Criterion Challenge week nine: Bringing Up Baby (1938)
Photo courtesy of Wikimedia Commons
Bringing Up Baby (1938) is a well-made film featuring an unforgettable costar: a real leopard!
The Criterion Challenge is an annual film challenge with 52 weekly categories that the participant must fulfill by watching films within the Criterion Collection. Last week’s challenge was to watch a film that would be added to Criterion’s physical collection in 2025. The challenge for this week (week nine) is the 1930s.
Out of the 1700+ films making up the collection, 125 match the criteria of being made in the 1930s, spanning the full decade: 1930 to 1939. I was surprised that I had both heard of and had already seen a handful of films from this subset. My watches from that century include a French film, The Blood of a Poet (1930), and an American film, The Emperor Jones (1933). The 1930s marked the transition from silent films and slapstick comedy to action-packed classics that tend to be a little more digestible for modern-day viewers.
For week nine, I watched the film Bringing Up Baby (1938). I chose this because the movie’s name sounded familiar to me, which is understandable given that it is considered a classic by many. I also chose this because it is credited as including one of the earliest examples of a “manic pixie dream girl,” a character trope I will describe shortly.
This film features Professor David Huxley (Cary Grant), a paleontologist who had an unfortunate run-in with a young, rich woman, Susan Vance (Katharine Hepburn). The professor is an aloof workaholic, willing to brush off his fiancée in favor of the completion of his museum exhibit. Susan is aloof in a completely different way, meaning she is definitely not a woman grounded in a logical reality. During the morning of the professor’s wedding, Susan tells him she needs his help to transport a live leopard (yes, a live leopard) to Connecticut. From there, their journey only continues its spiral towards madness.
Susan is one of the most infuriating, agitating characters I have ever laid eyes on. She goes to ridiculous lengths to derail the professor’s day (his wedding day, mind you), including stealing his clothing while he showers and inadvertently getting him arrested. Susan is impossible to have a rational conversation with, seeming to be the kind of girl who’s never heard the word “no.” She absolutely fits the bill of a “manic pixie dream girl,” who is often described as a mostly one-dimensional, beautiful young woman with bizarre personality traits and abnormal behavior. These types of characters are often not the main character; instead, they serve as the love interest for a male main character.
Before watching the film, I knew the leopard on screen was not a puppet. Still, I was surprised to see a real live leopard when it came on screen. In my opinion, it is this leopard that steals the show; it appears so well-behaved that it makes you start to consider getting one as a pet yourself. In the plot, the leopard gets loose multiple times, causing the main characters to spend a great deal of time looking for him in rural Connecticut. The most surprising thing about this movie is the plot twist: there actually are two leopards, not one, roaming free in Connecticut on the same evening, and the characters end up catching the wrong one.
Seeing a real leopard on television was honestly refreshing after watching decades of movies full of computer-generated imagery (CGI) slop (next time I watch a film featuring or starring a CGI animal, I will be thinking of you, Baby from Bringing Up Baby (1938)). Overall, I give this movie four out of five stars, with one star short because of how agitating Miss Vance was. Professor Huxley should probably go into witness protection or something so she cannot track him down anymore.