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Jerry The Nipper

posted 13 years ago by PSVillas
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An interesting item I noticed when watching the film again. In the jail house scene when Susan(Katherine Hepburn) is making up a story about them being a criminal gang she refers to David(Cary Grant) as Jerry the Nipper. This must a reference to the film Grant make just the year before "The Awful Truth." There's a great scene in that film when Irene Dunn is trying to bust up Grant's romance to another women and she refers to Grant as Jerry the Nipper. In fact, in BUB when Hepburn calls him that Grant says she got the name from a motion picture she saw.

[–] ppllkk 13 years ago

Very interesting. I wonder if the line was in the shooting script or if Katharine Hepburn improvised it. I strongly suspect the latter, or perhaps Grant suggested it. Grant famously ad-libbed his "went gay" line earlier in the film. Howard Hawks allowed a lot of improvisation unlike, for example, Ernst Lubitsch for whom the script was sacred. (Lubitsch would not even change "robber" to "thief" to accommodate the wavishing Kay Fwancis who had trouble pronouncing the letter r.) The shooting script seems to be herehttp://www.lib.muohio.edu/multifacet/record/mu3ugb4177838but I have not been able to access it.The script in the Gerald Mast book is a transcription of the movie, not the script from which it was made. It is based on the continuity script (what was actually shot including scenes later deleted) which the studio used to establish copyright._______________For easy markup see http://userscripts.org/scripts/show/42255