Monkey Business

Monkey Business

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Editorial Reviews

Marilyn Monroe, Cary Grant and Ginger Rogers star in this classic comedy about a chemist who discovers the secret of eternal youth. For years, Dr. Barnaby Fulton (Grant) has been working on a youth-restoring serum with little success - until the day a chimpanzee gets loose in the lab and accidentally concocts the exact formula Fulton has been searching for. The hilarity begins when, unbeknownst to anyone, the chimpanzee pours it into the office water cooler. For with each successive drink, everyone gets younger and younger. When Fulton's stunning secretary (Marilyn Monroe) and lovely wife get a taste of the potion, the chemical reaction is explosive and hilarious fun!

Cary Grant plays an absent-minded scientist working on a youth serum with little success. One afternoon, one of his test monkeys gets loose and works up a formula of its own, which then gets dropped into their water cooler. Shortly, Grant is tooling around in a sports car with his boss's voluptuous secretary (Marilyn Monroe). When his wife (Ginger Rogers) investigates, she too gets a dose and drags Grant off for a second honeymoon of all-night dancing. Meanwhile, Grant's elderly boss (Charles Coburn) is eager to get his hands on the formula--only Grant's formula isn't having the proper effect. Monkey Business is probably most familiar to Marilyn Monroe cultists, but it's Grant and Rogers who have the central roles and make the most of them. Rogers's adolescent emotional meltdown at a hotel and Grant leading a gaggle of boys on a scalping raid are only two of the movie's many richly funny set pieces, all directed by the nimble hand of Howard Hawks (His Girl Friday, Bringing Up Baby, Ball of Fire, Gentlemen Prefer Blondes). One of the last of the classic screwball comedies. --Bret Fetzer

Customer Reviews

Not really a Marilyn Monroe movie

Reviewed by A highly interesting, magnificent and important person, 2009-08-06

This movie is awesome with excellent performances by Cary Grant and Ginger Rogers.

However, I have to wonder why they are selling it as a Marilyn Monroe collection movie. She is in it, but not very much at all. It was just a bit surprising to me. I figured she would be in it more.

I was very pleased with it, however. Its a great little movie.

The Lost Art in Film Making

Reviewed by D. Wayne Dworsky, 2009-07-08

I would not describe this magnificent 1952 Howard Hawks' film as a classic Marilyn Monroe movie no matter what the box says. Although the footage was stocked with funny interludes, it lacks in the Monroe style that so appeals to Marilyn's fans. The only mitigating factor is that the movie was made before Monroe's film fame took hold. Cary Grant and Ginger Rogers certainly dress up this comedy. I adore this civilized humor of yester year, a lost art.

The chimp brings the comedy to life when she adds a special ingredient that completes a youth potion that Dr. Barnaby Fulton (Cary Grant) had tried unsuccessfully to concoct, and dumps it into the water cooler when no one was looking. Unknowingly, those who drank from the cooler turned this bland 1950's film into carnival atmosphere. Cary Grant, although a little stiff in the beginning of the film, loosens up once he's been bitten by the youth potion. Ginger Rogers (Fulton's wife, Edwina) manages to get her fingers caught in the cookie jar as well. Then Lois Laurel (Marilyn Monroe, the dumb blond secretary) gets a taste of it and they go off on a rampage, while the boss (Charlie Coburn) tries to figure it all out.

True to the nature of these vintage farces, all the loose ends get tide back together once all the antics are sorted out. Let's not give it away! The viewer is in for a treat as the stage is set for one heck of a splash in the mud. Too bad they don't make 'em like this anymore!

Monkey Business

Reviewed by Rodford E. Smith, 2009-01-21



Fun movie I hadn't seen in a while. The two leads convincingly play rejuvenated versions of themselves.

Tamer Than I Remember, But Still Funny

Reviewed by Neil Cotiaux, 2008-12-06

First, another set-up line for Monroe:

Coburn: "I want you to go to every Ford agency (dealership) in the city and find Dr. Fulton."

Monroe: "Which one do you want me to do first?"

Duh. "The original dumb blonde." When I was a kid and first saw this movie, it wasn't Monroe that I was preoccupied with but the monkeys. Now, many years later, my daughter asks me the same question that I had asked: "How did they get that monkey to do all those things?" Direction, honey, direction.

