Welcome to "Saturday Night at the Movies".

I'm your host, Glenn Holland.

[light upbeat music] Tonight's film is the classic screwball comedy, "Bringing Up Baby", directed by Howard Hawks for RKO Radio Pictures and released in 1938.

The movie stars Katharine Hepburn and Cary Grant with Charlie Ruggles, Barry Fitzgerald, May Robson, Walter Catlett, and Fritz Feld.

There's also a star turn by Skippy, the wire fox terrier best known for playing Asta in the "Thin Man" films.

As critic Pauline Kael once wrote, "That dog was a great actor.

He appeared to adore each master in turn."

Paleontologist David Huxley has been working for four years to complete the skeleton of a brontosaurus and needs only one more bone, the intercostal clavicle.

It is due to arrive in the mail the same day David is to marry his prim assistant, Alice Swallow.

David has to convince Alexander Peabody, the attorney for Elizabeth Carleton Random, a wealthy benefactress, that his work on the brontosaurus is worthy of the $1 million Mrs. Random may be willing to donate to the Natural Science Museum.

While playing golf with Mr. Peabody, David discovers a scatterbrained young heiress, Susan Vance, has played his ball before driving off in David's car.

Both mishaps she blames entirely on him.

Later, David runs into Susan again when he goes to a restaurant for dinner with Peabody, and again she manages to embroil him in several embarrassing situations.

The next day, David receives the missing dinosaur bone and prepares for his wedding to Alice.

Susan, however, calls him up because she believes he is a zoologist and has some expertise with animals.

Susan needs David to help her deal with Baby, a tame leopard her brother has sent her.

She manipulates him into coming to her apartment and with Baby in tow, driving her to her aunt's house in Connecticut.

But when they arrive, the aunt's dog George steals the intercostal clavicle and buries it.

Susan and David follow George around the estate fruitlessly digging holes and getting dirty in the process.

Back at the house, David takes a shower and finds his clothes have disappeared, Susan's aunt has arrived, and worst of all, Susan seems to be falling in love with him.

Screwball comedy is a knockabout version of romantic comedy that flourished during the Depression years of the '30s until the Second World War.

These movies featured a strong female lead, usually a young heiress, who encounters and frustrates a man from a different social class and catches him up in a series of farcical situations.

Protagonists are mismatched and are often forced to resort to disguise or other kinds of subterfuge at various points in the plot.

One of the earliest examples is Frank Capra's multiple Academy Award winner, "It Happened One Night", released in 1934.

It starred Clark Gable as a reporter who joins up with Claudette Colbert as a wealthy young woman traveling across country to spite her wealthy father.

Under the strictures of the Hollywood production code, screwball comedies also allowed filmmakers to depict sexual tension between a man and a woman in covert ways, including fast repartee and physical comedy that often slid into outright slapstick.

In fact, film critic Andrew Sarris has defined screwball comedy as "a sex comedy without the sex".

Screwball comedies provided a critique of both the dull cinematic scenarios the production code seemed intent on fostering and the worn romantic tropes of most motion picture love stories.

They offered audiences benign class conflict, [chuckles] those heiresses are so flighty, and escapist plots that had little to do with daily reality.

Pauline Kael saw them as a return to film comedy's roots.

"The screwball movies brought back the slapstick tradition of vaudeville and the two-reelers," she wrote.

And the directors who had come out of a Hollywood in which improvising and building gags were part of the fun of movie making went back, partly at least, to that way of working.

No longer so script bound, movies regained some of the creative energy and exuberance and the joy in horseplay too that had been lost in the early years of talkies.

The inspiration for "Bringing up Baby" was a short story by Hagar Wilde in the 1937 issue of "Collier's" magazine about a tame leopard loose in the Connecticut countryside.

Howard Hawks read the story and saw a movie in it.

Hawks hired screenwriter Dudley Nichols, who often worked with director John Ford and won an Academy Award for his screenplay for Ford's 1935 movie, "The Informer", about the Irish War for Independence.

