Katharine Hepburn, Bringing Up ... an Untamed Leopard (Bringing Up Baby)

Wednesday, September 21, 2005

Otis Ferguson

"....For comedy to be really good, of course, there is required something more in the way of total design than any random collection of hilarities. There must be point--not a point to be made, which is the easy goal of any literary tortoise, but a point from which to start, as implicit throughout as the center of a circle. Bringing Up Baby has something of the sort. The actual story.... could be done in two reels. What puts the dramatic spirit into it is the character of the harebrained young thing who gets him mixed up in all this.

"Katharine Hepburn builds the part from the ground, breathless, sensitive, headstrong, triumphant in illogic, and serene in that bounding brassy nerve possible only to the very very well bred. Without the intelligence and mercury of such a study, the callous scheming of this bit of fluff would have left all in confusion and the audience howling for her blood. As it is, we merely accept and humor her, as one would a wife...."

Otis Ferguson
The New Republic, March 16, 1938
The Film Criticism of Otis Ferguson, p. 215-16

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