Monkey Business (1952) - film review

Dr Barnaby Fulton is a brilliant research chemist who, to his wife’s dismay, has become obsessed with developing a drug that will throw the ageing process back into reverse.  Finally, after months of painstaking research, he thinks he has succeeded.  Sure enough, when he drinks his secret potion, he sheds 20 years in an instant, and instantly rushes off to enjoy a day of frolicking madness with his boss’s secretary.   What Barnaby doesn’t know is that the real cause of his regained youth is a random concoction of chemicals that his laboratory chimp poured into the lab’s water dispenser...

Monkey Business was the last, and unquestionably the silliest, of the five immensely popular screwball comedies directed by Howard Hawks that starred Hollywood legend Cary Grant.   Whilst the absurd fantasy elements of the plot (a reworking of R. L. Stevenson’s Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde story) prevent the film from having anything like the sophistication of Hawks’ earlier screwball comedies and make it a rather childish affair, it cannot be denied that Monkey Business is a hugely entertaining film which guarantees a fair quota of laughs.  

Witty quick-fire dialogue may be in short supply but there is an abundance of hilarious visual gags to make up for this, including some unforgettable sequences with a delinquent chimpanzee "monkeying around" in a laboratory.  Ginger Rogers is an unusual partner for Cary Grant – a choice which Hawks himself regretted on account of her age - but the pairing works surprisingly well, particularly in the scenes where one or other of their characters is returned to childhood’s happy hour by the magic serum.   As appealing as the Grant-Rogers double act undoubtedly is, it is Marilyn Monroe who is the film’s biggest revelation.  The actress was on the brink of stardom when she appeared in this film and Hawks made very effective use of her obvious sex appeal to ensure that not one heterosexual male spectator left the cinema disappointed.

© James Travers 2008

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