Bringing up Baby. Howard Hawks, Katherine Hepburn, Cary Grant etc.
And since I'll be discussing specific details SPOILERS, obv.
The end of Bringing up Baby sees the dizzy heiress Susan Vance scramble up a ladder to meet her love David and explain that she will be donating the million dollars, which she recieved from her aunt Elizabeth Carlton Random, to the museum (a prize originally both sought by her and David). In doing so she begins to fall, David saves her, but at the expense of the towering bronntasaurus skeleton which she knocks, destroying a work David has spent years constructing (perhaps even a sizable amount of his lifetime).
While this may work symbolically as David's inculcation into Susan's world (a world far from the staid and scientific) and a disavowal of his own previous one, one really does wonder what kind of relationship they will ever have? David has undoubtably had the best few days of his life, a time far more full of excitement than his previous fiance Miss Swallow could have offered him, however, his body posture slumps in acquiesence to Susan's claims of love rather than in equal agreement and want of it. As if Susan has solely achieved this love by force of her own will?
Certainly Susan and David will never fit comfortably within the realms of traditionally portrayed filmic couples and the movie never sets that up as an expectation. For example, in a much earlier scene, Susan mistakenly steals David's car and we literally fade out to them driving off into the sunset in possible mimicry of a more cliched Hollywood ending only with David standing on the car's door ledge and with he and Susan engaged in the usual high speed verbal argument. Throughout the film Susan fixates on David tricking him, lying to him, making him miss his wedding, introducing him to criminality, skewing his logical world from outside in (all of this in a hurricane of fast talking and screwball antics.) Both Hepburn and Grant remain a likable pair each playing their part wonderfully throughout but the sheer level of Vance's manipulation on the basis of a brief "fixation" is frankly astounding.
The movie, as with the relationship, doesn't seem to fit within conventional Hollywood norms, more a wild frenetic subversion of one which, importantly, lacks complete complicity of both partners. As we leave Susan and David clinging to each other. high atop a podium, over a sea of bones, (the ruination of David's work), I can't quite reconcile in my own mind any possible future for the pair after the camera switches off.
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That type of thing then Mick? |
