'Bringing Up Baby' and Others

...I telephoned Vina Delmar, alive and busy on a new novel in Beverly Hills, to ask what she remembered about writing the screen play for The Awful Truth, the film Cavell sees as "the best, the deepest," and "without a dull moment...

...Thinking now about Bringing Up Baby, I was struck by how precisely Hagar and I, friends from the frivolous '20s had responded to the two competing currents of the '30s: on one side the drive toward the still glimmering dream of fame and money, with Hollywood at the end of the rainbow...

...Lea vis, John Dryden, T.S...

...What he used was what she wrote...

...He refers the reader also to essays that have appeared in such publications as Philosophy and Literature...

...Baby is a pet leopard, you remember, on the loose in Connecticut...

...Is there present a definite structure of the kind I have named the comedy of equality...

...That was a triumph in those days, even though the novel never could be made into a movie because it told of a bridegroom's impotence on his wedding night...

...later she would be passionately attached to a notably timorous Bed-lington called Killer...

...How can it be chance...

...both depend on a faith in something that is always happening, day by day...

...Howard Hawks...

...Of these only one, Donald Og-den Stewart, receives even passing mention—for The Philadelphia Story, along with the original playwright Philip Barry...

...That and other complications of the movie plot, such as the dog making off with the brontosaurus bone, were added in the screenplay—written by Hagar Wilde...

...She probably worked harder than anyone I knew—unseen, she practiced her play-writing for years before achieving her two Broadway hits—yet the self image she presented to her circle matched as nearly as possible the capricious, petted heiresses in the stories she wrote, of whom the paradigm was Susan in Bringing up Baby...

...Once on the trail, I discovered that the screenplays of three of the seven films had been written by friends of mine...

...Not knowing whether human knowledge and human community require the recognizing or the dismantling of limits...

...After Hagar broke into Collier's she urged me to try for that market...

...Being called Baby was regarded by most young women as stylish and desirable...

...Vina was quick to remind me that her work (nominated for an Academy Award) drew on a Broadway success by Arthur Richman, whose name, like hers, is nowhere mentioned by Cavell...

...He grinned at Johnson, who until that moment had not known Ford had been assigned to direct the film for which he had written the screenplay, including that scene...

...The significance Cavell missed was social...

...His earlier works, often cited here, are Must We Believe What We Say?, The Sense of Walden, The Claim of Reason, and The World Viewed: Reflections on the Ontology of Film...

...Phenomenologists speak of the mind, in that it takes objects, as intentional...

...Cavell has found an ideal form of academic play...

...Director John Ford slyly described one of the touches he was sure he would get credit for in his next picture, a scene of a wagon wheel passing over a flower...

...on the other the surge of social conscience roused by the Depression and the threat of fascism...

...This warning is preceded by eight pages invoking Levi-Strauss, Freud, Wittgenstein, Locke, Hume, Plato, Kant, Dostoevsky and Thoreau...

...This is a matter not so much of assigning significance to certain events of the drama as it is of isolating and relating the events for which significance needs to be assigned...

...In Adam's Rib we have in effect noticed two variations on this relation...

...Hagar Wilde and I, along with other beginners like Vina Delmar and Dawn Powell, sold our first fiction there...

...It was too much team play...

...She had an assist from Dudley Nichols, an attractive pro with 58 screen credits who became her lover during the assignment...

...The whimsy was typically her own...

...Often he even speaks specifically of a detail as typifying the director's genius when it is clearly the creation of someone else...

...This was all in Hagar Wilde's original Collier's story, though the hero had not yet become the Cary Grant professor engaged in reconstructing prehistoric skeletons...

...Stanley Cavell is the Walter M. Cabot Professor of Aesthetics and the General Theory of Value at Harvard, that's why...

...Remember Constance Bennett in Topper, as she pauses before sliding down a chute into a ballroom, calling to Cary Grant ahead of her, "Wait for Baby...

