Screwball Speakeasy Club Presents: BRINGING UP BABY

Bringing Up Baby (1938, Dir. by Howard Hawks, 102 mins). With Katharine Hepburn and Cary Grant at their effervescent best, Bringing Up Baby is a seamlessly assembled comedy with enduring appeal. Emerging in the 1930s was a wild new strain of farces involving battles of the sexes and these films continue to remind us how necessary and sneakily profound silliness can be.. 

Pregnant with witty double-entendres, the humorous hijinks and romantic entanglements of Screwball Comedies gleefully reveal that control is an illusion, and that the orderly world exists forever on the brink of collapse. This unparalleled screwball classic features Hepburn (in her most truly madcap role) as an agent-of-chaos heiress who, along with her leopard named “Baby,” challenges a repressed paleontologist (Grant) to find his own liberation. *This event will be in our community space, please use side entrance. Doors 7pm, Film Begins at 7:30pm. Tickets are $15. Popcorn, Raffle Ticket and Thematic Libations inspired by the film are Included.

Critical Acclaim:

"When compared with other screwballs of the era—even with the ones Hawks went on to direct—Bringing Up Baby seems almost like the genre’s feral stepchild. The film doesn’t just go off leash; it questions the concept of leashes altogether. The law of the jungle reigns. Bringing Up Baby has much in common with Shakespeare comedies such as A Midsummer Night’s Dream and As You Like It, in which the characters leave the rule-bound court and enter the forest. In the forest, love, lust, gender-bending, and magic all flourish. At the end, the characters return to the court, ready to rejoin society. Order is restored. In Bringing Up Baby, though, order is not restored: the brontosaurus collapses, and so does civilization. Maybe it deserves to go down." 

-Excerpt from: Bringing Up Baby: Bones, Balls, and Butterflies, an essay by Sheila O’Malley for The Criterion Collection.