Bringing Up Baby (1942)

Grant plays a bookish paleontologist unfelicitously engaged to his even stuffier assistant (Virginia Walker); Hepburn’s a flighty, madcap socialite who bursts into his life on the 18th fairway and is very soon literally driving him to distraction. Grant’s meticulously assembled dinosaur skeleton perfectly embodies the ossified, dead-end direction his personal life is currently taking, and contrasts strikingly with the much livelier and more formidable (not to mention quirkier) beast he meets in Hepburn’s company — a Brazilian leopard with old-fashioned taste in music.

In a performance reportedly inspired by silent comedian Harold Lloyd, the bespectacled Grant does the slow burn beautifully; and Hepburn’s battering-ram personality and non-sequitur repartee are irresistible rather than irritating. From the rollicking dialogue to the daft situations to the deft physical comedy, Bringing Up Baby has it all.