Bringing up baby : Howard Hawks, director

Choice Review

The series "Rutgers Films in Print" contains many films (Rashomon, 8 1/2, La Strada, My Darling Clementine) which, conceivably, can make converts of skeptics. The one unexpected and screwball comedy on the list will convert no one: if you already like Bringing Up Baby, this volume is a balm, a confirmation, a joy. It contains, in addition to the story by Hagar Wilde, the continuity script, script variations, and a heap of essays. These include a short introduction by Gerald Mast on the making of the film, a biographical sketch about Hawks--not a fraction as valuable as Clark Branson's Howard Hawks: A Jungian Study (CH , Sep '87), three routine reviews (The New York Times, Variety, New Republic), and three more than routine, longer essays on the film: "The Auteur Theory" by Peter Wollens, Stanley Cavell's essay "Leopards in Connecticut" (reprinted from his Pursuits of Happiness: The Hollywood Comedy of Remarriage, 1981), and an orignial Gerald Mast essay on the film. Mast knows--or once knew--a great deal about film comedy, but this essay is a dreary piece of work. Because Mast is tired of this movie, or never liked it in the first place, it would have been more valuable to solicit the abuse of a critic who intelligently dislikes the work rather than include this smiling tribute to "spiritual vitality and sexual energy" all clouded over with polite yawning. P. H. Stacy University of Hartford