And while Howard Hawks is a very fine director, in retrospect, there's still something in the formula (the movie formula, that is) that doesn't fully ignite. Love Rogers. Love the chimp. Love the classic car careening around town. And the "acetates". But taken as a whole, all this "Monkey Business" doesn't genuinely add up to a true, vintage "screwball comedy". Let's call it a frolic instead, a pleasant enough frolic well worth viewing with the family on a rainy Saturday afternoon as a reminder of the kinder, gentler style of comedy that eschewed four-letter words and gave us something to smile about, if not laugh over in places. Which is good enough for me - especially in 2008.

Incidentally, one measure of how both the execution and the definition of "dumb blonde" has changed over the years is to view Monroe's characterization alongside Reese Witherspoon's to-perfection take in the original "Legally Blonde." Not only did Witherspoon nail the stereotype, she also showed a half-century later what Monroe in her era could not - that even dumb blondes can "have more fun" by getting sweet revenge.

Take this one around the block at least once. It's sturdy, it's reliable, and it's got some class.

Screwball Retread from Howard Hawks Boasts Strong Talent But Few Peaks

Reviewed by Ed Uyeshima, 2008-10-03

The shadow of Howard Hawks' earlier screwball classic, 1938's Bringing Up Baby, hovers over this equally inane 1952 farce like a dark, foreboding cloud. In his fifth and final collaboration with Hawks, Cary Grant plays a very similar character to the bespectacled, absent-minded paleontologist he played in the earlier film. This time, he plays a bespectacled, absent-minded pharmaceutical scientist named Barnaby Fulton who is on the verge of discovering a fountain-of-youth elixir in his laboratory when a hyperactive chimpanzee seizes the formula and pours it in the water cooler (thus the movie's title). The inevitable comic shenanigans ensue. While there are sporadic laughs throughout, the film's underlying problem has less to do with the preposterous storyline (scripted by the veteran trio of Ben Hecht, Charles Lederer, and Billy Wilder's constant partner I.A.L. Diamond) than it does with the uneven pacing and a palpable lack of the genuine manic energy that marked the earlier film as well as Hawks' other great Grant film, 1940's His Girl Friday.

Much of the comedy comes from how Barnaby and his wife Edwina revert back to adolescence once they drink the elixir. He starts acting like a twenty-year-old - getting a crewcut, wearing a loud plaid jacket and driving a sports car convertible at breakneck speed. What's worse, he has his boss' curvaceous secretary Miss Laurel join him for the hi-jinks, and she is more than willing to accommodate. Edwina sees the after-effects and drinks the elixir herself as a test subject. She reverts to her high school years and entices her old flame Hank Entwhistle to believe she wants a divorce. Meanwhile, all hell breaks loose at the laboratory when everyone drinks from the water cooler and reverts to a second childhood. Barnaby and Edwina end up throwing paint on each other at which point Barnaby plots to seek revenge on Hank whom he thinks is running off with Edwina. It all ends in pretty ridiculous fashion with the inevitable results.

At this point in his career, the 48-year-old Grant could sleepwalk through a role like this. Fortunately, he is better than that, though the devil-may-care energy he had in "Baby" and "Friday" is missing until he reverts to his childhood. A brassy personality by nature, Ginger Rogers seems strangely restrained as Edwina until she moves dexterously into the childish manner she used to better effect in The Major and the Minor. Hawks likes to recycle bits from his earlier movies, for instance, the contrived scene where Edwina wears a backless apron over a black slip much to Barnaby's chagrin when Hank comes over. This is a virtual replay of the country club scene where Grant inadvertently rips the back of Katharine Hepburn's gown. It's just not funny this time.

Charles Coburn plays his blustery self as Barnaby's merciless boss, while Hugh Marlowe as Hank repeats the pompous ignorance he displayed so well as the naïve playwright in All About Eve. As the vacuous Miss Laurel, Marilyn Monroe has a smallish role and is relegated to some silly lines to emphasize her dumb-blonde character. However, when she joins Grant for his juvenile delinquent escapade, whether on roller skates or poolside in a form-fitting swimsuit, she is so beautiful and vibrantly alive that her future seems completely assured in this early role. There are three extra features on the 2002 DVD - the original theatrical trailer, a twenty-picture stills gallery with some production shots of Monroe, and a brief restoration comparison details the work done to restore the film back to its original quality.