• Writing Credits (1) Susumu Mitsunaka

Latest Stories

Haikyu dumpster battle review - more than worth the four-year wait, crunchyroll announces tickets for haikyuu the dumpster battle are finally on sale, related titles.

eternal sunshine of the spotless mind

BABY REINDEER

Alien: Romulus Review

Alien is back from the (evil) dead.

I’d like to invite anyone surprised to hear that director Fede Álvarez and Alien are a match made in space hell to stop reading this and watch his 2013 remake of The Evil Dead (but, like, come back after.) It was the first time in 20 years the Necronomicon was opened, and horror fans pinned the survival of the beloved franchise on the young director’s efforts. That faith was rewarded with one of the most effective horror remakes ever , and that ability to both honor and modernize a sacred text of the genre is the most obvious explanation for the success of Alien: Romulus. Like a kid in a Freudian nightmare of a candy store, Álvarez bellies up to a feast of Alien iconography and cryptozoology with abject glee, even and especially in scenes of bone-crunching mayhem. Alien: Romulus distills the franchise into its most functional, focused form. And once it starts cooking, it doesn’t let up.

Top to bottom, Alien: Romulus displays exemplary production design which, while nodding to what’s to come in the future-set Aliens, owes far more to the totemic textures of Ridley Scott’s original movie. The industrial futurism of Michael Seymour’s original sets is wonderfully replicated in the malfunctioning Renaissance station, colored by red warning lights and the spindly blacks of H.R. Giger’s Xenomorphology as they weave into that aesthetic as threateningly as ever. Alien: Romulus also represents what’s undeniably the franchise’s most cohesive blend of computer-generated and practical techniques employed to bring its locations, creatures, and injury effects to life. The saying goes that the best CG is the kind you don’t notice, and the team here has achieved a largely seamless blend of all those elements. The irony here is that I have to immediately contradict myself: there are a few times – especially in the third act – where you can very much tell Álvarez is cutting to closeups of fake-as-hell xenomorph heads being blown apart. But those moments, or times when you can clock a miniature being used, do as much to evoke the franchise’s first two movies as any iconic one-liner or recreated shot.

Alien: Romulus Gallery

Álvarez really lets Romulus breathe through its first act, taking time to establish the central relationship between Rain (Cailee Spaeny) and android Andy (Daniel Jonsson), who live as siblings in indentured servitude on Weyland-Yutani’s Jackson’s Star colony. Desperate to leave the colony’s perpetually sunless gloom – which Álvarez renders as a metal hellscape befitting of a Terminator flash-forward – Rain and Andy reconnect with their old scavenging buddies, the crew of the Corbelan IV. Rain’s resourceful nature and protectiveness of her synthetic sibling get the audience on her side quickly and, as a performer, Spaeny does great work believably grounding Rain in the moment-to-moment horror of a young adult making their first foray into the big, scary world and finding it’s worse than they could’ve imagined.

Rain is heavily solution-focused, which gives her plenty of hero moments as the movie goes on, but Álvarez and co-writer Rodo Sayagues’ script doesn’t hold much space for her to change along the way, or to at least highlight what makes her so resilient in the first place. Jonsson winds up with the trickiest tightrope to walk in his performance, constantly balancing childlike hesitation with cold efficiency, collating what information he should offer and which of his bedrock directives he should follow. But Jonsson holds the core of Andy well once that conflict becomes central to the plot. The accompanying unpredictable shifts in Andy’s personality serve not just to ratchet up the tension, but also as a mirror by which the human characters see themselves reflected.

As for the crew of the Corbelan – sibling pairs Tyler (Archie Renaux) and Kay (Isabela Merced), and Bjorn (Spike Fearn) and Navarro (Aileen Wu) – Álvarez and Sayagues employ archetypes which will be instantly familiar for Alien fans. Tyler’s steely reserve evokes Dallas, Bjorn’s edge and bandana call up both Alien’s Parker and Aliens’ Vasquez… you get the idea. While numerous films in the franchise flirt with slasher conventions, Alien: Romulus commits harder to the subgenre’s quintessential structure than ever before. As such, it’s wise not to get attached to anyone who speaks mostly in jokes or exposition. That structure occasionally lets the audience get ahead of the plot, but Álvarez throws enough curveballs and misdirects to offset this.