For "Bringing Up Baby", Nichols worked on the story and structure while Hagar Wilde developed the characters and the comedy.

Romance also developed and Nichols and Wilde later married and went on to write other movies together including Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers' 1938 musical "Carefree".

Hawks also used several members of John Ford's informal repertory company in "Bringing Up Baby", including Barry Fitzgerald as gardener Aloysius Gogarty, D'Arcy Corrigan as Professor LaTouche, and Ward Bond as a motorcycle policeman.

Howard Hawks initially had trouble with Katherine Hepburn overplaying the comic aspects of her part.

"The great trouble is people trying to be funny," Hawks later said.

"If they don't try to be funny, then they are funny."

He advised Hepburn to talk with Walter Catlett, an actor who was a comic for the Ziegfeld Follies.

Afterwards she said, "Howard, hire that guy and keep him around here for several weeks because I need him."

So Hawks gave Catlett the role of Constable Slocum, who is ironically the closest thing to a sane person in the movie.

Hawks later came to greatly admire Hepburn's comedic abilities, saying, "She has an amazing body like a boxer.

It's hard for her to make a wrong turn.

She's always in perfect balance.

This gives her an amazing sense of timing.

I've never seen a girl that had that odd rhythm and control."

As for Cary Grant, he had some doubts about his ability to play an intellectual and it took him a couple of weeks to accept the role of paleontologist David Huxley.

Hawks asked him, "You've seen Harold Lloyd, haven't you?"

Lloyd's character in his wildly popular silent comedies was an innocent go-getter, embroiled in a string of wild situations like climbing an office building in 1923's "Safety Last".

So Grant donned a pair of glasses like the ones Lloyd wore in his films and played David with an unassuming shyness that masks his steely determination to bring his brontosaurus project to completion.

This brings him into conflict with Hepburn's Susan Vance, whom one critic has described as, "a female cross between Bugs Bunny and Groucho Marx, making use of fractured conversation to ambush the opposite sex."

Hepburn and Grant got along famously during the filming of "Bringing Up Baby", the second of four movie comedies they would make together.

They would often double date with their romantic partners at the time, Howard Hughes and Phyllis Brooks.

They would arrive on the set early to work up new comedy bits together.

One was based on something that had actually happened to Cary Grant at the Roxy Theater in New York.

After Grant made a trip to the men's room, a woman passed in front of him just as he noticed his fly was down.

As he zipped it up, he caught part of the woman's skirt in it.

They had to walk in lockstep to the manager's office for a pair of pliers to untangle them.

This, of course, was the origin of the scene at the restaurant when David accidentally tears off the rear of Susan's gown, a pretty shocking scene at the time, and they have to lockstep out the door to protect her modesty.

Cary Grant was also responsible for a famous ad lib in the movie.

When Susan's Aunt Elizabeth first encounters David at her country house, he's wearing a woman's marabou trimmed negligee.

When she asks why, he replies, "Because I just went gay all of a sudden," punctuating the word gay with a jump in the air.

Although the word gay as a euphemism for homosexual was not widely known until after the Stonewall Riots in 1969, it had been around since the turn of the century.

Although Grant may have intended gay as a synonym for blithely happy, given the situation in the movie, it was more likely a joking reference to homosexuality, the first use of the word gay in that sense in mainstream media.

Although "Bringing Up Baby" includes multiple instances of movie magic to allow Grant and Hepburn to share scenes with the leopard Nissa as Baby, as well as the dangerous circus leopard, Hepburn worked well with Nissa in person as well.

She wore heavy perfume to keep the big cat calm and Nissa's trainer, Olga Celeste, said Hepburn could have been an animal trainer herself.

Grant, on the other hand, was terrified of the leopard so a stand-in covered for him in his scenes with Nissa.

One day during production, Hepburn playfully threw a toy leopard through the roof of Grant's dressing room.

She later recalled in her autobiography, "He was out of there like lightning."

[chuckles] Please join us again next time for another "Saturday Night at the Movies".

I'm Glenn Holland.

Good night.