Bringing Up Baby is a 1938 American screwball comedy film directed by Howard Hawks, starring Katharine Hepburn and Cary Grant, and released by RKO Radio Pictures.

The movie tells the story of a paleontologist winding up in various predicaments involving a woman with a unique sense of logic and a leopard named "Baby". The supporting cast includes Charles Ruggles, Barry Fitzgerald, Walter Catlett, and May Robson. The screenplay was adapted by Dudley Nichols and Hagar Wilde from a short story by Wilde that originally appeared in Collier's Weekly magazine on April 10, 1937. Nichols and Hagar began a relationship during their collaboration and went on to write other screenplays together. Nichols partially based the relationship between Susan and David on the real life love affair between Hepburn and director John Ford, which Nichols had witnessed first hand on the set of Mary of Scotland a few years earlier.

The script was written specifically for Hepburn and tailored for her personality. Cary Grant was reluctant to take the role and was chosen after several other established leading men turned the part down. Filming began in September 1937 and did not wrap until January 1938. It was over schedule and over budget. Hepburn initially struggled with her comedic performance and was coached by co-star and vaudeville veteran Walter Catlett. A real tamed leopard was used during the shooting and its trainer was off screen with a whip for all of its scenes.

Although it has a reputation of being a disastrous flop upon its release, Bringing up Baby was moderately successful in many cities and eventually made a small profit after its re-release in the early 1940s. Shortly after the film premiered Hepburn was famously labeled box office poison by the Independent Theatre Owners of America and would not regain her success until The Philadelphia Story two years later. Grant's popularity was beginning to rise during the film's production and the film's failure did not hurt his career. Hawks was scheduled to direct an adaptation of Rudyard Kipling's Gunga Din but was fired by RKO after the film's disappointment and George Stevens directed the film instead. Grant and Hepburn had previously worked together in Sylvia Scarlett in 1935 and would go on to film Holiday immediately after finishing Bringing Up Baby and The Philadelphia Story two years later. Grant and Hawks went on to make four more films together.

The film's reputation began to grow tremendously beginning in the 1950s when it began to be shown on TV. In 1972 director Peter Bogdanovich filmed a loose remake of the film called What's Up, Doc?. In 1990, Bringing Up Baby was selected for preservation in the National Film Registry by the Library of Congress as being "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant". It has appeared on numerous lists of films considered the greatest ever made.

Bringing up Baby is also known for its early use of the word gay by Grant, which many people believe to be a reference to homosexuality. Some historians believe that the word gay did not have a homosexual connotation in 1937, but other film theorists such as Vito Russo believe that the line was an early example of the slang term.

Plot
David Huxley (Cary Grant) is a mild-mannered paleontologist beleaguered by problems. For the past four years, he has been trying to assemble the skeleton of a Brontosaurus but is missing one bone (the mythical "intercostal clavicle"[4]). To add to the stress, he is about to get married to the dour Alice Swallow (Virginia Walker) and must make a favorable impression upon Mrs. Random (May Robson), who is considering donating one million dollars to his museum.

The day before his planned wedding, David meets Susan Vance (Katharine Hepburn) by chance on a golf course. She is a free-spirited young lady, and unknown to him at first, happens to be Mrs. Random's niece. Susan's brother Mark has sent her a tame leopard from Brazil named "Baby", which she is supposed to give to her aunt. Susan believes David is a zoologist rather than a paleontologist, and she is very persistent in getting David to go to her country home in Connecticut to help her take care of Baby, which includes singing "I Can't Give You Anything But Love" which Baby likes. Complications arise as Susan decides that she has fallen in love with David, and she endeavors to keep him at her house for as long as possible to prevent him from marrying his colleague.

While David is there, Susan's dog George (Asta) steals and buries the bone that David needs to complete his Brontosaurus skeleton. Susan's aunt, Mrs. Elizabeth Random arrives. She is unaware of who David really is because Susan has introduced him as a man named "Mr. Bone". Baby runs off, as does George. To further complicate matters, Susan and David mistake a decidedly wild and very dangerous leopard that has escaped from a nearby circus for Baby. They are jailed by a befuddled town constable, Constable Slocum (Walter Catlett) for breaking into the house of Dr. Fritz Lehman (Fritz Feld). When Slocum does not believe their story, Susan tells him that they are members of "The Leopard Gang"; she refers to herself as "Swingin' Door Susie" and David as "Jerry the Nipper" (a name Cary Grant's character was called by Irene Dunne in the movie The Awful Truth, also featuring Asta). David fails to convince the constable that she is making everything up "from motion pictures she's seen."

