This essay is part of Avidly’s RomCom Superlatives series
Here’s my least favorite romantic comedy convention: the desperate, vaguely stalkery “I-must-chase-you-because-I-love-you” rom com ending. I hate how formulaic it is, how artificially urgent, how devoid of the witty, back-and-forth banter I’d so much rather be spending the last few minutes of my viewing time relishing instead. So it’s a bit ironic that this essay celebrates what I consider to be the genre’s superlative chase scene — the one variation on the chase scene theme that always makes me beam from ear to ear and squee with fangirl delight. For unlike typical chase scene fare, the chase I love isn’t about the pleasure of romantic pursuit (or triumphant romantic conquest) at all. It is, instead, about the pleasure of disruption. The pleasure of commotion. The pleasure of the abrupt, the absurd, the off-kilter, the queer. It puts the “screw” in screwball comedy. It is, in a word, the Best.
Rather than taking place at the end of the film and posturing as some sort of romantic apotheosis, the scene in question takes place about halfway through Howard Hawks’s frenetically perfect Bringing Up Baby (1938). In it, a man (David, played by Cary Grant) who’s supposed to be sitting still for a nice, pleasant dinner keeps getting up from the table to chase not the woman with whom he’s supposed to be falling in love (Susan, played by Katharine Hepburn), but rather the woman’s aunt’s dog (George, played by Skippy/“Asta” of The Thin Man/The Awful Truth fame—Best Canine Performer in a Romantic Comedy if ever there was one!), and, by the end of the sequence, the woman’s pet leopard (Baby, uncredited) as well. It’s by no means the only chase scene in the film, as anyone who knows the movie knows full well. From the get-go, the question of whether David is chasing Susan or Susan is chasing David (the question, as Susan puts it, of “who’s always behind whom?”) fuels the thematics and mechanics of the plot. David chases Susan to get his ball back from her on a golf course, to stop her from driving off with his car in a parking lot, to save her from walking through the Ritz Plaza Hotel with her underwear showing. Susan chases David because “he’s the only man [she’s] ever loved” and because (not unrelatedly) he’s “so good-looking without [his] glasses.” Like so many other rom com couples, then, David and Susan are playing a spirited game of Cat and Mouse—or, more accurately, of Owl (nerdy paleontologist David) and Pussycat (sly socialite Susan).
But part of the unique screwball fun of this particular chase scene comes from how David and Susan don’t just play like animals; they play with animals. For example, because George the Dog has found and buried David’s “intercostal clavicle” (the very last bone he needs to complete the dino skeleton he’s been working on for the past four years), David feels the need to chase after George wherever he goes in the hopes that he’ll lead them back to where the bone is buried. Susan, meanwhile, is less invested in keeping track of George than she is in keeping track of Baby, the tame leopard that her brother Mark has (she thinks) gifted her from Brazil.
Paired together, David’s obsessive interest in the male dog George (and, more specifically, in what George has done with his “precious bone”) and Susan’s obsessive interest in the female leopard Baby (to whom she happily croons love songs) open the door for ambiguous, queer readings of their individual characters and of the sexual ethos of the film as a whole. (It helps, of course, that David and Susan are played by Cary Grant and Katharine Hepburn, ambiguously queer Hollywood icons par excellence, and that the scene right before the chase scene in question features David in a frilly woman’s bathrobe, shouting at Susan’s Aunt Elizabeth [May Robson] that his reason for wearing it is “Because I just went GAY all of a sudden!”)
Aunt Elizabeth seems to be less bothered by this sexual proclamation than she is by the sight of David chasing her dog all around her property, stopping only to dig holes. Susan, for some reason, thinks that an excellent way to explain David’s eccentric behavior to her aunt is to tell her that he’s a “big game hunter” friend of her brother Mark’s who has recently suffered a nervous breakdown. She also, in the same conversation, tells her aunt for the first time that she’s in love with David and plans to marry him, even if he doesn’t know it yet. As much as Aunt Elizabeth disapproves of David as a prospective romantic partner for her niece—“I don’t want another lunatic in the family, I’ve got lunatics enough already!”—she nonetheless does her best to attend to his needs at dinner that evening by asking her own dinner date, Major Applegate (Charlie Ruggles), to “draw him out” a bit during the meal, by talking to him, for instance, about big game hunting, the hobby that (she thinks) the two men have in common. With Baby locked safely away in the farmhouse garage and George curled up on a chair in the farmhouse dining room, all the various strands of animal-related backstory are lined up and ready for the four comedically-gifted actors who join forces in the scene (Grant, Hepburn, Robson, and Ruggles) to knock them out of the proverbial park.
Major Applegate starts the scene off by telling a story that he’s sure will enrapture his fellow big-game enthusiast David (a story about the “thrilling experience” of killing a tiger he’s been chasing through the jungle), but David is far too busy keeping his eyes on small-game George to pay any attention to what the major is saying. When George jumps off his chair and trots out of the house just as Major Applegate is asking David whether he’s ever gone hunting in the Malay Peninsula, David abruptly stands up, blurts out “Excuse me!”, and bolts after George—the first of many such eruptions and interruptions that will take place over the course of the dinner. The layout of the Random farmhouse is such that George takes David on a disorientingly circuitous ride, always out by one door and in by another. In pointed contrast to the various guns that Major Applegate keeps talking about using in his hunting expeditions, David chases George around and around and around the farmhouse environs armed only with his dinner spoon in one hand, napkin in the other. And this, we are surely meant to feel, is what romance should be more like: less about hunters and their prey, more about quirky, playful, random shenanigans.
Early in the scene, Aunt Elizabeth specifically points out how incongruent David’s “queer,” disorderly conduct is with the norms and expectations of high-class, married-couple life—“Susan, imagine giving a dinner party with your husband stalking like Hamlet’s ghost all through the meal!”—but Susan’s starry-eyed love for David isn’t fazed by his non-normative tendencies in the least. (Indeed, nowhere in the film does she gaze at him quite so desirously as in the scene that directly follows his “Because I just went GAY!” proclamation.) What does start to faze Susan, as the dinner progresses, is the sound of a leopard’s cry echoing through the quiet Connecticut night, which, she soon learns, is the result of Baby having been inadvertently let out of lock-up by Aunt Elizabeth’s inebriated gardener. From this point in the scene on, Susan’s anxious chasing after Baby matches David’s anxious chasing after George, and she too takes to leaping up from the dinner table and darting in and out of the house with disorderly abandon. As the scene draws to a close, David and Susan are both still running in chaotic pursuit of their respective animal interests, but now they are running in chaotic pursuit together.
Ultimately, then, what the Dinner, Interrupted chase scene from Bringing Up Baby encapsulates is how very much fun the chase can be when it’s not as linear—as “straight”—as a man racing breathlessly after a woman or a woman racing breathlessly after a man down a street or, god forbid, through an airport. And while David and Susan do wind up professing their love for one another in a relatively straight fashion in the end (if David’s “I love you, I think?” counts), they show us, all along the way, how to rom and how to com in superlatively dizzying, roundabout, anarchic style.
Nora Gilbert is an associate professor of English at the University of North Texas where she teaches and writes about old Victorian novels and old Hollywood movies. She is the author of two books: Better Left Unsaid: Victorian Novels, Hays Code Films, and the Benefits of Censorship (Stanford UP, 2013) and Gone Girls, 1684-1901: Flights of Feminist Resistance in the Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century British Novel (Oxford UP, 2023), as well as a bevy of articles and book chapters. She admits some bias in writing this essay due to the fact that she grew up with a dog named Asta (and was named after Nora Charles—Best Namesake Ever—herself).