Plot
David Huxley (Cary Grant) is a mild-mannered paleontologist beleaguered by problems. For the past four years, he has been trying to assemble the skeleton of a Brontosaurus but is missing one bone (the mythical "intercostal clavicle"). To add to the stress, he is about to get married to the dour Alice Swallow (Virginia Walker) and must make a favorable impression upon Mrs. Random (May Robson), who is considering donating one million dollars to his museum.
The day before his planned wedding, David meets Susan Vance (Katharine Hepburn) by chance on a golf course. She is a free-spirited young lady and, unknown to him at first, happens to be Mrs. Random's niece. Susan's brother Mark has sent her a tame leopard from Brazil named "Baby", which she is supposed to give to her aunt. Susan believes David is a zoologist rather than a paleontologist, and she is very persistent in getting David to go to her country home in Connecticut to help her take care of Baby, which includes singing "I Can't Give You Anything But Love" which Baby likes. Complications arise as Susan decides that she has fallen in love with David, and she endeavors to keep him at her house for as long as possible to prevent him from marrying his colleague.
While David is there, Susan's dog George (Asta) steals and buries the bone that David needs to complete his Brontosaurus skeleton. Susan's aunt, Mrs. Elizabeth Random arrives. She is unaware of who David really is because Susan has introduced him as a man named "Mr. Bone". Baby runs off, as does George. To further complicate matters, Susan and David mistake a decidedly wild and very dangerous leopard that has escaped from a nearby circus for Baby. They are jailed by a befuddled town constable, Constable Slocum (Walter Catlett) for breaking into the house of Dr. Fritz Lehman (Fritz Feld). When Slocum does not believe their story, Susan tells him that they are members of "The Leopard Gang"; she refers to herself as "Swingin' Door Susie" and David as "Jerry the Nipper" (a name Cary Grant's character was called by Irene Dunne in the movie The Awful Truth, also featuring Asta). David fails to convince the constable that she is making everything up "from motion pictures she's seen."
Eventually, Alexander Peabody (George Irving) shows up to verify everyone's identity, Susan, who has sneaked out of a window, unwittingly drags the highly irritated circus leopard into the jail. David has to save her, using a chair to shoo the animal into a jail cell.
A few weeks later, Susan finds David, who has been jilted by Alice because of her, working on his brontosaurus reconstruction at the museum. After presenting him with his bone, which she finally found by trailing George, Susan informs David that she has gotten her aunt to donate the million dollars to the museum. Against his advice, she climbs a tall ladder beside the dinosaur to be closer to him. Although Susan climbs from the dangerously swaying ladder onto the skeleton and causes it to collapse, David finally gives up and admits he cannot do without her.
Read more about this topic: Bringing Up Baby
Famous quotes containing the word plot:
“James’s great gift, of course, was his ability to tell a plot in shimmering detail with such delicacy of treatment and such fine aloofness—that is, reluctance to engage in any direct grappling with what, in the play or story, had actually “taken place”Mthat his listeners often did not, in the end, know what had, to put it in another way, “gone on.””
—James Thurber (1894–1961)
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