You don't kiss leopards
| Movie | |
|---|---|
| German title | You don't kiss leopards |
| Original title | Bringing up baby |
.jpg) | |
| Country of production | United States |
| original language | English |
| Publishing year | 1938 |
| length | 102 minutes |
| Age rating | FSK 6 |
| Rod | |
| Director | Howard Hawks |
| script |
Hagar Wilde , Dudley Nichols |
| production |
Cliff Reid , Howard Hawks for RKO Pictures |
| music |
Roy Webb Jimmy McHugh |
| camera | Russell Metty |
| cut | George Hively |
| occupation | |
| |
You don't kiss leopards (Original title: Bringing Up Baby ) is an American screwball comedy directed by Howard Hawks from 1938 with Cary Grant and Katharine Hepburn in the leading roles. The screenplay for the film was written by Dudley Nichols and Hagar Wilde, based on a story by the latter that she previously published in Collier's Magazine . Directed by Howard Hawks. Although the film was a financial flop , it is now considered one of the best comedies of all time. In 1990 he was inducted into the National Film Registry .
action
Dr. David Huxley is a spiritualized, somewhat confused paleontologist . For the last four years he has been working on the reconstruction of a Brontosaurus , for which he is now only missing a single bone (the [fictional] "intercostal clavicle "). Huxley is also about to marry his assistant Alice Swallow. For the dominant and serious Alice, career and science count more than love and family, she does not want a child with David, but sees the Brontosaurus as the "common child" of the two. The day before the bone's arrival and the wedding, his fiancée sends him to a game of golf with attorney Peabody. Peabody is the lawyer for millionaire Mrs. Carlton Random, who is considering donating $ 1 million to David's Museum. David is supposed to make a good impression on the renowned lawyer and thus help the museum to make a donation.
This resolution fails when David meets the extremely spirited Susan Vance on the golf course. She keeps David's golf balls and ultimately his car as her property. In the evening he meets her again in a restaurant, where Susan's intervention leads to all sorts of comical incidents that make David fall in favor of Mr. Peabody. Among other things, a mishap with Susan caused the psychiatrist Dr. Lehman David accused of stealing his wife's handbag. Susan thinks David is a zoologist and the next day gets him to take care of the tame leopard Baby, a present from her brother to her aunt. They take the leopard to the aunt's country home in Connecticut . On the way to the country house, Susan steals Dr. Lehman, so that she doesn't get a ticket for parking her own car in front of a fire hydrant. Susan decides that she is in love with David and tries to keep him indoors as long as possible in order to sabotage his upcoming wedding. In fact, he missed the wedding date. Among other things, she takes David's clothes to the dry cleaner so that he has to put on Susan's clothes. In this woman's outfit, David meets Susan's resolute aunt, who immediately wants to forbid her niece from marrying this man.
Unfortunately, Susan's aunt turns out to be the museum donor Mrs. Elizabeth Carlton Random. Because David made a very bad impression on her, Susan introduces him to her aunt as the slightly crazy big game hunter Mr. Bronto (in the original version: Mr. Bone ). David's predicament comes to a head when Susan's dog George buries the Brontosaurus bone in the garden; Susan and David dig holes in the garden with George, but they cannot find the bone. While Susan and David are having dinner with Aunt Elisabeth and Major Applegate, a guest of their aunt who is indeed a big game hunter, the drunken gardener Aloysius accidentally opens the bars of baby's cage, after which the baby can escape. After Aunt Elizabeth and Major Applegate also found out about the leopard, those involved set out to look. Meanwhile, another dangerous leopard, which has attacked a guard in the circus, is to be put to sleep. But David and Susan free the dangerous leopard from his transporter because they think he is a baby.
Susan and David discover the real baby on a house roof and sing the song I Can't Give You Anything but Love , with which one can attract the leopard. Unfortunately, the house belongs to Dr. Lehman, who now thinks Susan and David are notorious thieves and calls the police. The two are arrested as burglars by the local, rather idiotic police chief Slocum and put in prison. He doesn't believe them that they are looking for a leopard. Major Applegate, Gardener Aloysius, and Aunt Elizabeth are also imprisoned after a chain of unfortunate circumstances. Susan explains to Police Chief Slocum that she and the others are the infamous "leopard gang" and responsible for many atrocities. However, Susan manages to escape by a trick and wants to capture baby to prove the truth of her story. Meanwhile, attorney Peabody appears, who ensures the release of those involved. The police chief apologizes when suddenly baby with the dog George appears at the police station. Meanwhile Susan has dragged the wild leopard - believing it was a baby - to police headquarters. With combined forces Susan and David manage to transport the wild leopard into a cell.
