BRINGING UP CARY

Adjoining are some production (and candid non-production) photos of Cary Grant and Katharine Hepburn in their screwball comedy classic, “Bringing Up Baby.”

In this 1938 RKO movie, we’re introduced to two delightful people: handsome, repressed paleontologist David Huxley (Grant) and dazzlingly energetic society girl Susan Vance (Hepburn). They meet, quite by accident, on a golf course. (Ah, accidents!) And when Susan decides they’re in love--an insight that at first eludes David--she pursues him relentlessly.

She rips his tux, kidnaps him, steals his suit, swipes his bone (a rare dinosaur part called an “intercoastal clavicle”), robs him of all self-respect, ruins his professional image and impending marriage, gets him jailed and nearly declared insane--and sends him off on a wild chase after Baby, the friendly leopard.

But does he complain? Not a bit. “You know what?” the impassioned David tells an enraptured Susan, just before she destroys a skeleton that he’s spent 10 tedious years assembling. “That was the best day I ever had!”

That’s putting it mildly. There’s something enduringly fresh about this film. Watching it is almost as good as falling in love--or maybe even finding another intercoastal clavicle. Anyone who doesn’t enjoy it is probably beyond help.

Grant was 33 when he made “Baby.” He was working with one of Hollywood’s best leading ladies: Hepburn. (Oh, why quibble? The best.) And one of its more perfectionist directors, Howard Hawks. The script was co-written by Hagar Wilde and Dudley (“Stagecoach”) Nichols.

Together, they achieved the ideal of the Depression-Era comedy: a dream-fantasy of life among the careless rich. Could anything be more fun than chasing Susan Vance and her perverse wire-haired terrier, George (Asta), around that sylvan Connecticut estate? Watching it, you wonder.

Grant isn’t playing the kind of role he became famous for: the suave, dimpled charmer. Here, he’s an awkward introvert who stumbles over everything. Yet, surely this is one of Grant’s finest hours. We see him beneath David . Both he and the movie seem eternally zesty, high-spirited, full of boundless good humor. In “Baby,” most of our worst fears are merrily inverted: Almost everything that could go wrong with David’s life crashingly does within 24 hours. But it’s still, somehow, the best of all his days.

Why? Because of two very simple, unpredictable ingredients. Love and joy. That’s why the movie keeps relentlessly chasing us, making us laugh--why we can still hear David’s plaintive cry, “I’ll be with you in a minute, Mr. Peabody!” echoing down the still-green fairways of our mind.

That’s why Cary Grant gave us--and always will give us--some of the best movie hours we’ll ever have.