DIRECTOR: Howard Hawks.
BOTTOM LINE: In Howard Hawks’s “Bringing Up Baby,” Cary Grant answers the front door dressed in a négligée because Katherine Hepburn has hidden all his clothes. When Hepburn’s aunt, played by May Robson, asks him to explain, he replies exasperatedly, “Because I just went gay all of a sudden” (and leaping into the air at the word gay). There are no further references to Grant’s character being Gay/Queer/homosexual in the rest of the movie. How often was gay used as a synonym in the vernacular for homosexuality in 1938? Can I get a linguist? Can I get a linguist? Grant plays a paleontologist who gets involved in several predicaments involving a scatterbrained heiress (Hepburn) and a leopard named Baby. The film represents the peak of Hollywood’s slapstick era, with Grant taking a couple of classic tumbles. Adapted by Dudley Nichols and Hagar Wilde from a short story by Wilde, which originally appeared in Collier’s Weekly magazine on April 10, 1937.
REMADE WITH BARBRA STREISAND AND RYAN O’NEILL BY PETER BOGDANOVICH AS “WHAT’S UP DOC” IN 1972.
STREAMING: Amazon Prime, Apple TV+ and YouTube
https://thebrownees.net/sixty-five-queer-films-made-under-the-hays-code-1934-1967
https://thebrownees.net/sixty-five-queer-films-made-under-the-hays-code-1934-1967-table-summary
https://thebrownees.net/fifty-two-post-hays-code-queer-films-released-in-the-decade-1967-1976