Eventually, Alexander Peabody (George Irving) shows up to verify everyone's identity. Susan, who has sneaked out of a window, unwittingly drags the highly irritated circus leopard into the jail. David has to save her, using a chair to shoo the animal into a jail cell.

A few weeks later, Susan finds David, who has been jilted by Alice because of her, working on his brontosaurus reconstruction at the museum. After presenting him with his bone, which she finally found by trailing George, Susan informs David that she has gotten her aunt to donate the million dollars to the museum. Against his advice, she climbs a tall ladder beside the dinosaur to be closer to him. Although Susan climbs from the dangerously swaying ladder onto the skeleton and causes it to collapse, David finally gives up and admits he cannot do without her.

Awards and honors
In 1990, Bringing Up Baby was selected for preservation in the National Film Registry by the Library of Congress as being "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant", the second year that the registry started preserving films. Entertainment Weekly voted the film number twenty-four on its list of the greatest films. In 2000, readers of Total Film magazine voted it the forty-seventh greatest comedy film of all time.

Premiere ranked Cary Grant's performance as Dr. David Huxley #68 on their list of The 100 Greatest Performances of All Time. They also ranked the character of Susan Vance #21 on their list of The 100 Greatest Movie Characters of All Time.

American Film Institute recognition
AFI's 100 Years...100 Movies - #97
AFI's 100 Years...100 Laughs - #14
AFI's 100 Years...100 Passions - #51
AFI's 100 Years...100 Movie Quotes:
"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!" - Nominated
AFI's 100 Years...100 Movies (10th Anniversary Edition) - #88
AFI's 10 Top 10 - Nominated Romantic Comedy

Review
"Bringing Up Baby" is a film I unconditionally love; it is so utterly sublime a comedy that I was truly sighing, awed, 'it can't get better than this...' at many points. Yet it regularly does; Hawks keeps the momentum going majestically; it is one incredibly surreal, bizarre tangent going off unexpectedly into another, at every juncture. He photographs and presents his actors in the most charming and amusing possible ways, and the film is certainly a more leisurely, perfectly pitched film than "His Girl Friday", which I nonetheless admire.

There is not one actress in the annals of film who I adore more than Katharine Hepburn; she is a compelling performer, of great charm, intelligence and wit; of very real, idiosyncratic looks that to this eye are beautiful, vivacious, impish. In "Bringing Up Baby" her Susan Vance is a very interesting diversion from her more usual type of character - the slightly superior, in-control ice maiden, as shown in say "The Philadelphia Story". She is phenomenal in that film, yet here beguiling in a completely different fashion, playing a slightly scatterbrained, sprightly, charmingly delinquent woman, who seems to have no control over anything; least of all her feelings for Grant. Her giddy, breathless exuberance and anarchic helplessness are really endearing; it's a wonderful film that stretches out the credulity of Grant's wonderfully straight-laced character's resistance to Miss Vance. The ending is a gorgeous, satisfying pay-off, as he finally gives way, as would we all! It's a charming, suitable ending that rectifies the slight fall-off of the preceding jail section of the film. That is very amusing, but in a more predictable, slightly laboured way. In stark contrast to the first 70-80 minutes of the film, which amounts to about the finest sustained American comedy I have seen of that length - "Way Out West" and "Duck Soup" being shorter in total.

Cary Grant, truly an institution of a comedic player, is very different to his more remembered persona of later years. It's remarkable to see this absurd little man, bespectacled, unworldly and cutting an orthodox figure played so perfectly by the suave Grant. This is gleefully played on with the sublime scene where Hepburn and Grant are trying to catch the leopard - Kate butterfly net in hand! She accidentally happens to break his glasses and is even more taken with him without them... The tension between how we usually remember Grant and the character he is playing here does add an extra layer of amusement to the film. Need I really add that the rest of the film's company are note perfect? Charles Ruggles, Barry Fitzgerald and many more really give the perfectly matched stars a fine backdrop.

I shan't spoil too much of this heady, sublimely silly film... just go and watch it and see Howard Hawks, a master craftsman, at his best - there are no pretensions but making a quite wonderful character comedy - and Katharine Hepburn and Cary Grant on insurmountable form. With these delightful stars and anarchic, scintillating comic material, what we have on our hands is an unutterably fine film, one of my very favourites of all time. Where else are you going to get such plot threads running simultaneously as: a hunt for a rare archeological find buried by a dog, an absurd upper-middle-class family dinner and an escaped leopard?