...They pay five cents a word...

...Vina recalled that she had done her writing at home, and McCar-ey had come to her every day or two to discuss what she had written or might write...

...But McCarey, though he might propose, did not dispose...

...Readers should not depend on this promise...

...Though she could be a warm and generous friend to another woman?rare in her day—she expected adoring servitude from men...

...Scholarly probings are legitimate, of course, and the new meanings discovered may justify the subject's being treated as a work of art...

...The two looked very dashing together, I remember, the night in 1938 when they passed through the dining room of the Murray Hill duplex where I was eating squab with her husband while we planned a serial for his magazine about a strike of mill workers in Bridgeport...

...Meantime I had become deeply committed politically, writing for magazines read by " the masses"—stories about people who were poor, deprived of their rights, yet learning (from me) to fight for them...

...After all, the movie would not have been without her idea of a panther (changed to a leopard in the film) named Baby...

...The small children I have known have been sensational comedians and joke makers, one and all...

...If some of the themes proposed to unify these films turn out to be contradictory (e.g...

...Yet even he, in making The Lady Eve, drew on the source material of Monckton Hoffe, who won an Academy Award...

...Turning to Chapter III, I scanned the first page: "Howard Hawks' Bringing Up Baby...

...Hagar herself enjoyed being called Baby...

...Wherever she is now, though, I am sure she is having a good ghostly laugh with Dudley Nichols, if they can know that a resoundingly titled Harvard professor has seen in Bringing Up Baby clear connections to Kant, Freud, Shakespeare, Feydeau, Luther, Marx, Rodin's sculpture, Greek tragedy, and especially Nietzsche's Genealogy of Morals...

...To the reckless, rebellious postwar generation of the '20s nothing was allowed to stand in the way of pleasure-seeking and self-solicitude...

...At the time 1 met her she was breaking away from a young husband who preferred playing tennis...

...Very definite specifications are listed for the genre he calls "comedies of remarriage," but in each case some of the films prove to be exceptions...

...She would die alone and friendless in the Motion Picture Country Home, after years of seeing her film become a late-night cult of millions without bringing her a cent of the money she desperately needed...

...She had avoided the studios...

...I am not interested to try to provide solider evidence for the relation of The Philadelphia Story and A Midsummer Night's Dream...

...Cavell sees much significance (but misses some) in the film's title and in the need of luring the wild animal by singing " I can't give you anything but love, Baby...

...Cavell has tossed up and tried to connect thousands of ideas—every vagrant notion stirred by any detail of a movie that could be related to a philosopher's thought by his own kinetic (to use a film critic's cliche) imagination...

...Cavell, following the fashionable practice, discusses each of these films as if it were a God-ordained spectacle that emerged fullblown from the head of Hawks, Capra, George Cukor, Preston Sturges or McCarey...

...Some are humanly appealing, such as his picture of marriage as a "devotedness" or (from John Milton) "a conversation...

...they did not try to live by it...

...Hagar Wilde did...

...Sometimes he even excuses violations of category by saying that the exception proves the rule, forgetting that the meaning of "prove" here is to test, not to validate...

...Drawing on Kierkegaard and Nietzsche he offers a parallel that, although hanging on a slight Hollywood twig, is in itself eloquent: "As redemption by suffering does not depend on something that has yet to happen so redemption by happiness does not depend on something that has yet to happen...

...But she was not long in finding a lover who took delight in gratifying such fanciful tastes as Blue Moon cocktails, made with creme de violette...

...The pair played by Katharine Hepburn and Cary Grant in Bringing Up Baby, for instance, having hardly shaken hands before the movie begins, require Cavell's most ingenious efforts to fit them into his scheme...

...She had published a bestseller, Break-Up, which sold to Hollywood for $52,000...

...Why should I let a man who would choose that quotation instruct me on comedy...

...I might rather describe my interest as one of discovering, given the thought of this relation, what the consequences of it might be...

