The Criterion Collection announced its film restoration slate for the month of July and there is no better place to start than director Howard Hawks’ 1938 “Screwball” comedy, Bringing Up Baby, teaming Cary Grant with Katharine Hepburn.
This new 4K restoration will be available on July 6 as both Blu-ray and double-disc DVD product offerings.
The Hollywood trade press back then made two points that have sort of become legend over time. First, Cary Grant was not locked in as paleontologist Dr. David Huxley and so speculation was rampant as to who the lead would be for this “big budget” RKO production. Everyone from Leslie Howard, Ray Milland, Robert Montgomery, Ronald Colman and even Fredric March appeared in the trades as possible lead actors during the run-up to the start of production in 1937.
The other trade press thing that helped make this film a legend was the list published by the Independent Theatre Owners Association in the fall of 1937 while the film was still in production. They declared that Katharine Hepburn was, are you ready for this, “box office poison.”
That was it for RKO. Despite the filming being completed, the studio decided to shut it down (no post-production work, editing, sound, etc.) and there would be no theatrical release for Bringing Up Baby.
Enter Katharine Hepburn’s lover at the time, Howard Hughes, who purchased the film outright from RKO, had the post work completed and then cut a deal with MGM to have the film exhibited in its Loew’s Theatre chain. It opened in February of 1938, and, as they say, “the rest is history.”
Bonus goodies include a vintage commentary from filmmaker Peter Bogdanovich (circa 2005), a new “video essay” with author Scott Eyman (“Cary Grant: A Brilliant Disguise”) on the film’s star, Cary Grant, another newly-minted video session with cinematographer John Bailey on the work of cinematographer Russell Metty (Oscar-winner for Spartacus) and a newly-prepared “selected scene” commentary by historian Shelly Foote on the work of costume designer Howard Greer in Bringing Up Baby.
Additional bonus features include German documentary filmmaker Hans-Christoph Blumenberg’s 1977 feature-length documentary, Howard Hawks: A Hell of a Good Life, and vintage audio sessions.
Rounding out the July film restoration calendar from the Criterion Collection are: A double-disc helping of Russian filmmaker Andrei Tarkovsky’s 1975 (1980, domestic) Mirror (July 6, in Russian with English subtitles and accompanied by three separate documentaries); director Bill Duke’s under-appreciated 1992 neo-noir thriller, Deep Cover (July 13 with Laurence Fishburne and Jeff Goldblum), director Lizzie Borden’s 1987 film, Working Girls (July 13) and on July 20 French filmmaker Jacques Deray’s 1969 (1970, domestic) film release of La Piscine starring Alain Delon and Romy Schneider.
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