Funniest movie of all time?
That’s a tough call, but Bringing Up Baby [2] (1938) has to be a contender.
This screwball masterpiece from director Howard Hawks and starring Cary Grant and Katharine Hepburn screens on Sunday, January 27 [3], at 1:30 p.m. at the Plaza Branch, 4801 Main St., as part of the Movies That Matter film series. It’s free.
The Library’s Robert W. Butler provides introductory and followup remarks.
Baby is a near-perfect example of a screwball comedy, which developed during the Depression when movie goers wanted escapism, laughs, and romance. This rollicking genre offered rapid-fire dialogue, farcical situations, a big dash of slapstick, and often cross dressing.
Screwball was also noteworthy in that usually the narrative’s main force is a ditzy woman (to whom bewildered men react) and in its examination of class differences. Most screwball comedies were about stupid rich people who learn something about life from hard-working, common-sense Joe Blows.
Prime examples are It Happened One Night [4], His Girl Friday [5] and My Man Godfrey [6].
Bringing Up Baby has all of the above traits, plus Grant [7] as a befuddled paleontologist and Katharine Hepburn [8] as a scatterbrained heiress who is dangling in front of him the promise of a big donation. The Baby of the title, by the way, is Hepburn’s pet leopard.
Behind the camera is Hawks [9], a man as comfortable with madcap silliness as with Westerns (Red River [10], Rio Bravo [11]), film noir (The Big Sleep [12]), gangster movies (Scarface [13]), science fiction (The Thing From Another World [14]) and real-life hagiography (Sergeant York [15]).