| Monkey Business | 
 enlarge | Director: Howard Hawks
Actors: Cary Grant, Ginger Rogers, Charles Coburn, Marilyn Monroe, Harry Carter
Studio: 20th Century Fox
Category: DVD
List Price: $14.98
Buy New: $6.97
You Save: $8.01 (53%)
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Avg. Customer Rating:  23 reviews
Sales Rank: 8802
Format: Black & White, Closed-captioned, Dvd-video, Full Screen, Ntsc
Languages: English (Original Language), French (Original Language), English (Subtitled), Spanish (Subtitled)
Rating: Unrated
Number Of Items: 1
Running Time: 97
Aspect Ratio: 1.33:1
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.3
Dimensions (in): 7.3 x 5.1 x 0.6
MPN: D2003512D
UPC: 024543035121
EAN: 0024543035121
ASIN: B000062XG5
Theatrical Release Date: September 5, 1952
Release Date: May 14, 2002
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
Condition: BRAND NEW, Factory Sealed items direct from the Studios. 30 Day Satisfaction Guarantee. Quick International Airmail!
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Amazon.com
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
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 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!
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| Customer Reviews: Read 18 more reviews...
 Like a good wine not properly aged . . . November 11, 2008
0 out of 1 found this review helpful
I just watched this on Netflix and I have to complain (sowwy). I really wanted to like this more.
I love the classic screwball comedies with a ferver that boreders on the obscene. Cary Grant, Katherine Hepburn, Rosalind Russel, Marx Brothers; hit me again--you can't hurt me. I just keep coming back for more. but this was perhaps the end of the run (for the genre), and a sign of how and why the screwball formula fell out of favor. It's not a bad movie at all, and it would make a great re-make if the casting were perfect, the director someone with the talent of Spielberg and the humor of Mel Brooks. The problem with this version was...
Well, it was a solid premise, and the acting was fine. In fact, Ginger Rogers stole the movie, even though her character was a bit unbelievable (a doting, caring wife who is intelligent (140+ I.Q.), compassionate, understanding, not at all jealous of anything, and feminine to the point of being almost a slap in the face of the feminist movement). If they had taken the time to really tighten up the script, work out the weak bits and retool the dialogue it might have reached the level of something more mid-1930ish (the heyday of screwball comedies).
It seems that the older Howard Hawks and George Cukor got, the less screwball and more lighthearted the comedy became. Marilyn got far too much billing on the cover, as it looks to be some of her least lively work. She was little more than an extra. A good extra, but her dialogue was hardly filling. It seems they cast her just to have her in a movie with Cukor, Rogers, Hawks, and Grant. Kind of a passing of the torch to the new generation.
It really is worth watching if you like the screwball genre, from a historical point and to see how the scripts devolved over time. Perhaps there is a lesson for future screenwriters there--to see what fell apart so that they can learn from the mistakes, and take what did work and make it better in their own comedies. I really wish this had been more of a 4 star movie, as I am afraid to ask for a five star screwball comedy after 1944. I wasn't alive back then, but from what I have heard the world was changing. If I have my history right, the 30's = depression and the hell that was WW2, and America needed silliness and insanity in their comedy to really divorce themselves from the horror of reality. First everyone is broke and then hundred of thousands of men dying in war while women are yanked out of school or beauty salons and put into sweaty, grimy factories to work long hours for a global conflict. The world seemed to need industrial strength comedy to keep sane.
By the early-mid 40's the war was waning or over, and the economy was great (everyone making war stuff it seems) and then the 50's were just a meltdown of culture and the start of something new. I guess those who tried to take what worked so well in the 30's through the 40's and into the 50's were just climbing a hill too steep. The gags got old, the dialogue just wasn't as crisp, and the actors seemed like they were working with threadbare material. That is saddening, as it seems we lost an artform (the classic screwball comedy) that resurfaces only occasionally now. What usually passes for screwball is mostly written and performed by far lesser minds, and ends up for fratboy humor, which, while fun is hardly classic or funny enough to merit generations of new viewers.
Well, that's my rant. I think I will go watch Bringing Up Baby, or his Girl Friday and laugh myself silly. That should cheer me up a bit. As always, thanks for reading.
Screwball Retread from Howard Hawks Boasts Strong Talent But Few Peaks October 3, 2008
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 naive 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.
 Laugh Out Loud May 4, 2008
0 out of 5 found this review helpful
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.
 Full of laughs, Ginger Rogers and Cary Grant are terrific. May 15, 2007
2 out of 3 found this review helpful
The fountain-of-youth is what every middle-aged adult dreams about from time to time, aahhh, to be young again!
Ginger Rogers plays Edwina, the understanding wife of chemist Barnaby Fulton (Cary Grant). After working on his fountain-of-youth formula for two years, he has finally got it and it is time to do some experimental research. Let the fun begin! Both Edwina and Barnaby take the formula, and revert back to a day when they were full of boisterous energy. Being under the influence of the formula also brings up all sorts of unconscious behaviors and thoughts about each other to the surface, which brings about some tense conversation between the two of them later on.
Marilyn Monroe is incredibly sexy in her role as the boss's secretary. Moving and swaying her body with such precision, the viewer is captivated by her.
It doesn't stop there, more research must be done. More laughs, each comedic event builds on the next. This story does have a happy ending!
Monkey Business doesn't Monkey Around April 10, 2007
2 out of 3 found this review helpful
This is one of my all time favorite screwball comedies. Cary Grant and Ginger Rogers, with a little Marilyn Monroe tossed in for spice, make a great couple. They are both great comedic actors and to me they had definite chemistry.
Marilyn plays the quintessential Marilyn, ditzy and sexy. Charles Coburn nearly steals the show with his usual gruff demeanor halted by his drinking the "fountain of youth" potion. His chasing Marilyn Monroe around the laboratory is a great scene.
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