1952 Comedy
From 20th Century Fox
Directed by Howard Hawks
Starring
Cary Grant
Ginger Rogers
Charles Coburn
Marilyn Monroe
Hugh Marlowe
Larry Keating
Henry Letondal
Cary Grant and director Howard Hawks had been looking for another film to do together. It had been three years since their comedy success with I Was a Male War Bride. Two other comedies were more successful, His Girl Friday (1940) and especially Bringing Up Baby (1938). Well, actually the latter was not a success when released but by the mid-40s people began to see it for the riotous laughfest it certainly was.
They frequently had different opinions on the success or comedy importance of their films but they knew they liked working with one another. Both did very well at the box office and with critics without one another. Their roster of individual hits was massive. But not all of them were fun to make and Grant did not like all his directors nor Hawks his actors. So working together could be a respite from all the nonsense.
Hawks talked 20th Century Fox into buying the story and then turned it over to writer friends Ben Hecht, Charles Lederer and I. L. Diamond to fashion an acceptable screenplay. Hawks himself was involved in the writing (without credit) because the film had to display all the traits that would encourage people to see it as a Hawks film. Even the studio agreed. Around this time a reviewer said if one doesn't love the films of Howard Hawks, one cannot love cinema. Fox allowed Hawks and his writers to do their thing.
An absent-minded research chemist (Grant) who works for a pharmaceutical company (run by Coburn) is working on a formula for a product that will defy the aging process. He does a lot of mixing in the lab but is unable to come up with the right ingredients and/or proportions. When everyone is out of the lab, a chimpanzee used for experiments slips out of her cage, sits at the counter and mixes up her own concoction. She then dumps it all in the water cooler inside the lab.
Grant tries some of his own mixture again and then has some water from the cooler and the next thing he and others know, he is acting like a misbehaving 12-year old.
He runs out of the lab, gets a haircut, a flashy sports jacket and buys an MG sportscar. At the dealership he runs into Monroe, Coburn's secretary, who has been sent to bring Grant back to the office. Instead the pair of them go on a wild ride around town. He damages the front end of the vehicle and as it's being fixed right away (boy, this is a piece of whimsy) they go roller skating and then swimming. All of these incidents produce the desired screwball comedy results.
When wife Rogers comes looking for him, she finds him asleep in his lab office. While he's awakening she takes a healthy drink from the cooler and soon she is bonkers. He is no longer under the influence of the concoction nor does he have much memory of his behavior while he was. He observes Rogers and thinks she's lost her mind. She balances a glass of water on her forehead as she performs harem-style high-jinx across the floor. She slips a goldfish in Coburn's pants and tries in vain to slap Monroe for putting lipsticked kisses all over Grant. More giggles...
Grant, thinking, of course, that it's his formula that has produced all the childish behavior, destroys it. Rogers goes to the water cooler so that she can make coffee and the duo downs it. Both are wildly out of control when Coburn summons them to the conference room for a chat with the board of governors. They arrive with the chimp.
When Grant is questioned about the formula, he offers a lot of doublespeak, driving every crazy. Monroe is standing between Grant and Coburn and as she is talking to Grant, Rogers shoots her in her ample derriere with a slingshot and she slaps Coburn. Now looking at Coburn, Rogers performs her task again and Monroe slaps Grant. The chimp ends up on the chandelier, unscrewing lightbulbs and throwing them at everyone. Pure bedlam.
They head home and Rogers calls Marlowe, an attorney and family friend of hers and sworn enemy of Grant's. Marlowe is in love with her and is certain she is getting close to filing for divorce. He decides to come over. Grant, in the meantime, still acting 12, comes across a gang of young boys playing cowboys and Indians. When Marlowe arrives Grant encourages the boys to tie him to a tree and give Marlowe a mohawk.
Soon a baby comes into the scene and Rogers thinks Grant has gotten even younger. Rogers and baby wind up at the lab for the grand finale with most of the principals having had some of the water and chasing one another around and shooting each other with seltzer bottles. Somebody empties the cooler water into the sink.
I don't regard Monkey Business as good as the other Grant-Hawks comedies but not that it doesn't try awfully hard to rival them. While I laughed a number of times, from start to finish, we certainly get the point way back at the beginning and everything after seemed like a lot of stuffing of gags and more gags.
Hawks himself ended up being displeased with the final picture. His main complaint was that it was too silly and as a result no one would find it believable. What...!?!? Had he been spending too much time at the water cooler? Did he think anyone would take this seriously? I adored Bringing Up Baby and I didn't take it seriously for a moment.
Studio head Zanuck pretty much stayed away but he insisted that the ending should leave the audience with a few serious, earth-shattering thoughts... be satisfied, leave well enough alone... let nature take its course, youth is not all it's cracked up to be... the green pastures we see in the distance aren't always so green when seen close up. Oh brother... he must have been at the water cooler, too. Hawks and Zanuck both needed to relax... this is simply an hour and 37 minutes of silliness, and pretty entertaining silliness at that.
Hawks didn't care for either of his leading ladies. He was against Rogers being hired. He thought she was too old at 41 and she was, in fact, the oldest leading actress to appear in a Hawks film at least up to that time. But when she was hired, she insisted that her character get to drink some of the water, too. Why should Grant (whom she regarded as a friend and had worked with in Once Upon a Honeymoon in 1942) get to do all the fun stuff while she's just the concerned wife? Hawks fought her all the way because he thought allowing two adults to act like schoolkids was just too much. She won. Actress and director had a frosty relationship throughout filming.
He was disdainful of Monroe both as a person and a performer and yet he would say I think the overdeveloped quality in that little girl is going to be kind of funny. When he saw her on the screen in the finished product, he could not believe how much the camera loved her. Nobody saw any real shining future for her in films. Hawks noted her odd behavior, her lateness, her inferiority complex. He once made a comment (not to her) that she was so goddamned dumb. She got wind of it and was leery of him for the remainder of the shoot.
But Monkey Business in MM lore is famous for being the last of her featured/supporting roles in movies. Her next film was Niagara which catapulted her to mega-stardom the world over, curvy and beautiful, queen of the sex goddesses. If that weren't enough, she put her musical talents to work, joined up with Jane Russell and made Gentlemen Prefer Blondes. There was no stopping her now. Who should be the director of Blondes but Howard Hawks?
Monroe was fun in a brief role. The film never meant much to her except for the dream-come-true of working with Grant. He had a friendly relationship with her and didn't come on to her which she always attributed to his being a gentleman. She met Joe DiMaggio during the shoot and he brought far more interest to her life than working with a chimp.
Coburn was a master character actor. I always knew what to expect and that's what I got. He sure knew how to deliver the lines in a comedy. His part was originally written to make him a little more of a lecher, rather like the character he played in Blondes. But for Monkey Business the censors didn't want any undue monkeying around and his character was cleaned up.
I always loved Hugh Marlowe who more than held his own with all those others in All About Eve. Equally at home in comedies and dramas, what made him so interesting to me in comedies was that the actor didn't have a silly bone in his entire body. He was always so tightly wound and in comedies they found good uses for exploiting that trait.
The acting of all the principals is, as I sometimes say, all it needed to be. I always saw Cary Grant films. He totally fascinated me as an actor and a person. He might have made 4-5 bad films. I'm not sure what they are. Interesting, I think, is that this film and the character he played foreshadowed his preoccupation with rejuvenation in the last 30 years of his life.
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a few good moments
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