BRUNSWICK — As the second installment of its “Screwball Comedies” film series, Curtis Memorial Library will host a free screening of “Bringing Up Baby” at 7:30 p.m. today in the Morrell Meeting Room. Admission is free. Refreshments, including mocktails and popcorn, will be served.
“Bringing Up Baby,” which debuted in 1938, stars Cary Grant, in one of his less debonair roles, and Katharine Hepburn. At www.filmsite.org, Tim Dirks describes the film as “one of versatile director Howard Hawks’ greatest screwball comedies and often considered the definitive screwball film. It is also one of the funniest, wackiest and most inspired films of all time with its characteristic breathless pace, zany antics and pratfalls, absurd situations and misunderstandings, perfect sense of comic timing, completely screwball cast, series of lunatic and hare-brained misadventures, disasters, light-hearted surprises and romantic comedy. The non-stop, harum-scarum farce skewered many institutions, including psychiatry, the sterile field of science, the police, and high-society upper classes.”
In the fourth film to co-star Grant and Hepburn, the two play against type. She portrays “a mad-cap, scheming, aggressive, impulsive, accident-prone and daffy society heiress,” according to Dirks, “while Grant appears as a bumbling, clumsy, absent-minded, straight, nerdy and stuffy paleontologist from a natural history museum.”
The “baby” referred to in the title is not a cute little cherub, but those unfamiliar with the film will have to view it to find out “Baby’s” identity.
After a one-week hiatus, the film series will return on March 23 with “Holiday.” The series will conclude March 30 with “The Lady Eve” (1941).
Curtis Memorial Library is located at 23 Pleasant St. The entrance to the Morrell Meeting Room is from Middle Street.
For information, call 725-5242.
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