Bringing Up Baby

RKO Radio Pictures | Release Date: February 18, 1938

CRITIC SCORE DISTRIBUTION

91	METASCORE Universal acclaim based on 17 Critic Reviews

Positive:

Mixed:

Negative:

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Critic Reviews

Critic score Publication By date

100

EmpireAngie Errigo

Damn, damn funny. Read full review

100

The GuardianPhelim O'Neill

Hawks powers through all of this, keeping his performers busy with a torrent of one-liners and physical comedy moves that only the extremely talented could even hope to grapple with. It's perfect. Read full review

100

The GuardianDavid Thomson

Bringing Up Baby is very funny. It leaves one in awe at the speed and timing of Grant and Hepburn, as well as their goofy, lopsided humanity...Don't trust the public to recognise a masterpiece. Read full review

100

Staff (Not Credited)

One of the finest screwball comedies ever...Fast, furious and very, very funny. Read full review

100

Dave Kehr

Time has revealed its brilliance, as well as the apparent impossibility of its like ever being seen again. Read full review

100

TV Guide MagazineStaff (Not Credited)

A delightful piece of utter absurdity and one of director Hawks' most inspired lampoons of the battle between the sexes. Hepburn and Grant are superb in this breathlessly funny screwball comedy with a plot that could have been hatched in a mental institution. Read full review

100

Mike D'Angelo

The quintessential screwball comedy. Read full review

100

Staff (Not Credited)

A one-of-a-kind concoction. [1 June 1989, p.4E]

100

Hal Linden

Basically, Katharine Hepburn could do no wrong, and with Cary Grant, the ultimate screen actor, you've got an instant classic. Screwball comedy is one of the hardest to bring off, and director Howard Hawks realized that you have to play real to make it succeed. [12 July 1998, p.30]

100

Joshua Rothkopf

The movie takes risks that Hollywood isn't even aware of anymore. Read full review

Caroline Siede

As Hawks admits, Bringing Up Baby isn’t a perfect film. But there’s an undeniable, ephemeral magic that comes from watching him, Hepburn, and Grant all work together on such a madcap story. Read full review

Richard Brody

Having already helped launch the genre, the director Howard Hawks here reinvents his comic voice, establishing archetypes of theme and performance that still hold sway. Read full review

Pauline Kael

The director, Howard Hawks, keeps all this trifling nonsense in such artful balance that it never impinges on the real world; it may be the American movies' closest equivalent to Restoration comedy.

Mike Clark

I'd give this Howard Hawks perennial four stars (like everyone else) if I didn't find the climactic jailhouse scene so labored. [5 May 1989, p.3D]

Staff (Not Credited)

Bringing Up Baby is constructed for maximum of laughs, with Ruggles and Catlett adding to the starring team’s zany antics. There is little rhyme or reason to most of the action, but it’s all highly palatable. Read full review

Jeremiah Kipp

Bringing Up Baby has some delightfully comic sequences, for sure. But I’m less inclined to remember the dynamics of the gag than Grant and Hepburn’s timing. Read full review

Frank S. Nugent

After the first five minutes of the Music Hall's new show - we needed those five to orient ourselves - we were content to play the game called "the cliche expert goes to the movies" and we are not at all proud to report that we scored 100 per cent against Dudley Nichols, Hagar Wilde and Howard Hawks, who wrote and produced the quiz. Of course, if you've never been to the movies, Bringing Up Baby will be all new to you - a zany-idden product of the goofy farce school. But who hasn't been to the movies? Read full review