Bringing Up Baby (Howard Hawks, 1938)

One of the chief reasons Howard Hawks' Bringing Up Baby is the king of the screwball comedies because it never stops. It has a straight man in Cary Grant's hysterically put-upon paleontologist, but no one in the movie is at all normal. Hawks himself later criticized this after the film proved, amazingly, to be a complete flop, saying he should have had at least one person acknowledge the lunacy and provide some kind of sanity anchor. But that's what makes the movie so great: it never steps outside itself to note how ridiculous (and downright naughty) everything is.

Some of the first lines of the film are pure innuendo, showing Grant's David Huxley, framed in an unflattering, goofy Thinker pose trying to figure out where a brontosaurus bone goes and telling his fiancé "I think this one must belong in the tail." "Nonsense," she says, "you tried it in the tail yesterday." This sets the ball rolling on a flagrantly sexual movie that inverts gender roles, making Grant the creepily stalked object of affection of Katharine Hepburn, who flashes into the movie like a firecracker and only gets more spectacular from there. While David is out playing golf to woo a potential museum investor, Hepburn's Susan walks up and plays his ball. Then, she drives off in his car, dragging him along on the running boards. Take a deep breath, this is as calm as the film gets.

Grant had already established his comic persona that would serve him well for the remainder of his career, but he still plays entirely against type here. He's so good at being clumsy, using his acrobatic talents for the first time in film in service to magnificent pratfalls, that it's easy to forget that this is Cary Grant, sexiest man who ever lived and a powerhouse leading man. He submits entirely to Hepburn, who has never seemed more masculine despite the absence of her usual suits. Hepburn is the aggressor, sizing up the bumbling paleontologist and seeing that beneath his obscuring spectacles and stick-up-his-ass gait, he is indeed Cary Grant. Naturally, she'd like a piece of that, so she begins contriving wilder and wilder reasons to keep David from his wedding to the frigidly, ironically named Miss Swallow (who almost certainly has no idea what her surname references and would be appalled if she did).

The titular Baby of the film is not, as one might have guessed, a human child but a tame leopard Susan's brother sent back from Brazil for their aunt, the same patron considering the donation to David's museum. Before long, the whole world's gone mad, with David and Susan chasing around their leopard; another, far less agreeable one they let out of a zoo truck under the impression it's Baby; and George, Aunt Elizabeth's dog, who steals the brontosaurus bone David has with him and buries it. All the while, Susan's antics attract attention and her lies grow more and more fanciful.

Hepburn and Grant had already co-starred in two films, the even more gender-bending Sylvia Scarlett and the commercially disappointing but critically lauded Holiday, and they had another coming in 1940's The Philadelphia Story. Their familiarity each other makes for intense chemistry, even as both convince the audience they've never met before in this movie. By the same token, Hawks incorporates enough self-reflexivity—Susan using Grant's character name from The Awful Truth to identify him in an elaborate lie to the cops, the use of the star dog Asta for George—that the look of knowing on Susan's face from the moment she sets eyes on David suggests she has some of her actor's awareness. As fast as the film moves, the actors needed that past working relationship to let them feel so believably attracted. It's difficult to describe how the movie builds their romance even as it never flags, something the film itself points out when David says, "It isn't that I don't like you, Susan, because after all, in moments of quiet, I'm strangely drawn toward you. But, well, there haven't been any quiet moments."

Not quite as fast-paced as Hawks' own His Girl Friday, Bringing Up Baby nevertheless feels the most breakneck of the screwballs even as it is also one of the most carefully composed. Obviously, it takes skill to move at this speed, but that wouldn't automatically make it good: think of all those showboating heavy metal guitarists who wow everyone by playing arpeggios over, and over, and over. Like, yeah, great, you can do scales, now when are you gonna be a big boy and write something? Bringing Up Baby doesn't simply assume that by pushing forward it is funny. It relies on a perfect cast of loony characters* to complement Grant and Hepburn, who crucially play their roles with conviction. Hepburn purportedly did not realize the importance of this at first, overselling her lines because she was in a comedy, but Grant, by then a close friend, set her straight**. If Bringing Up Baby is a film where no one is a reasonable, sensible human being, it is also one where everyone in it likes to think himself reasonable and sensible. That, fundamentally, is why it remains one of the most enduringly funny comedies more than 70 years after its release.

*My favorite side player is Walter Catlett's Constable Slocum, a bumbling sheriff so forgetful he finds himself in pleasant chats with those he seeks to arrest, only to snap back to reality and explode in rage at having been "duped" into treating the perps with pleasantries.
**For a far more thorough account of Hepburn's on-set evolution, read this piece by Sheila O'Malley.

