THE FIRST TAKE CLUB

Classic movies, seen for the very first time

THIS MONTH LOVE, UNSCRIPTED AUTHOR OWEN NICHOLLS HUNKERS DOWN WITH SCREWBALL ROMANTIC COMEDY CLASSIC BRINGING UP BABY

IF SOMETHING WAS released on a screen near you from the early 2000s to the days of digital, the chances are it drifted over my eyeballs. I was one of the people up in the booth, splicing reels together and making sure your film started on time. Add a film degree to this decade-long profession, and an Empire subscription dating back to the halcyon days of Matt Leblanc covers and “That’s enough of that — Ed” jokes, I’d like to think there are few films that passed me by.

But nobody (not even the little-known love child of Pauline Kael and Edgar Wright) has seen all the movies. And when you’re tasked with finding one you haven’t, you quickly discover the list is so long, you question whether you’ve ever been inside an arthouse or a multiplex.

Holed up with iplayer and Bfiplayer for a day straight, I plugged my filmic gap (“That’s enough of that — Ed”) with À Bout De Souffle, The Conversation and Bringing

Up Baby. As these were watched during Lockdown

2020, the first had me sweating at the sight of Jean-paul

Belmondo touching his lips without washing his hands, and the second just felt a little too close to home. (If you’d like to know how my neighbours Sue and Trevor are coping with lockdown, I’d say very badly.)

Thank the makers, then, for

Bringing Up Baby, officially the antidote to all things Covid.

The screwballiest of screwball comedies, Bringing

Up Baby begins with a meetless-than-cute on a golf course, as Susan Vance (a sublime

Katharine Hepburn) half-inches David Huxley’s ball (Cary Grant at his most ‘early-funny’ Cary Grant), before rear-ending his car without a care in the world. Cue the classic romcom trope of enemies becoming lovers as they chase a million-dollar grant for a museum (him), his attention and affections (her), a wire-haired terrier with a dinosaur bone (him, again) and two pretty-pissed-off leopards (him and her together). That one of the leopards is tame and the other will rip your goddamn face off — and that both happen to be loose in Connecticut on the same night — gives you some indication of the levels of realism Howard Hawks and company are playing with. But then, at this moment in time, realism is exactly what I’m not looking for.

And realism is exactly what I don’t get, as outlandish set-piece piles on top of unlikely coincidence and both get covered in sticky, silly misunderstandings. As is the writer’s way, I’m loath to heap praise on anyone except the wordsmith, with screenwriter Hagar Wilde doing a stellar job adapting her own short story alongside Dudley Nichols. Each scene ratchets along at such a pace, it’s a wonder they don’t pratfall over each other as much as the film’s stars. The dialogue is faster than the big cats they’re chasing, and at a little under two hours, like many stone-cold classics, it’s over in a flash.

You can see Baby’s pawprints all over cinema today. What’s Tyson’s tiger in The Hangover if not a direct nod to Baby the leopard? Tell me the climax on top of a brontosaurus doesn’t remind you of Mr Spielberg’s first dino-outing and I’ll eat my own intercostal clavicle. As for Hepburn’s Susan, there are shades of Margot Robbie’s Harley Quinn in her anarchic, loosey-goosey approach to life ( just minus the violence).

I’m always in awe of effects before laptops, and while we know the aforementioned Harley’s hyenas were entirely digital, Baby is so very real, it makes you wonder for the safety of crews in the 1930s. (A post-credits online search taught me that the leopard was filmed separately and spliced together with a splitscreen technique.) Before I sat down to write my first novel, Love, Unscripted — an absolutely fictional tale of a white, male, 30-something projectionist who loves movies and doesn’t understand what a real relationship is — I compiled a list of cinema’s best couples for inspiration. As half of the novel takes place on just one night, I also jotted down the ultimate all-in-one-night movies (Before Sunrise, In Search Of A Midnight Kiss).

If I’d have seen it before then, Baby’s Susan and David and their weird and wonderful 24 hours together would definitely have made the grade, twice.

LOVE, UNSCRIPTED IS PUBLISHED ON 9 JULY. YOU CAN PRE-ORDER IT NOW