Álvarez establishes the ensemble economically, especially during the Corbelan’s trip up to the Renaissance, where cuts to each character reveal how they react in stressful situations, reinforcing those archetypes just before the acid hits the fan. Merced gets the most personalized material, spending much of the movie separated from the main group and playing catchup in increasingly awful fashion. While these cutaways do function well as their own little Alien vignettes, it should be noted that as they crop up through act two, they splinter the focus a little and lead to Romulus’ only real pacing hiccups. That’s not to say there’s no utility to the way that time’s spent, though: Kay’s agenda is more complicated than her friends’ which opens the door not only to Romulus’ most brazen theme work (the nature of which I’ll leave vague), but for late twists that kick off the movie’s audacious, cacophonous, and unbearably tense final showdown.

What's The Best Alien Movie?

Pick a winner.

Alien: Romulus rarely shies away from the chance to celebrate its forerunners, mostly for the better but, in one significant case, definitely for the worse. But let’s focus first on what works, and works well: Álvarez understands exactly how and when to deploy Alien’s most iconic imagery. Though the scavengers’ initial exploration of the derelict Renaissance is a quiet, tense affair, just below the surface, you can feel Álvarez’ hand establishing the space like a kid breathlessly showing off all his toys before settling on which one he wants to share with you first. Duct systems, airlocks, stun batons, motion sensors, a dead synthetic, maybe the odd tweak from flame- to freeze-thrower here and there. But Álvarez doesn’t spend too much time fetishizing these inanimate objects; they’re purely functional and so don’t feel like they cross the line of being fan service for the sake of fan service.

Romulus even finds space – plenty, in fact – to incorporate elements of Creative Assembly’s excellent Alien: Isolation game. Whether it’s the registration points which Álvarez deploys (moments which wind up serving as devilishly clever nods to The Godfather ) or the flares which get used to clever practical and defensive ends, it’s emblematic of an attitude that all Alien is good Alien, an ethos that drives this whole movie forward and unlocks its most shocking narrative turns. Of course, Romulus also brings its own new toys and tricks, the most significant of which is zero gravity. It’s baffling to consider that the franchise really hasn’t mined zero G more in the past, and it’s used well here not only to spice up some xenomorph encounters, but repeatedly as a ticking clock obstacle the scavengers have to work around due to the Renaissance’s malfunctioning gravity drive.

And yet, like Weyland-Yutani has been known to do, Alien: Romulus can’t seem to abandon some ideas which, on their face, seem destined for messy ends. As I mentioned, Romulus handles most of its exposition quite elegantly early on, but Álvarez overplays his hand and commits to, as executed here, a deeply flawed vehicle by which to deliver that information once we’re on the Renaissance station. I’m dancing around the details for spoilers’ sake, but I’ve never been more sure that you’ll know exactly what I mean. This choice by no means derails Romulus – the movie racks up plenty of good will in other ways – it just feels like a wholly unnecessary evil and the only part of the movie that regularly breaks suspension of disbelief. Which is saying something… this is a movie about genetically perfect killer aliens, after all.

Evoking the genetic f***ery that always spells doom in these movies, Alien: Romulus is a lean, mean, chimeric beauty. Fede Álvarez proves that his Evil Dead remake was no fluke: The director seamlessly keys into the narrative and aesthetic touchstones of the series and marshals them to breathtaking ends. Romulus occasionally takes a turn down a dead end hall pace-wise – and unfortunately its most audacious bridge to the franchise’s past is extremely rickety – but those missteps are forgivable considering how confidently and judiciously Álvarez handles them elsewhere. Helped along by a talented ensemble of young actors and reference-quality production design, Alien: Romulus’s back-to-basics approach to blockbuster horror boils everything fans love about the tonally-fluid franchise into one film, and it’s one that you’re going to need to start making time for the next time you plan on marathoning Alien and Aliens.

More Reviews by Tom Jorgensen

Ign recommends.