...Perhaps in the ardent effort of her imagination Hagar Wilde inadvertently persuaded herself that she, like her heroines, could have everything—celebrity, luxury, frequent changes of scene and of lovers and husbands, daily partying, and parenthood too, all without any sacrifice or compromise of her dream...

...To follow Cavell's foraging through these films the reader needs a detailed movie memory, plus if possible some knowledge of philosophy...

...Reviewed by Hope Hale Davis Author, "TheDark Way to the Plaza" WHEN I saw that this collection of "readings" of seven favorite movies included Bringing Up Baby, I recalled nostalgically the spring Hagar Wilde published the original story in Collier's magazine...

...presents the purest example of...the achievement of purposiveness without purpose (or directedness without direction...

...sexual equality versus man creating woman), he can use the Freudian device of making the negative denote the positive when required...

...Like a kitten batting and chasing a ball of wool, surprised and diverted by each strand a clinging claw unravels, he leaps after every new twist and tangle, stalking and pouncing, grappling with what is delightedly perceived as formidable prey...

...But this also should make correct attribution—the sine qua non of scholarship—especially important...

...This romantically hedonistic fiction was serving still in 1937, along with the movies made from it, as relief from the meager realities of the Depression...

...The index of Pursuits of Happiness has five pages of impressive names...

...And if there is, what has it to do with the thematic or systematic allegory in Bringing UpBabyt How does it help us to understand who or what Baby is, and wherea Baby belongs, and where a Baby comes from...

...In Film-making: The Collaborative Art (1975), a book of interviews, screenwriter Nunnally Johnson reminisces about a Hollywood party...

...But let a few of the author's own words about his chosen seven give a preview: ?"We can make a start in reading The Lady Eve (1941) without considering its generic allegiances and their Shakespearean background...

...She was then one of their star contributors, but her talent had been appreciated much earlier, at Snappy Stories, where the editor, fresh from the New Republic, was doing her bit to free the country from its puritan repressions...

...Somebody began talking about directorial touches...a favorite cliche of critics who hadn't the faintest idea what they were talking about...

...I suppose some of these thoughts colored my expectations as I opened Stanley Cavell's book...

...not knowing whether we are more afraid of being isolated or being absorbed by our knowledge and by society—these lines of ignorance are the background against which I wish to consider Frank Capra's It Happened One Night...

...is to move in response to a character's attentions...

...This gave me my second pause...

...Eliot, Matthew Arnold, John Dewey, even Eleanor Roosevelt, but not Monckton Hoffe...

...It would be reasonable to describe His Girl Friday as the introduction of a Shakespearean leading pair into a Jon-sonian environment...

...I should like to speak of the camera, in that it takes subjects, as inflectional____" ?"And here we are, at the concluding image of The A wful Truth, watching two childlike figures returning, and meant to return as long as they exist, into a clock-house, a home of time, to inhabit time anew...

...Cukor's camera instinct...

...The connotation was pampering, the glad indulgence of infantile demands...

...How can my linking of Friedrich Nietzsche and Leo Mc-Carey not be chance...

...The failure to give Hagar Wildecred-it for Bringing Up Baby is particularly shocking...

...not knowing what it means that these limits are sometimes picturable as a barrier and sometimes not...

...By 1937 such calculations were far behind her...

...At the end of the paragraph Cavell adds, "I am reminded here of the poignant concluding words of Freud's Wit and Its Relation to the Unconscious: "the mood of childhood when we were ignorant of the comic, when we were incapable of jokes and when we had no need of humor to make us feel happy in our life...

...you will find Margaret Mead, F.R...

...They would call in the office boy for advice...

...Bemused, I read on more carefully through this application of Kant's characterization of the aesthetic experience...

...That is nothing new, of course...

...Of the five directors honored here, only Preston Sturges comes close to deserving the status of auteur...

...Most people welcomed it as escape, and temporary...