“I’ll Be With You In a Minute, Mr. Peabody!”

A wonderful analytic post about Bringing Up Baby. I see the movie, on average, once a month. It keeps working for me, regardless of repetition.

“You told them my name was Bone, and you didn’t tell me.”

“That was the loon’s mating cry!” “Now don’t be rude, Horace.”

“I’ll be with you in a minute, Mr. Peabody!”

“Now look here, young lady, that is my car!” “Your car, your golf ball. Is there anything in the world that doesn’t belong to you?” “Yes – YOU. Thank heavens!” “Now don’t lose your temper.”

I love his thoughts there in that post – makes me see a couple of things anew. Especially the bits about Hepburn’s character’s amorality – definitely – the woman knows no societal restraints!! And how good Hepburn is in that realm!

Excerpt from the post:

Hawks here introduces us to his distinctive take on the comedy of power and powerlessness: he likes pushing the protagonist’s loss of control into the realm of humiliation, and then, in a compensatory gesture of equal force, he shifts the focus to the humbled protagonist’s recovery of his dignity and power – sometimes via detachment, sometimes via exasperation. In the other corner, Susan Vance is explictly amoral, in rebellion against every rule society is selling – and extremely feminine, her strategems couched in the language of girlish seduction, her threat coded as the threat of femininity. Somehow Bringing Up Baby seems more explicitly about sex than other screwball comedies: partly because the focus remains squarely on the boy-girl thing, and partly because Hawks pushes Susan’s antisocial qualities so far that it’s easy to imagine her breaking the Hays Code as well.

And also I love his observation about the entire cast basically tromping into the jail in single file at the end for the finale. It’s hysterical!

Here’s the whole post

via – the wonderful Girish