11 - Howard Hawks and Bringing Up Baby

Summary

In an excellent piece on Howard Hawks's Man's Favorite Sport? Molly Haskell argues that innumerable details of the film fall into place the moment it becomes obvious that fishing stands in for man's true “favorite sport,” the pursuit of women. The dialogue takes on a quality of persistent double entendre. Situations, gestures, and images disclose a graphic sexual underside, and a whole reading of the film as sexual allegory is invited.

Bringing Up Baby has a comparable structure of doubleness. Thus the film's opening: Cary Grant, atop a brontosaurus skeleton, is thinking. He is pondering the correct placement and function of the bone he is holding, but he is thinking about something else as well. He is about to marry Miss Swallow, to enter a state that brooks “no domestic entailments of any kind.” The brontosaurus will be their only baby: Marriage to Miss Swallow means no sex. Cary Grant is pondering the correct placement and function of another “bone.”

Line after line refers to Grant's “precious” bone, his “rare” bone, the bone which, Katharine Hepburn tries to impress on the terrier George, they so badly need. All of this reaches one absurdly logical conclusion when Grant finds himself unable to shake the name “Mr. Bone.”

The mythical term “intercostal clavicle” itself conspires with this doubleness. This reconstructed brontosaurus is a creature with a clavicle – hence presumably its head, even its mind – between its ribs.