Category Called Comedy #4

 

CCC: Bugs and Daffy and Bringing Up Baby

HIS BITTER HALF (1950) --- It pains me to see Daffy Duck excessively abused. I’ve often wanted his and Bugs Bunny’s circumstance reversed … give Bugs a taste of what Daffy has too long suffered. His Bitter Half is same marital hell as P. Pig endured in Porky’s Romance (1938), among most trenchant of all Warner cartoons. Daffy it’s true has wed for money, describing himself as impoverished and hopeful that life will improve by responding to a singles ad. The duck as attentive to content of a newspaper seems somehow wrong. To be daffy means to dismiss all trappings of society, but DD had played out his manic string by this time and had to embrace convention to stay relevant. That meant compromising his character in ways off-putting. Bugs Bunny avoided this by always having an opponent, this to keep busy attending to his own priorities and never mind snares a wider sphere would impose. I don’t enjoy Bugs tormenting Elmer where latter doesn’t have it coming, as in The Unruly Hare (1944), Elmer there to survey for the railroad with no intent to do harm until Bugs forces the issue. Here was where the rabbit's popularity began working against him, programmed now to bedevil all comers, and the sooner getting on with that, the better. Daffy differs because for all of venality (over)applied by the fifties, the duck just wanted what was his, and then some, but otherwise held no brief against others, unless clearly provoked. Bugs comes across like a wise-acre schoolyard bully just waiting for helpless sorts to venture near. Among unfair advantage BB enjoys is being able to disappear down his hole at any moment of the contest, and I’ve often wished his victim could follow and hand Bugs comeuppance he deserves.

Bugs at least has sense never to seek counsel or cooperation from a wider world, staying in his own back yard for most part. Daffy is arrogant enough to imagine he can tame hostile environments, marriage an option Bugs would not likely choose. Still I find no amusement in punishment piled upon the duck for mere misjudgment. Postwar Warner cartoons dealt much in domestic traps, Daffy, Porky, the rest, less of forest and lake origin than blight that was suburbia. Was this consequence of animator/writing/directing talent maturing and snared now by manicured lawns and barbecue pits? There seems less freedom in fifties cartoons, Daffy not so zany, seeking but a main chance, bent to compliance by an increasingly corporatized society, postwar lot perhaps of men who drew him. Of handlers, Chuck Jones understood best, and made fresh rather than dispiriting Daffy’s frustration ducking claw hammer that was fifties life, but no more nasty quacks lest he be punished and severely so, as in His Bitter Half where a from-hell wife threatens to “pluck every feather off your scrawny carcass,” and for an alarming fade, does just that (mercifully offscreen). Who asked to see Daffy Duck reduced to vacuuming floors? It was as if to break him meant any of us could be broken, none to overcome enforced order firmly in place. Did then-audiences feel this rebranding process, or was it gradual enough not to register fully? Television told truth stark by following 1938 cartoons with ones from 1958, or vice versa, spin wash or un-wash of favorites to train youth that life has no continuum and that we all are subject to often convulsive change.

BRINGING UP BABY (1938) --- Let me toss the grenade early and suggest that the Katharine Hepburn part should have been reversed with Virginia Walker’s “Alice Swallow,” who enters Bringing Up Baby in the opening scene and is such a dish in "severe" spectacles and dread announcement that marriage to “David Huxley” (Cary Grant) will be wholly platonic, their wedded mission to investigate dinosaur bones and never mind any/all physical contact. Now normally this would be ideal set-up for director Howard Hawks to let Cary Grant thaw such prospect over ninety minutes and make Miss Swallow grateful for overhaul of her attitude. She reminds me of Dorothy Malone’s bookseller in Hawks’ The Big Sleep, of bespectacled and pulled-back hair mien who gives in straightaway to Humphrey Bogart’s manly approach. Did Hawks cast Miss Swallow wrong? --- because I found her most distracting and wondered (hoped) for the rest of Baby’s overlong 102 minutes that she would come back. Now Hepburn would have been ideal as Miss Swallow. We could figure losing her no great loss, indeed I wished KH as “Susan Vance” would get lost so Cary could focus upon Alice and persuade her out of no-honeymoon policy as only Cary Grant could do. My much happier ending would be him doing that and Susan left to make living hell of another hapless man’s life, maybe Jack Carson or Patric Knowles, someone we'd feel less sorry for.

Not that I dislike Hepburn (have said this before, will likely do so again), though Susan Vance is wearying to extreme. Try as I might via viewings over so-far lifetime, there is just no reframing Bringing Up Baby as other than strain severe over a second half, confinement of us alongside a cast in and out of jail cells. Bringing Up Baby lost money ($365K) for a reason, perhaps several besides  Hepburn. Clearly there was limit to wacky as welcome, modern tolerance greater if reports of repertory delight are to be believed, but how much laughing went on in 1938? I’m going to guess it stopped, in fact slammed shut, at some point in this movie, departing audiences to warn friends accordingly. Comedies, at least good ones, habitually did well as everyone is presumed to like humor and will choose it where given the option, hence "comic relief" factored into almost everything. Uncharacteristic response to Bringing Up Baby would need 1938 patrons to explain, but who of them is left? Notice I said patrons as opposed to critics, for critics too often, and still, say what they think they are expected to say, whereas customers speak from the heart. Final scene where David's precious brontosaurus skeleton collapses bothers me to point of fast-forward. Should he accept Susan’s largesse of a million dollars for the museum when she has just destroyed what had been a lifelong dream and project for him? Cary Grant was of course a master at farce, but Hepburn was just discovering it, had to be coached by supporting comedians per Hawks request, outcome an actress drunk on the schooling, giddy with new-found if misplaced confidence, not knowing, perhaps not caring, how an audience will react to her escapades.

There are merry moments in Bringing Up Baby, especially early on when the cast moves around more. Pitfall of screwball can be shouting too much, as here when most of a cast repair to the country house and then to jail. The animals are engaging, especially the cat which I hoped would molest someone just to surprise us. Watching Bringing Up Baby makes us realize how totally Peter Bogdanovich appropriated Hawks and creators’ effort with What’s Up Doc?. Think too of how Hawks copied himself less than ten years before What’s Up Doc? when he re-did the ripped coat and torn dress routine for Man’s Favorite Sport. Had Bringing Up Baby become a buff-driven “thing” by 1963? I don’t know for sure when it began showing up on revival screens, maybe because NC’s revival screens were just for Thunder Road and later Billy Jack. I could wonder too if Cary Grant went to see himself played by Ryan O’Neal. So which --- honestly --- is the better film, Bringing Up Baby or What’s Up Doc? Criterion has a Blu-Ray of Bringing Up Baby where they point up difficulty finding elements, the negative having long gone to dogs. Remarkable how so many titles survive by skin of teeth. Question to close: How many, if any, have seen Bringing Up Baby with a full audience? Did it rouse laughs throughout, or did watchers wilt as some of us tend to?