Screwball farce stars Cary Grant as an absent minded, bespectacled paleontologist who, on the day before his wedding, struggles to make a favorable impression on a society matron with one million dollars to give to a museum. Enter Susan Vance (Katharine Hepburn, earning top billing), the brazen niece of the society matron who decides, on the first of many whims, that she’s in love with the square professor.

After teeing off with his golf ball on the green, Hepburn forces Grant into one lunatic situation after another, dragging him along with her to Connecticut with a tamed leopard named Baby that her brother has sent her from Brazil.

Written by Dudley Nichols and Hagar Wilde, from a scenario by Wilde, this was the first of five collaborations between director Howard Hawks and Cary Grant, who, following The Awful Truth in 1937, was the biggest romantic comedy star of the day.

Bringing Up Baby met a scattershot reception at the box office; though not a flop, some audiences just didn’t get it. Forgotten for many years, it’s now considered one of the comic treasures of the American screen, ranked #97 in AFI’s recent 100 Greatest American Movies of All Time.

The most notable feature of the film is its unbelievable speed. The conceit is that, with Grant getting married in a day, Hepburn has to move and speak very, very fast to get him to fall in love with her. The script was an epic 202 pages in length, indicating a running time of 202 minutes for any leisurely paced movie. There is nothing leisurely about this film.

Bringing Up Baby rockets from start to finish, jamming its wild, over the top jokes in at the insane running time of 101 minutes. It’s the cinematic equivalent of Red Bull. Hawks didn’t believe in slowing a joke down so the audience could anticipate and get ahead of it for a bigger laugh. If you missed something, he figured you could watch the movie again. Seeing it on a TV screen is exhausting. There’s so much to focus on and it moves by at such a clip, I needed a nap halfway through.

When I woke up, I replayed the movie and discovered there was much to appreciate. Hepburn – starring at a time when actresses usually got top billing over their male co-stars – is a force of nature throughout. A gifted athlete, she does terrific pratfalls, rolling down hills, knocking over furniture and crashing into things. She even sinks a forty foot putt in an unbroken take.

As for Grant, every other gesture, or inflection in his voice is funny. When Hepburn’s dog steals his prized brontosaurus bone and buries it, he gets down and practically shouts in the dog’s ears to give it back. Both stars seem to possess a similar sense of silly, yet dark, humor. Neither one are trying to be comedians, but play it straight and just react to the screwball situations around them with perfect timing.

The script is intelligent, with much sly double entendre throughout, most notably during the search for the missing bone. How the filmmakers were able to work a leopard, and a dog, into the frantic action without the benefit of computer generated effects is also remarkable.

Bringing Up Baby takes place largely at night, and its darkly lit scenes make focusing on the madcap action even tougher. There’s no musical score to use as a hand rail either, with the exception of the opening and closing titles, or the use of “I Can’t Give You Anything But Love, Baby” on a phonograph. It’s on repeated, wide awake viewings that the film’s refreshing, go-for-broke pace is easier to appreciate.