1930s: Bringing Up Baby

For our stop in 1930s film history, we screened Bringing Up Baby (1938), directed by Howard Hawks. The film follows a straitlaced palaeontologist whose life is thrown into chaos by a free-spirited heiress and her pet leopard. It moves fast, rarely pauses, and finds its comedy in watching a very controlled man lose control entirely.

After the film, we talked about:

• Is the romcom dead? What Bringing Up Baby offers that the genre seems to have lost

• What Baby the leopard represents — wildness, desire, the unconscious, the thing neither of them can control

• How the film plays with gender roles: Susan pursues, David flees, and what that inverts about 1938 — and now

• Is David Huxley a Manic Pixie Dream Boy? What it means that the chaotic, life-disrupting figure is the woman

• Whether Susan is a romantic lead or a force of nature — and if there's a difference

• The straight man as romantic ideal: why David's rigidity is what makes him worth chasing

• What the screwball format allows that a modern romcom wouldn't dare

• Why the film flopped in 1938 — and what audiences then couldn't accept that we now find charming