Bringing Up Baby

Bringing Up Baby is a screwball comedy that I thought was very comical. This movie contained a lot of funny one-liners that at times were a little inappropriate. Although, at times this movie just seemed to be simple fun, there were some hidden connotations and attention grabbing scenes that kept the movie interesting! The theme that stuck out to me while watching this movie was the idea of mistaken identities. There were several situations where one character’s identity was mixed up with another characters, but what was really interesting was the film didn’t stop at mistaking character’s identities – props were mixed up and even Susan’s pet leopard had his identity mistaken for an escaped leopard from the zoo!
Starting at the very beginning of the movie, Susan mistakes her golf ball and plays David’s actual ball. This leads into the next scene where she is trying to move her car from a parking spot. She misidentifies her car and accidently gets in David’s car and ends up scratching and damaging his car. These two blunders are just the tip of the iceberg of “mistaken identities” which occur throughout the entire movie. Another funny scene was when David had the psychiatrists wife’s’ purse, which he was told to hang onto until Susan returned, but argued with him over whose purse it was. Susan came back to them arguing only to show David that she had her purse making it look like he took her purse. Here he was wrongly identified as stealing or taking the psychiatrists’ wife’s purse. Another mistaken identity, which I thought was interesting, was that Susan believed that David was a zoologist rather than a paleontologist. It was weird because she called him a zoologist almost the entire movie, but she knew he worked with dinosaurs and was collecting that final “intercostals clavicle bone.” Another scene where props/identities are swapped is when David and Susan traveled to Connecticut. They stopped to get 30 lbs of meat for Baby, but while David was inside purchasing the meat, Susan was outside waiting in her car. At the same time a police man was about to write her a ticket for illegal parking when she told him it wasn’t her car, which it actually was, but then lied and stole the car next to hers. The police officer believed her until the actual owner of the car ran out as they were driving off. Another example of this prominent theme was when Susan’s Aunt Elizabeth first met David. Throughout the entire movie David was trying to get a $1 million loan for his museum and when he first met Susan’s Aunt he acted like a real jerk. He made a horrible first impression, but that was because he didn’t realize it was the Aunt who was donating all of the money. David then told Susan to introduce him as someone different because David didn’t want her to know his real identity. Susan then told her Aunt that David’s name was “Mr. Bone”. David had first mistaken her identity as a different woman, which ultimately made him lie about his identity to her. This was also funny because it led Susan to tell other lies about David, saying that he was crazy and a big game hunter. This leads into the next funny mistaken identity, which was from Major Applegate. Over dinner he talked a lot about his previous experiences of big game hunting, but when they heard the leopard call outside during dinner he acknowledged it as a loon call. Major Applegate kept saying he would never forget the sound of a leopard, which he was sure it wasn’t, he kept saying that it had to be a loon. The next scenario of mistaken identities was when everyone mixed up leopards. There were two leopards on the loose and one was the tame pet of Susan’s and the other was the vicious leopard from the circus. One of the final scenes in this movie, the jail scene, was probably the biggest case of mistaken identities. Constable Slocum, the Sherriff, got everyone mixed up. It was a pretty crazy and confusing scene, one full of mistaken identities. Sometimes accidental and other times intentional – mistaken identities were the stepping stones from scene to scene throughout the movie. It is what made this movie funny, crazy and times unbelievable, but in the end it was what made the movie work and tied it all together!