Only Angels Have Wings

The rousing, boisterous opening of Howard Hawks' Only Angels Have Wings is misleading in its jubilation, the shots of a bustling Latin harbor giving the impression of adventures to come. But the music fades out, and the peppy opening proves merely to be the setup to a decrescendo that lasts the rest of the film. With its romantic title and setting among pilots in hazardous terrain, Only Angels Have Wings seems the film that should be a classic melodrama. Instead, it communicates a deep, affecting melancholy, and also a keen sense of gallows humor that parlays the screwball credentials of its stars into something with more kick.

Off the boat sailing into the Andes port town of Barranca strides Bonnie Lee (Jean Arthur), a piano-playing chanteuse, so confidently and forcefully that a fresh sailor winds up with a face looking as if a puma swatted it (hilariously, he acts like a cowed spouse, blaming his swollen and scratched eye on falling into a doorknob). Two American airmen, gobsmacked by the sight of this blond beauty in the middle of the teeming harbor, nearly fall over themselves trying to win her attention. She prepares to box them as well, until she recognizes their accents and joyously tags along with them, thrilled "to hear someone talking in something that doesn't sound like Pig Latin." They take her back to their home base -- a building that combines elements of a general store, bar/restaurant and air delivery service -- where they attempt to ply her with American luxuries such as steak. The place is run by Dutchy (Sig Ruman), named for his national origin, and his presence creates a marvelously Hawksian microcosm where different ethnicities casually rub against each other without comment, save for Bonnie's initial spat of racism, but then she is cast as the outsider even among the Americans.

The two men behave as if college lads on vacation, forgetting all their duties and sporting over the woman right in front of her. With Dutchy chuckling good-naturedly in the background as his employees cost him time and money, the atmosphere shifts fully from the confusing bustle of the harbor to a lively but homely setting, a place where all the various people populating this port town can meld into one friendly group. Fueled by a steady supply of machismo, Dutchy's store looks to be one of the most appealing groups of Hawksian individuals in the director's canon.

Then reality finally seeps into the picture: at last, the men can put off their jobs no longer and one of the two, Joe, heads out to fly a mission in the dense fog around Barranca, and on his return he crashes and dies. Suddenly, the carefree nature of the film turns deadly serious, and it never particularly lets up again. The word "Hawksian" exists because the director centered so many of his movies on the same topic: men walking the line between individualism and teamwork to overcome obstacles. Here, however, the only obstacle is death, and it is insurmountable. No matter how high those planes climb, they won't be able to stay up forever, and eventually they'll crash down into death's infinite maw. These men band together, sure, but only in mutual emotional support. They do not have a luxury of a villain: they struggle against inevitability.

Ingeniously, Hawks decides to rest the split between the lighter tone of the beginning and the more macabre feel of the rest of the film entirely on the shoulders of Cary Grant. For my money, Grant's entrance into the film eclipses even that of the most famous of appearances in 1939, that of John Wayne in Stagecoach. Where Ford's film made its impression by literalizing Wayne's magnetism by sending the camera so quickly at the star that it seems to have broken free of operator control, Grant's entrance here relies on his singular ability to stand back just far enough to let the wave of talent emanating from him crest and crash onto the camera.

Grant simply appears in a door frame as the two other pilots fail to contain their drooling over Bonnie, sporting a cowboy hat and gaucho as if he looked at the leather jacket and sunglasses of the stereotypical pilot and thought, "Too subtle." Where everyone else bustles around the place in Dionysian revelry, Grant's Geoff Carter gently saunters in from his mission, laconic even in body language. Things quiet down when he arrives, not because he intimidates anyone but because they want to see what he'll do.

The remove in Geoff's carriage becomes evident when Joe dies, his steeled emotions a defense against the constant risk of losing a friend. The others fall in line too, responding to Bonnie's anguish over the man's death with feigned ignorance, everyone acting as if Joe never existed now that he no longer does. Only a quiet gesture Geoff makes in private with Dutchy reveals just how badly he feels every time someone in his command crashes. But he cannot display that outside the room, and his emotional distance extends to Bonnie, who is incensed outwardly that Geoff is boorish to her and, inwardly, because he man be the first man in many years to ignore her.

Grant brilliantly plays Geoff in the manner that made him the most irresistible leading man of all time. I never could play hard to get. I was always too invested in the outcome, too reliant on that need for reciprocity. Most people strike me as being bad at playing the game, only ever succeeding when they genuinely do dislike the person pining for their affections, or are at least uninterested. At best, they're just scared of commitment and decide to waste time with a game they are never good at. But Cary Grant, to steal from Richard Schickel, never played hard to get. He was hard to get. He could stand in the corner seemingly oblivious to the existence of everyone but himself, at last leaning out of his solipsistic bubble to kiss the woman near desperation for longing for him. There are endless fantasies of the suffering man entreating his ideal love until she finally relents, but Cary Grant did his bit made up for the massive gap, letting potential loves come to him, never making the trip himself. Bonnie cannot wait to leave this flea-ridden cesspool, but Grant's presence allures her so much she eventually cancels her ride home to keep seeing him. Wouldn't you?

