Lisa from Boondock Ramblings and I are back to watching and sharing about comfy cozy (and sometimes, chilling) movies for the fall season. Feel free to join in with us!! Our link will be live for a whole week after we post about a movie. 

We had a last minute movie shake up! We were supposed to watch Skylark – then learned that we couldn’t find it available anywhere! Lisa switched it out to Bringing up Baby, starring Cary Grant and Katherine Hepburn, and it was adorable.

I just want to start by saying that Cary Grant was an attractive man, no denying it, but seriously he never looked better than he did as a dino nerd, the slightly awkward paleontologist David Huxley. Dang.

Now, the summary before I get really started. “Harried paleontologist David Huxley (Cary Grant) has to make a good impression on society matron Mrs. Random (May Robson), who is considering donating one million dollars to his museum. On the day before his wedding, Huxley meets Mrs. Random’s high-spirited young niece, Susan Vance (Katharine Hepburn), a madcap adventuress who immediately falls for the straitlaced scientist. The ever-growing chaos — including a missing dinosaur bone and a pet leopard — threatens to swallow him whole.” (From theromcomcatalog)

I loved this movie! Maybe because on some level this movie made me think of Billy and I; he often calls me Calamity as my nickname because well, I guess he thinks I can be a bit of a Calamity. And he wouldn’t be wrong. Billy is much more rational and practical than I am; I get us into all sorts of predicaments, all none of them as cool as what happened in this movie.

So. David is supposed to be married to a woman named Alice Swallow, who is his assistant at the museum. It is never really said why other than that it is for his career, and it sounds like it will be a business-like, staid marriage. No honeymoon, no children. Just work. Which, yuck. David doesn’t seem too thrilled with that but kind of shrugs it off. Neither are madly in love with the other, so that makes what happens the rest of the movie ok.

Enter Susan Vance, portrayed by Katharine Hepburn. She is wealthy, has an even wealthier aunt, and is a bit of a scatterbrain. She is also very impulsive and flighty. And, she has a leopard! Her brother who is in Brazil sent it her way, and while it seems rather tame she can’t keep it in her apartment either, and convinces David to help her drive it out to her country house.

We get a taste of the madcap crazy in the beginning when the two meet, but it doesn’t really escalate until they reach the countryside. It is one thing after another, crazy schemes and situations and misunderstandings and dogs and leopards and car thefts and running around the woods and country at night. It was a wild trip!

Grant and Hepburn were fantastic and just kept the frantic energy up the whole movie, complete with witty remarks and exasperation. When David meets Susan’s aunt, he is clothed in a negligee of Susan’s and has no idea that he is meeting the woman he is hoping will donate money to the museum and kind of releases some of his frustration at his situation on her. Susan tries to cover up for his behavior by telling his aunt that he is a man named David Bone who is a friend of her brother’s, and who has had a nervous breakdown. I thought this was so funny as it becomes a running joke where anything he does is a result of his nervous breakdown, at least as far as the aunt is concerned.

Anyway, there are so many moments in this movie that were funny or endearing or both. They are on the hunt for the leopard baby, who has escaped. Although, unbeknownst to them, another more ferocious leopard has escaped from the nearby circus. Two leopards are on the loose in Connecticut in the same few square miles – what could go wrong?

I always use a net when I am looking for escaped leopards too.

The audience knows of course that Grant and Hepburn are going to end up together, and we are just waiting for the moment that the characters themselves realize it.

We have to wait all the way until the end, when David is back in his museum, putting together his Brontosaurus, sans glasses by the way. Susan comes in with his bone, and she climbs up a ladder, which we all know will end in disaster because it is Susan after all.

This movie was madcap, funny, crazy. I never knew what misadventure would befall our hero and heroine from minute to minute and I loved it. And now I totally want my own leopard. However, that seems to be illegal in the United States. I do have a leopard gecko, and she is a sweet girl and easier to feed so there is that.

My Luna baby.

If you watched Skylark or anything else at all, feel free to comment and link up with us about it! The link is open for a week. You can read Lisa’s thoughts here!

https://fresh.inlinkz.com/js/widget/load.js?id=c0efdbe6b4add43dd7ef

Next up is The Grand Budapest Hotel, and after that is Chocolat and our watch party! We will all press play together at home and chat on our discord channel (and don’t worry, not on video!). The watch party will be November 17th, at 7pm EST. (the day after my birthday! yay!)