Finally available on Blu-ray, Criterion’s 4K restoration of Howard Hawks’ 1938 comedy classic, Bringing Up Baby, was well worth the wait.

Four years prior to the film’s release, Frank Capra’s It Happened One Night and Hawks’ Twentieth Century ushered in the era of screwball comedy with Capra’s film winning a slew of Oscars including Best Picture and Director while Hawks’ film wasn’t nominated in any category. Subsequent masterpieces of the genre included Gregory La Cava’s 1936 film, My Man Godfrey, and Leo McCarey’s 1937 film, The Awful Truth. Both Capra and Hawks would return to the genre in 1938 with Capra’s film, You Can’t Take It with You, again winning Oscars for Best Picture and Best Director while Hawks’ Bringing Up Baby not only wasn’t nominated for a single Oscar, but it was also a notorious commercial failure.

The screwiest of all screwball comedies, part of the film’s initial failure was attributed to word of mouth about all the characters being screwy with no normal people in sight. RKO had wanted Hawks to turn down the comedy about a paleontologist and a spoiled heiress and her pet leopard, and turn up the romance, but he refused.

Adding to the film’s woes was the naming of star Katharine Hepburn as box office poison by the Independent Theater Owners Association. Also on the list were Joan Crawford, Greta Garbo, Marlene Dietrich, and Kay Francis. All but Francis would soon recover.

The film had a prestige multi-week planned run at New York’s Radio City Music Hall, but it flopped so badly that it was withdrawn after one week and replaced by Warner Bros.’ Bette Davis film Jezebel, which opened to lines around the block in a blizzard.

Hepburn was new to comedy, but Cary Grant, long established in the genre, was coming off the major success of The Awful Truth opposite Irene Dunne. The two make a perfect comic team as they later did the same year in George Cukor’s Holiday and two years later in Cukor’s The Philadelphia Story, Hepburn’s comeback film.

Supporting the two stars are a superb cast of farceurs including Charlie Ruggles (Ruggles of Red Gap), May Robson (Lady for a Day), and Barry Fitzgerald (Going My Way).

Criterion’s Blu-ray extras feature a previously recorded commentary from Peter Bogdanovich, a new video essay on Cary Grant, a new interview by John Bailey on cinematographer Russell Metty, a new interview by film scholar Craig Barron on the special effects, previously released interviews with Grant and Hawks, and the feature-length 1977 documentary, Howard Hawks: A Hell of a Good Life, filmed a month before the director’s death. Also included is a booklet featuring an essay by critic Sheila O’Malley and the 1937 short story by Hagar Wilde on which the film is based.

Last fall, Kino Lorber released a box set of three Deanna Durbin films on Blu-ray, the first of three such planned releases, consisting of 100 Men and a Girl, Three Smart Girls Grow Up, and It Started with Eve. Having overestimated the popularity of the gloriously voiced singer and actress who saved Universal from bankruptcy in the mid-1930s and by 1942 was the highest paid actress in the world, Kino cancelled its plans to release the second and third box sets.

Universal has stepped in to release three more Durbin films, sold separately, on Blu-ray, but in the reverse of Kino’s situation, underestimated her popularity. Retailers like Amazon can’t keep up with the demand for Mad About Music, That Certain Age, and Nice Girl?.

Mad About Music and That Certain Age were Durbin’s third and fourth films. Released in 1938, they were the films that earned the then-17-year-old actress her honorary Oscar. By the time she starred in Nice Girl? three years later, she had already had her first on-screen kiss, supplied by Robert Stack in 1939’s First Love.

1941’s Nice Girl? was the first film Durbin made with a director other than Henry Koster (The Bishop’s Wife). Her director here was William A. Seiter (One Touch of Venus).

One of the best films about small town America in the days preceding America’s entry into World War II, Durbin plays the middle daughter of school principal and scientist Robert Benchley. Anne Gwynne is her older sister and Ann Gillis her younger sister. Helen Broderick is the family cook, Walter Brennan the nosey mailman, and Robert Stack the boy next door. Franchot Tone is an associate of Benchley’s whose arrival throws the household into temporary turmoil.

Durbin sings “Perhaps,” “The Old Folks at Home,” “Swanee,” “Love at Last,” “Beneath the Lights of Home,” and “Thank You America.” For the British release of the film, she also sings “There’ll Always Be an England” which had been included on previous release of the film on home video but is missing from the Blu-ray.

Trivia abounds with Durbin’s supporting cast in this one.

Walter Brennan won his third Oscar for The Westerner shortly after the release of this film.

Durbin’s two suitors in the film were one-time Oscar nominees, Franchot Tone six years earlier for Mutiny on the Bounty, Robert Stack fifteen years later for Written on the Wind.

Helen Broderick was the mother of 1949 Best Actor winner Broderick Crawford (All the King’s Men).

Ann Gillis’ last film was the 1968 Visual Effects Oscar winner, 2001: A Space Odyssey in which she played Gary Lockwood’s mother.

Robert Benchley was the grandfather of Jaws author Peter Benchley.

Anne Gwynne was the grandmother of actor Chris Pine (Star Trek).

This week’s U.S. Blu-ray releases include The Pianist and Alias Nick Beal.