“In finding his voice as a comedy director with the making of Bringing Up Baby, Howard Hawks set up archetypes of theme and performance that are still valid,” writes New Yorker Richard Brody. His article is a nod to MOMA screenings of this 1938 classic from 3.11 to 3.13.
“He turned Cary Grant into an extension of his own intellectual irony, an absent-minded professor who seems lost in thought but awaits the chance to unleash his inner leopard. He reinvented Katharine Hepburn as a sexually determined woman who hides her aggression under intricate scatterbrained schemes that entrap the deep thinker in adventures that reveal his untapped humor and virility. And he brought to fruition his own universe of hints and symbols for the force that rules the world: she tears his coat, he tears her dress, she steals his clothes, she names him ‘Bone’ and the mating cries of wild animals disturb the decorum of the dinner table, even as a Freudian psychiatrist in a swanky bar gives viewers a skeleton key in advance.”