Bringing Up Baby

Bringing Up Baby with Katharine Hepburn and Cary Grant, directed by Howard Hawks.  You can hardly talk about the screwball comedy genre without mentioning this one.  The host of TCM says that this was Katharine Hepburn's first comedy.  I've already had Holiday on my list which was another Hepburn/Grant pairing but it was released later in 1938.

David (Cary Grant) is a paleontologist trying to assemble a complete brontosaurus skeleton.  In the beginning of the movie he learns that the final bone, the intercostal clavicle, has been found and forwarded to him.  Then, while trying to petition a wealthy patron over a golf game to donate a million dollars to his museum, he runs afoul of Susan (Katharine Hepburn).  Misunderstandings flow around her like a sandstorm and whenever David gets close to her he gets buried in them.  After another chance meeting Susan decides that she is taken with David and uses the circumstance of being recently sent a leopard by her brother to trick David into accompanying her to Connecticut.  David has brought along his recently-received intercostal clavicle and Susan's Aunt's dog George (played by Asta from The Thin Man) steals it and buries it in an unknown location.  While waiting for George to reveal the location of the intercostal clavicle, Baby (that's the leopard) escapes.  Baby is a nice, tame leopard but there is a circus in town that has a mean, vicious leopard and Susan accidentally lets this one escape, too.  Everybody goes to jail but everyone ends up happy.  Except Alice, David's original fiancée.