Bringing Up Baby - BFI Film Classics Author:Peter Swaab Bringing Up Baby, directed by Howard Hawks in 1938, is one of the greatest screwball comedies and a treasure from the Golden Age of Hollywood. Cary Grant plays a naive and repressed paleosaurologist who becomes entangled with (and ensnared by) a wilful heiress (Katharine Hepburn). Chaos ensues as romance blossoms and not one but two... more » leopards are set loose in verdant Connecticut. Hawks is at his best: there is a wonderful ensemble cast, his visual style is characteristically refined yet unself-conscious, and a wild succession of pratfalls, innuendo, and jokes (written by Dudley Nichols and Hagar Wilde) make the movie a model of a comic classic. Yet beneath the chaos and good cheer is a serious tale of escaping life's hardships by dint of nothing more or less than nerve and luck.« less