A Film Canon

 

 

This ingenious screwball comedy turns on the juxtaposition of two very different forms of conversation. On the one hand, there are the conversations of the modern world, all of which involve meek zoologist David Huxley (Cary Grant) being met with an abruptness that immediately stifles any pretensions of masculine authority that he might have had, forcing most of his contributions into an anticlimactic undertone reminiscent of The Awful Truth. On the other hand, there are the conversations of the primeval, or animal, world, centring on the exchanges between Huxley, madcap heiress Susan Vance (Katharine Hepburn), dog George, and leopard Baby; a cacaphonous profusion of barks, howls, screeches and mating cries. The comedy turns on the intersection of these two conversations, most obviously in Baby's refusal to behave unless David and Susan sing him love songs, but most pervasively in Susan's tendency to respond to David at cross-purposes, both silencing him, and imbuing him with a raw, primeval attractiveness to which he remains oblivious. This, in turn, superimposes the primeval over the modern world, expanding the pastoral interlude characteristic of the genre into an entire act, as David, Susan and a host of other eccentric characters prowl the Conneticut jungle in search of a variety of animals, all of which relate to the missing intercostal clavicle of a prized brontosaurus skeleton. In doing so, their animalistic attributes extend to their bodies, explaining the unusual proliferation of frenzied physical comedy, and culminating with the surreal nexus between prison and zoo.