Amazingly, in light of its current classic status, Bringing Up Baby was a box office failure, mainly because it went over budget and grossed only $715,000 in the U.S. and another $394,000 in the rapidly declining overseas market. It also received decidedly mixed reviews from the critics.

"In Bringing Up Baby, Miss Hepburn has a role which calls for her to be breathless, senseless and terribly, terribly fatiguing. She succeeds, and we can be callous enough to hint it is not entirely a matter of performance." - Frank S. Nugent, The New York Times

"The players deserve the chief credit for the smattering of amusement in the offering. The part of a spoiled playgirl is perfectly suited to Miss Hepburn's talents, and she offers as breezy a performance as the script permits. Mr. Grant has more chance to create a burlesque, but he sometimes finds himself stranded while the plot makes good and sure that no one will miss a gag or a comical situation." - Howard Barnes New York Herald Tribune.

"Bringing Up Baby's slapstick is irrational, rough-&-tumble, undignified, obviously devised with the idea that the cinemaudience will enjoy (as it does) seeing stage Actress Hepburn get a proper mussing up." - Time.

"I am happy to report that it is funny from the word go, that it has no other meaning to recommend it...and that I wouldn't swap it for any three things of the current season." - Otis Ferguson, The New Republic.

"The director, Howard Hawks, keeps all this trifling nonsense in such artful balance that it never impinges on the real world; it may be the American movies' closest equivalent to Restoration comedy." - Pauline Kael, 5001 Nights at the Movies.

Film Scholar Morris Dickstein in his essay on Bringing Up Baby in the book, The A List: The National Film Society of Film Critics' 100 Essential Films, wrote, "The zany effervescence of screwball comedy, with its buoyant, anarchic energy and rapid-fire dialogue, became a suggestive way not only of countering depression but of making movies about sex without any sex in them. Perhaps the greatest, certainly the wildest of these movies was Howard Hawks's Bringing Up Baby."

In writing about Bringing Up Baby for his book, Guide for the Film Fanatic, Danny Peary wrote, "...this is the rare screwball comedy in which the woman pursues the man. That she causes him trouble is not unexpected, since she is so desperate to get his attention that she "does anything that comes into [my] head." You've got to admire her brazenness, and her willingness to make a fool of herself in order to win Grant. She isn't worried when he gets annoyed with her, she expresses a major theme in comedy: "The love impulse in man frequently reveals itself in terms of conflict."

Compiled by Rob Nixon & Jeff Stafford AWARDS & HONORS

In 1990, Bringing Up Baby was voted a place on the National Film Registry.

by Frank Miller