Monkey Business
Description
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 eac… More >>
July 28th, 2010 at 11:29 pm
screwball comedy…that is, if you’re a mental patient. Screenplay by The Monkey. Movies like this don’t age well. It probably stank when it came out, too. It’s essentially a vehicle for introducing various parts of Marilyn Monroe’s body to the young men of the time.
Rating: 1 / 5
July 29th, 2010 at 12:31 am
I purchased this movie on DVD and I had to return it to the store twice before getting a refund on it. Regarding defects, you name it, it has it! It has skipping, pixels showing up, and it’s almost impossible to search the movie forwards or backwards because that’s when most of the freezing happens. I would recommend having the sales associates play the DVD (if they’re willing to do so, that is) and check for all the possible defects. I checked my DVD player with other movies to make sure, and all of them played back okay.
As for the movie itself, well, it’s not in my list of movies that I would watch over and over. Once was enough for me!
Rating: 1 / 5
July 29th, 2010 at 2:40 am
“We dream of youth. We remember it as a time of nightingales and valentines, and what are the facts? Maladjustment, mere idiocy, and a series of low comedy disasters, that’s what youth is. I don’t see how anyone survives.”
So says Dr. Barnaby Fulton to his loving wife Edwina. In fact the search for a youth formula is the commission he is working on at Oxley Chemicals, with the help of his assistant Jerome Keating. So far, he’s gotten a 23% efficiency rating out of the formula, until in a serendipitous moment, he hits upon heat as the answer to make it 100% efficient.
Now, we’ve all heard of the story of many monkeys typing up gibberish until only one of them comes up with Hamlet. Well, in yet another totally bizarre and random moment, Esther, one of the experimental chimpanzees in Fulton’s lab, unwittingly creates a formula that’s more effective than Fulton’s. And the cruel joke is that the chimp dumps her formula into the water cooler. Meanwhile, first Barnaby, then Edwina, take Esther’s formula, thinking it’s Barnaby’s, and they regress back in age, both to college age. Yes, they seem livelier, whooping it up, and acting youthful. But their outrageous behaviour causes consternation among their bewildered colleagues, particularly Mr. Oxley, who’s simultaneously pleased and concerned that the formula’s working. And guess how the Fultons act when they unwittingly take a larger dose of the formula?
Some of the things are very dated, such as the sports coat and haircut that’s reminiscent of college boys in the late 1920’s. The open top sports car is a beaut, though.
As for Marilyn, who plays Oxley’s secretary, Lois Laurel, she doesn’t have much to do, but the one feature that’s emphasized are her legs. She raises her skirt to Fulton to show how well the non-rip stockings are working, and when she’s sent to find Fulton at the Ford dealer, from beneath a billboard, we see a pair of legs walking. When Barnaby calls out her name, the legs stop in reaction. Interesting technique there. And Edwina says of Laurel, who’s described as “half infant” by Barnaby, “not the half that’s visible.” And yes, her typing is so bad, her boss hands her a paper and says “Find someone to type this.”
Cary Grant comes off well as Barnaby, playing the myopic absent-minded professor to a tee. When Ginger Rogers (Edwina) lets her hair down, shades of what made her glow during her Fred Astaire days come through, but it’s clear that she hasn’t aged that well with time.
The voice telling Cary Grant, “Not yet, Cary” at the beginning is none other than director Howard Hawks, who’d direct Marilyn in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, in which Charles Coburn (Oxley) also appears as Sir Henry Beatman. And the young boy in the cowboy hat with the low speaking voice is George “Foghorn” Winston, who has a small role as Henry Spofford III in Blondes.
An average light comedy that’s good as a time-killer, enjoyable if it’s not taken too seriously. But in going back to that opening quote, it amazes me that no matter how adult adults seem to be, the maladjustment and mere idiocy is something that even most of us adults never grow out of. If that’s what makes us young at heart, that’s just human nature. I suppose that means that if we’re as young as we feel, that it’s all in the mind, well, that’s what matters in the end. Youth is one thing, immaturity is quite another.
Rating: 3 / 5
July 29th, 2010 at 5:08 am
MONKEY BUSINESS was a wonderful throwback to the screwball comedies of the 1930’s. It boasts terrific comedic performances from the always-fantastic Cary Grant, Ginger Rogers and Marilyn Monroe in a fine supporting role.
Director Howard Hawk’s puts the film into full-throttle for this hilarious romp about a scientist (Cary Grant – NORTH BY NORTHWEST, CHARADE) who invents a youth serum. When the serum is accidentally tipped into the watercooler, everyone seems to have ‘monkey fever’! Ginger Rogers (KITTY FOYLE, TOP HAT) plays Grant’s long-suffering wife, whose relationship is put to the test when both she and he are sent back to their rocky courtship, thanks to the mind-bending effects of the serum!
The film also features Charles Coburn, George “Foghorn” Winslow (who both co-starred with Marilyn Monroe in Howard Hawk’s GENTLEMEN PREFER BLONDES the following year), Douglas Spencer (THE DIARY OF ANNE FRANK), Esther Dale, Hugh Marlowe, Henri Letondal, Robert Cornthwaite and Larry Keating.
The DVD includes restoration comparisons, still gallery and the trailer. Available seperately or as part of the Marilyn Monroe Diamond Collection.
Rating: 4 / 5
July 29th, 2010 at 7:33 am
Monkey Business (1958) not to be confused with the 1935 Marx Brothers movie with the same title is a very cute comedy and it stars Cary Grant as a scientist working on a formula that will delay the aging process but hasn’t been having sucess but unknown to him one of his test monkeys mixes things in the formular and a janitor accidently puts it in the water cooler and when people start drinking the water they begin to act much younger then they are. This movie is pretty funny and also stars Ginger Rogers as Cary’s wife and Marilyn Monroe plays a secretary. This is one of my favorite Cary Grant movies and I highly recommend this DVD!
Rating: 5 / 5