4 min
Bringing Up Baby
育婴奇谭
1938
Howard Hawks
United States · Screwball comedy / Romantic comedy · 102 min
A paleontologist who has spent four years assembling a dinosaur skeleton loses control of his life three days before his wedding, thanks to a girl, a leopard and a bone buried by a dog. Howard Hawks's screwball template — a flop on release, now the benchmark for the form.
01Why this film today
The same falling leaf can come down in opposite ways.
This morning's film is a scheme loosening joint by joint; this one is an entire order dismantled in one go — and the person dismantling it means no harm. She simply never thinks about consequences.
It opened at the Golden Gate Theatre in San Francisco on 16 February 1938 to a warm reception. By 3 March, at Radio City Music Hall in New York, it took $70,000 in a week and was pulled for Jezebel. It was not rediscovered until television in the 1950s, and the critics of Cahiers du Cinéma made its case in the 1960s.
If you are watching only one today, watch the morning film. If something has been pressing on you all week, watch this one. It will not fix anything, but it will make you laugh long enough to forget what you were worried about.
02Film details
- Chinese title
- 育婴奇谭
- English title
- Bringing Up Baby
- Director
- Howard Hawks / 霍华德·霍克斯
- Year
- 1938
- Country
- United States / 美国
- Language
- English
- Genre
- Screwball comedy / Romantic comedy / 神经喜剧 / 爱情喜剧
- Runtime
- 102 min
03About the film
博物馆的清晨。David Huxley 站在一副巨大的恐龙骨架下面，仰头看它。四年了，这副 Brontosaurus 只差一块骨头就能合拢。
明天他要结婚。今天他有两件事必须办成：把最后一块骨头装上，以及陪一位可能捐一百万美元的太太打一场高尔夫。
然后他在球场上遇到一个女孩。她走过来，用他的球打了一杆，然后若无其事地走开。
04Why it is a classic
The numbers: Rotten Tomatoes 97% from 74 reviews, Metacritic 91 from 17; selected for the National Film Registry in 1990; 88th on AFI's 2007 list of the greatest American films, 14th on its list of funniest, 51st among its great loves.
Its standing was not built from numbers, though. Leonard Maltin calls it the definitive screwball comedy and one of the fastest, funniest films ever made. Stanley Cavell grouped it with Holiday and The Philadelphia Story as the comedy of remarriage and called that cycle Hollywood's crowning achievement. Peter Bogdanovich's What's Up, Doc? (1972) is an outright homage.
It is also a textbook case of the failure that gets reclaimed. First-run grosses were $715,000 domestic and $394,000 foreign — $1,109,000 against a budget just over $1.1 million. Only after the 1940 and 1941 reissues did the books show a profit of $163,000. RKO released Hawks early from his two-picture contract and handed Gunga Din to George Stevens. Hepburn, already branded box-office poison by exhibitors, used the moment to buy out her contract for $22,000.
05What to notice
Hepburn 一开始不会演这个。 她反复过火，越想好笑越不好笑。Hawks 请杂耍老手 Walter Catlett 来，让他和 Grant 当场演一遍给她看——要她明白「正经的时候才最好笑」。她懂了，之后基本是在演自己；为了报答，她坚持让 Catlett 演那个糊涂警长 Slocum。
找骨头的戏拍了一整天。 从上午十点拍到下午四点以后，因为两个主演一直在笑场，机器停不下来。Hawks 后来把进度落后的责任半开玩笑地推给「两位明星的笑场和两个动物演员」。
那只狗是 Skippy。 演 George 的㹴犬就是《瘦人》系列里的 Asta，此前也和 Grant 在《The Awful Truth》里合作过。
那句「went gay」是即兴。 Grant 穿着女人的羽毛睡袍被撞见，剧本原写的是「我知道这看起来奇怪……我平时不穿这个」，他脱口而出的是「因为我刚突然变得 gay 了」。海斯办公室审片时放过了这句，只对裙子被撕破的戏和几处政治人物指涉提了意见。
账本是冷的。 首轮合计 110.9 万、成本 110 万出头，重映两次后才转为 16.3 万利润；Hawks 因此被 RKO 提前解约，《Gunga Din》转给 George Stevens。他后来复盘说，这部片「有一个大毛病，我从里面学了很多：里面没有一个正常人。你遇到的每一个人都是怪人。」
06Before you watch
黑白，102 分钟。语速是这部片真正的主角，几乎每句话都在打断上一句。第一次看可能觉得吵——那是设计。
不要当情节片看。它的逻辑是一个误会推动下一个误会，里面没有一个讲道理的人。Hawks 自己后来说这是它最大的毛病，但也正是这一点让它成了类型范本。
留意镜头：几乎没有靠剪辑堆出来的节奏。Hawks 对 Bogdanovich 说过：「让演员在画框里说得快，比快切更能得到节奏。」所以看的时候注意演员在同一个景里怎么走位。
也留意声音：全片配乐极少，主要是那首《I Can't Give You Anything but Love, Baby》——豹子听见它就安静下来。
那只豹子大部分时候是真的。
07In one line
"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." — David Huxley
