In Defense Of The Monkeys-Cary Grant And Ginger Rogers’ Monkey Business

DVD Review

By Lester Lannon

Monkey Business, starring Cary Grant, Ginger Rogers, Charles Coburn, directed by Howard Hawks, 1952   

Let’s face it not every actor, not every director draws to the high hand when acting in or directing movies. Why they take on acting or directing chores in vehicles that don’t showcase their talents has always been a mystery to me. Maybe it was strictly for the money (which I hope against hope was the reason here), as a favor for some past service, thinking that the script they read was not that bad until they saw what happened in production or maybe out of boredom but whatever it was did a disservice to the big talents in this production. That was my distinct impression after sitting through this stinker (I rarely give a one star), Monkey Business, about the wasted talents of legendary Cary Grant (think of any movie from Arsenic and Old Lace to To Catch A Thief and beyond), Ginger Rogers (all those great dance movies with Fred Astaire) and director Howard Hawks (including an early animal film Bringing Up Baby which was a least clever and filled with nice repartee between Grant and Katherine Hepburn). On top of that after viewing the antics that the former two were forced to prance through I felt an overwhelming need to come to the defense of monkeys, monkeys in general and the monkeys in the film who after all no matter how intelligence, no matter how close they are to humankind’s ancestry didn’t know any better.    

Here is why I have my dander up. Doc Barnaby, the role assigned to Cary Grant, was a chemist for a commercial chemical company (nice alliteration, right) who was working his butt off trying to find the fountain of youth, or rather the modern day short-cut a pill that will make one young again, or feel better as one ages anyway. Of course in order to see if the drug concoctions he was working on worked he needed clinical tests and so a couple of poor not so stupid monkeys who were forced into the service of humankind to test the stuff out. But Doc was one of those fly-by-the-seat-of his-pants guys and decided to try a particular concoction on himself. But here is where monkeys will be monkeys. One monkey, one very active monkey, got out of the cage and fooled around in the lab making a concoction which wound up in the water cooler. Doc drank the concoction he made up then grabbed a drink of tainted water from the cooler.           

Bang! Doc started acting like a guy of twenty including trying some hanky-panky with the boss’s secretary (a small part for Marilyn Monroe here before she became big, very big) and other twenty something antics. Naturally the boss was head over heels for the success of this new elixir for youth once he saw what it had done to Doc and was counting the money as he spoke. Problem was when they found out the whole experiment was monkey business they needed to figure out what chemicals went to the formula. So back to the grindstone.  

 Then came the monkey wrench (ouch). While working on a batch of the new concoction Barnaby’s wife, Edwina, played by legendary dancer Ginger Rogers, gulped down some of the drug (with a tainted water chaser).  She reverted to childhood, her second. Barnaby joined her and they thereafter acted like, well, ten-year olds. And it went downhill from there once the boss and Barnaby’s fellow researchers got at the cooler. Needless to say when the magic wore off and the water cooler empty, the fountain of youth going the way of Ponce Deleon, the whole thing was put on the back burner. Which I believe would have been a good place for this film.