Cary Grant’s “Crabby, Exasperated, Put-Upon Quality”

Richard Schickel on “David Huxley” – the absentminded paleontologist Cary Grant created in Bringing Up Baby:

There may be something sympathetic about a nebbish, but there is nothing funny about him. So they [Howard Hawks and Grant] added a certain crankiness to Grant’s character — a crabby, exasperated, put-upon quality. After all, the man was a scientist, a rationalist … What, logically, would be his response to the sheer impracticality and heedlessness of Hepburn’s character when the full import of their consequences to him dawned? Obviously, it would be a fuming fury, suppressed only by the demands of propriety (so many of her assaults on him occurred in public, a golf course, a nightclub, her aunt’s dinner table, a police station) and politeness (she was, after all, a woman, and he could vaguely remember from childhood that you were supposed to be polite to them, even protect them, as they were the weaker sex.)

Well, this was splendid. This was even historic.

Grant would use this comically-stated balefulness often in the future. It became part of his identity…

The primary importance of Bringing Up Baby is as the film in which he established that misogyny that was essential to so many of his best comic effects in the future, that sense that though women could be fun and all, they were — with their strainge ways, and even stranger logic — dangerous to one’s pursuit of serious male business (work and adventure and, for that matter, just hanging out with the guys).

One of my favorite moments in Bringing Up Baby comes early in the film, when she drops him off at his apartment – after their disastrous meeting in the nightclub – where he falls onto the floor (crushing his top hat), and then she tears his tail-coat.

She drops him off. She keeps insisting that she will help him connect with the benefactor of the museum, she will help him with his work … He continuously insists, “Please. No. You are a disaster. Stay away from me. DON’T HELP.”

She refuses to listen.

Finally, he manages to get out a complete sentence, and he says to her, very very firmly, in that cranky put-upon way, “My fiance has always thought of me as a man with some dignity.”

And Katherine Hepburn takes one look at him, with his thick glasses, his torn top-coat, and the crushed top hat on his head, and bursts into laughter. He endures her laughter, with this wounded proud expression on his face – but he looks so ridiculous that you must laugh at him, too.