After these events, David's fiancée Miss Swallow separated from him. Susan has now managed to find the bone after digging for hours with George. She also gives him the million dollars as a donation. David and Susan confess their love for each other and he says the two days with her were the best of his life. Shortly thereafter, Susan accidentally collapses the Brontosaurus skeleton, but this too can only briefly disrupt the love between the two.
background
Background and script
In April 1937, the short story Bringing Up Baby by the author Hagar Wilde appeared in Collier's Magazine , to which the film studio RKO Pictures also became aware. This suggested the story to the director Howard Hawks , who was just looking for a new film material. He then secured Wilde's film rights for $ 1,000. The original is very different from the film, so David and Susan are a couple right from the start, and David is not a scientist. The story about the wildcat, however, was adopted, only it is a leopard instead of the originally planned black panther . The dog George, Susan's wealthy aunt, and the song I Can't Give You Anything but Love also feature in Wilde's story.
From June 1937 Wilde worked together with the experienced screenwriter Dudley Nichols . While Wilde was responsible for the humor and characters, Nichols took care of the structure and logic of the script. In the end, the script had 202 pages. A love affair developed between Hagar Wilde and Dudley Nichols. In August 1937 Hawks brought in the gag writers Robert McGowan and Gertrude Pacelle, among other things, they added the story of the buried dinosaur bones. This was inspired by an episode of the Dinglehoofer and His Dog Adolph comic series . Some scenes in the middle section in which Susan and David make declarations of love to each other have been deleted from the script, and the character of Ali - Major Applegate's foreign assistant who was supposed to taste his food - has been removed. Dudley Nichols is said to have made allusions to the affair between Katharine Hepburn and John Ford in the film . During the filming of Mary of Scotland , there was an affair between the leading actress Hepburn and her director Ford, which Nichols had observed.
occupation
The role of Susan Vance was quickly cast. After briefly considering Hawk's cousin Carole Lombard , Katharine Hepburn was chosen. Hepburn's films had had little box office success after her Oscar for Dawn of Fame , which is why she had a reputation for being a box office poison . RKO Pictures was therefore happy that Hepburn's contract with them ended after this film. The male lead actor Cary Grant , on the other hand , rose to a star of the romantic comedy through the film The Terrible Truth last year. Before Grant was cast in the role, Hawks wanted to win the silent film comedian Harold Lloyd for the role; later the figure of Dr. Huxley of Lloyd's appearance with the distinctive round glasses. Other candidates were Ronald Colman , Robert Montgomery , Fredric March and Ray Milland . Skippy , the dog known from the Thin Man films , was used as George, Susan's dog. Both baby and the circus leopard were embodied, among other things, by an animal called "Nissa", which had been used in several B-films in previous years. Both a leopard and a jaguar were used as leopards in the film.
In the supporting roles Charlie Ruggles had to be loaned for the role of the big game hunter from Paramount Pictures . Hawks occupied Virginia Walker, who was to marry his younger brother William Hawks in June 1938, as David's fiancée Miss Swallow . Walker died in 1946 at the age of only 30. According to the cliché of the German psychiatrist following Sigmund Freud , the figure of the overzealous psychiatrist Dr. Lehman - who thinks David and Susan are dangerous thieves - has a German accent in the original version. He was portrayed by Fritz Feld , who was born in Berlin , and in two scenes the Austrian Tala Birell can be seen as his wife Mrs. Lehman . Uncredited actors of the film included: Jack Carson as a circus worker, D'Arcy Corrigan in the first scene of the film as Professor LaTouche, Billy Bevan as Tom barman (with the pea trick) and Ward Bond as a motorcycle policeman .
production
The film was originally supposed to be shot from September 1 to October 31, 1937, but the date could not be kept. In the end, filming began on September 23. Initially, the scenes were shot in Susan's apartment, and at the beginning of October they shot on the Bel Air Country Club golf course . The main part of the film was shot on a ranch near San Francisco that served as Aunt Elizabeth's house in the film. Hepburn had some problems with her acting as it was her first comedic film role and mostly overacting . So Hawks turned to veteran Broadway actor Walter Catlett for help. Catlett's rehearsals with Hepburn turned out so well that, at Hepburn's request, Catlett was cast as the idiot police chief.
Filming was severely delayed as Grant and Hepburn laughed a lot during their scenes; it took six hours to record the scene in which Huxley asks Susan where the Brontosaurus bone is. Hawks also repeatedly discarded or changed dialogues, which was particularly noticeable in the prison scenes: Originally only five days of shooting were scheduled, in the end there were twelve. Working with the animal actors was also difficult. In contrast to Hepburn, Cary Grant was frightened of the big cats on the film set, so that doubles were used as often as possible in the scenes between Grant and the leopard. The anecdote has been passed down that Hepburn once put a cloth leopard in Grant's wardrobe, so that when he saw the stuffed animal, he fled the room in panic.
On January 6, 1938, the last scenes to be shot in front of the lawyer Peabody's house. Instead of the planned approximately 700,000 US dollars, the film cost around 1.1 million US dollars, which was a comparatively high budget for a film at the time. This was mainly due to the increased salaries of those responsible due to the 40 days delay in filming.
Publication, aftermath and reception
In the previews, the film received good to excellent reviews from viewers and critics, so that the studio expected a great success. Despite some ambiguous scenes in the film, there were no major objections from the National Board of Review . However, the film grossed only $ 715,000 in the US and was a big flop. A total of 1,109,000 US dollars could only be brought in with the additional box office results from abroad. That meant a still unsatisfactory profit of $ 15,000 worldwide.
