Wild Animal
The Last of Girls?
From time to time these days, one meets young people—film students even—who can’t quite place Gary Cooper. Come May 13, he will have been dead for 51 years; and on May 7—the day I’m writing—he was born in 1901, up in Montana. Which seems appropriate for one of our great cowboys or Westerners, except that after being raised first on a cattle ranch he spent seven crucial years of his childhood in Dunstable, Bedfordshire, in England. READ MORE >>
There is a passage in Howard Hawks’ Bringing Up Baby in which David Huxley (Cary Grant) and Susan Vance (Katharine Hepburn) are lost at night in the forest of Connecticut searching for a leopard called Baby and a fox terrier named George. If you don’t know the picture, don’t bother to ask, “Why a leopard?” Your every instinct is correct—there are (and should be) no leopards in Connecticut. READ MORE >>
