Saturday Night at the Movies: I Can't Give You Anything But Love

Beware of this Baby

In 1934, the Oscar for Best Song – the first ever awarded - went to “The Continental,” introduced to the world by Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers in The Gay Divorcee. Should you wander across that offering on Turner Classic Movies, worry not, there’s not a black-and-white rainbow flag in sight. When The New York Times reviewer applauded the film as “gay in its mood,” he meant carefree, just as its title promised.

Below the linguistic surface, however, gay’s carefree days may have been on a collision course with a loud and proud iceberg. Four years later, through a series of unlikely events, a very respectable, upright sort of gentleman, played by Cary Grant, would find himself having no clothes to wear… except for an outrageously frilly, exceptionally feminine bathrobe. The doorbell rings and, forgetting for a moment how ridiculous he must look, he opens it to an equally respectable, morally upright older lady who is understandably shocked at the sight of a tall, handsome man wearing a lacy women’s outfit several sizes too small for him. “Why are you wearing these clothes?” she asks, in shock. Grant, by now at the end of his rope after a very, very long day, replies in a burst of comic anger: “Because I just went GAY all of a sudden!”

He didn’t mean carefree. To the best of my knowledge, Grant’s is the very first Hollywood use of the term with the meaning we know today. It would be many years (decades?) before the word, with its modern meaning, would reappear in mainstream cinema, as the Rogers and Astaire sense of the word would cling on for some time more in movie and popular song. But something – maybe the marchers in New York this week chanting “We’re here, we’re queer, and we’re coming for your children” – tells me that those carefree days are never coming back.

All of which is a long way to shoehorn my absolute favorite movie of all time into our Pride month theme. Yes, long time readers will recall that my other absolute favorite movie of all time is The Quiet Man, but this is my blog, I can have two favorites if I want.

Professor Esolen, in introducing Arsenic and Old Lace this week, states his belief that Cary Grant was “the finest comic actor in Hollywood’s history.” This is not up for debate. The only question is which of his movies is the funniest. The Awful Truth comes awful close, and I wouldn’t sleep on My Favorite Wife, His Girl Friday, or The Philadelphia Story either. Yet for my money the absolute top, the Shakespeare sonnet, the Bendel bonnet of comedy is Bringing Up Baby. There are certainly moments – many moments – in those other films that are as funny as any you’ll ever see. Yet what sets Bringing Up Baby apart is that there are zero non-hilarious moments – it starts at a frenetic pace and doesn’t slow down. You are never not laughing or smiling or having the time of your life. This is the absolute pinnacle of ‘screwball’ comedy, and it is not easy to achieve. Most comedies have normal people put in funny situations, or one or two comedians around a cast of straight men, but what makes screwball screwball is that every single person in the movie has a screw loose, there is no normal. Easier said than done. In What’s Up Doc?, his homage to Grant-era screwball, Peter Bogdanovich tries his best, and it’s not terrible, but it’s not great, because you can tell everyone is trying. There’s a kind of innocent effortlessness to Bringing Up Baby that makes all its craziness – leopards on the loose, jailbreaks, late night caroling – seem perfectly normal. I can’t describe it, you’ll just have to watch it, and enjoy!

For those like me who have seen it countless times, my favorite trivia nugget: in the prison scene, when Katherine Hepburn (who is also absolute comic perfection in this film, what a joy to watch her performance) gives Grant the mob nickname Jerry the Nipper, this is a reference to a throwaway line in the second funniest Cary Grant movie ever, the previous year’s The Awful Truth, when Irene Dunne (goodness, was she ever funny!) says of Grant’s character that he was such an alcoholic he was known as, yes, Jerry the Nipper.

With that all-important movie connection now clarified, I hope you watch the movie and have, in the pre-iceberg sense of the word, a gay old time doing so!