It is easy to lose sight of the entire film's copious rewards for the looming redwood that is Grant. It's difficult to even call him anything but his full name, as if to use Grant alone is akin to using Excalibur without its scabbard, a mistake that cost Arthur his life. The more I see of him the more I find myself unable to call him anything less than the greatest film actor who ever lived, and Only Angels Have Wings boasts a performance that cements itself among the ever-changing list of favorite Cary Grant roles. His Geoff retains some of the comic timing that made Grant famous, but even his interplay with Arthur, another screwball icon, is tinged with melancholy.

Where Grant always gave enough space to make love interests come to him, here the reasons for doing so are sadder, more vulnerable. Not only does Geoff have to consider the danger of his job, he must also take into account how that danger would affect Bonnie. His first wife left him because the stress of worrying about him made the constant threat of his death more difficult to bear than death itself, preferring Geoff to crash and die simply to let of her the damn seesaw. Bonnie, naturally, falls for Geoff, but this time he won't allow his feelings to intervene and break his terrible shield.

That same dour tone on romantic love extends to the platonic realm of the male interactions. Kid (Thomas Mitchell), Geoff's best friend, has grown old, his failing eyesight forcing a reluctant Geoff to ground the man to save his life. But what is life for a man who can no longer fly, who must return to the mortals after soaring above them for a lifetime? Kid's sadness turns to anger when a disgraced pilot, Bat (Richard Barthelmess), returns to the base. Bat bailed on a falling aircraft, trapping the engineer, Kid's brother, as the plane plummeted. Compounding the hostility of the men toward a traitor is the fact that Bat shows up with Geoff's ex-wife (played by Rita Hayworth, which can only deepen the sting). But even that level of ire cannot last, and a heroic act by Bat absolves him of his earlier sin, an act presented just as stoically as the more dire material.

That's the damnedest thing about the movie: it never lays off the gloom, even when it appears to lapse back into melodrama. Bat's triumph of platonic commitment reflects Geoff and Bonnie's budding romantic relationship, but both cannot lift the pall covering the film. Hawks maintains the fog around Dutchy's service, as if it were not merely condensing moisture but the ever-billowing smoke from the plane crashes around the perilous area, that mist reminding everyone inside of what awaits him someday.

That quiet tone allows from some understated beauty, such as Bonnie displaying her first touch of interesting humanity when she fails to detect the sarcasm in Geoff's voice when he meets her and condescendingly asks if she thinks airplanes make her think of birds. "No, I didn't," she responds with breathless awe. "That's what makes it so wonderful. It's really just a flying human being." Even Grant nearly breaks and lets on his attraction in the moment. That touching moment is contrasted with the chilling quality of Joe's flat voice over the radio when he attempts to return and crashes, his monotone not letting the audience relax or anticipate the worst. Occasionally, the humor comes through, such as the wordplay of Bonnie asking Geoff if he still "carries the torch" for his ex-wife and he holds up a cigarette and asks "Got a match?" There's also the time Bonnie uses a literal act to mock Geoff's macho proclamations: "I thought you never got burned in the same place," she sneers, and Grant's snicker lightens up the screen as if it were always a comedy. But the somber tone is unlike practically anything I can recall seeing out of mainstream Hollywood fare at the time. Only Angels Have Wings stops short of the cynicism of film noir but goes quite a bit further than the lavish emoting of a melodrama.

That is because the two primary relationships of the film, between man and woman and man and other man, are superseded by the connection of man to death. Gloom is rampant in Only Angels Have Wings, but it also contains the perverse optimism that comes with fatalism: when one knows of the finality of death, one strives to make the days alive count all the more. When Grant finally opens up, the promise of his relationship with Bonnie manages to overcome the burden of grief around them, something that might not have been possible had the film not earned that small breakthrough. But in classic Grant fashion, he cannot up and confess love to the girl: in the film's last act of stoic passion, Geoff leaves the fate of his relationship up to a coin toss, only for Bonnie to discover he rigged the game as he flies one last mission for Dutchy.

"I'm hard to get, Geoff," Bonnie says to him before the climax. "All you have to do is ask me." Any other man would have been on his knees an hour of screentime earlier begging, not asking, but that's the power of Grant, and of this film. It never screams or moans or wails. It just trudges on in its sadness, making the twinkling of sorrow in Geoff's eyes at the end as devastating as a full breakdown. That Only Angels Have Wings can somehow end this strain of thought on a happy, life-affirming note threw me so completely that I shall return to this, possibly Hawks' greatest masterpiece, in the hopes of figuring out how the son of a bitch pulled it off.