Bringing Up Baby (1938) Gets a Screwball Criterion Release
The Criterion Collection released Bringing Up Baby to Blu-ray on July 6, 2021. Howard Hawks directed the film starring Katharine Hepburn, Cary Grant, and Charles Ruggles.
‘Bringing Up Baby’ Movie Synopsis
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.
Read the full summary, and listen to our Golden Age of the Silver Screen film review.
Special Features
- 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
- Trailer
- English subtitles for the deaf and hard of hearing
- PLUS: 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
New cover design by F. Ron Miller
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RKO Radio Pictures released Bringing Up Baby on November 23, 1938. Howard Hawks directed the film starring Katharine Hepburn, Cary Grant, and Charles Ruggles.