For the director Hawks the commercial failure meant the end of his career at RKO , so that he had to switch to Columbia Pictures . His first film there was SOS Fire on Board - also with Grant - and got him back on the road to success. Katharine Hepburn's reputation as a box office poison solidified, after another failure with The Bride's Sister (again with Grant), she had to buy her way out of her contract with RKO and returned to New York's Broadway. The night before the wedding , her fourth and final collaboration with Cary Grant , ensured her acclaimed return to the film business . In the decades that followed, both Grant and Hepburn were among the leading stars in Hollywood.
The film grew in popularity in the 1950s and 1960s and received high praise from critics. In retrospect, the film has now been considered the climax of the screwball comedy . Hawks saw precisely this as the crux of the film's failure: “I had a great fault and I learned an awful lot from that. There were no normal people in it. Everyone you met was a screwball and since that time I learned my lesson and don't intend ever again to make everybody crazy. "
The director Peter Bogdanovich , who counts the film as one of his favorite films, shot Is' was, Doc? one does not kiss an homage to leopards . With Who's That Girl , the story with Madonna in the lead role was newly adapted in 1987 .
synchronization
A shortened, 94-minute dubbed version was made for the German theatrical release on March 18, 1966. The dialogue book was written by Hans-Bernd Ebinger , and the dialogue was directed by Ingeborg Grunewald . For a reconstructed television version, the missing eight minutes were added in the original subtitled dialogue in 1994.
| role | actor | Voice actor |
|---|---|---|
| Dr. David Huxley | Cary Grant | Erik Schumann |
| Susan Vance | Katharine Hepburn | Margot Leonard |
| Major Horace Applegate | Charles Ruggles | Paul Bürks |
| Constable Slocum | Walter Catlett | Klaus W. Krause |
| Aloysius Gogarty, gardener | Barry Fitzgerald | Anton Reimer |
| Dr. Fritz Lehman | Fritz Feld | Wolf Rahtjen |
| Alice Swallow, David's fiancée | Virginia Walker | Ingrid Capelle |
| Mr. Alexander Peabody, Mrs. Random's lawyer | George Irving | Robert Klupp |
| Employees in the circus | Jack Carson | Wolfgang Hess |
Reviews
“ A classic of the screwball comedy, which offers amusing entertainment of format with wonderful ideas, non-stop wit and successful situation comedy. "
“ One of the best comedies in cinema. High-spirited in the mood, perfect in the gags. "
“For 102 minutes the film is about nothing but sex, without, however, talking about it, let alone showing it. [...] Profession, money and recognition are nothing if they are bought with the suppression of lustful feelings, the film shows with its own evidence. The perfect chaos couple Katharine Hepburn and Cary Grant is the guarantee that this film logic takes effect. […] A large part of the comedic quality of the film is due to the script, which contains some of the best dialogues written for a screwball comedy. [...] Howard Hawks has intensified the wit of the dialogues with his fast-paced production. […] So this comedy is the best proof of the 'technical intelligence' that Jacques Rivette Howard Hawks attested. "
“ A few passages of exuberant imagination lift the film in its comedy above the usual Hollywood average. "
Web links
- Bringing Up Baby in the Internet Movie Database (English)
- Bringing Up Baby at Rotten Tomatoes (English)
Individual evidence
- ↑ Gerald Mast: Bringing Up Baby . Rutgers University Press, 1988, ISBN 978-0-8135-1341-6 ( google.de [accessed January 10, 2018]).
- ^ Todd McCarthy (1997): Howard Hawks: The Gray Fox of Hollywood.
- ↑ Gerald Mast: Bringing Up Baby . Rutgers University Press, 1988, ISBN 978-0-8135-1341-6 ( google.de [accessed January 10, 2018]).
- ↑ Gerald Mast: Bringing Up Baby . Rutgers University Press, 1988, ISBN 978-0-8135-1341-6 ( google.de [accessed January 10, 2018]).
- ↑ Apocalypselaterfilm.com
- ↑ Moviebuff.com
- ^ Virginia Walker (IMDb). Retrieved January 10, 2018 .
- ↑ entry to filmsite.org , accessed January 21, 2008
- ↑ kino.de: You don't kiss leopards
- ↑ One does not kiss leopards in the German synchronous file
- ↑ You don't kiss leopards. In: Lexicon of International Films . Film service , accessed October 15, 2016 .
- ↑ Dietrich Leder, in: Classic films: Descriptions and comments / ed. by Thomas Koebner , unt. v. Kerstin-Luise Neumann, Vol. 1: 1913-1946, Reclam, Stuttgart 1995 (Universal-Bibliothek; 9416), ISBN 3-15-009416-X , pp. 364-370; is related to: Jacques Rivette, Genie des Howard Hawks, first published in 1953, reprinted again. in: JR, Schriften fürs Kino, Munich 1989 (CICIM; 24/25))
- ↑ Ev. Munich Press Association, Review No. 178/1966