| Monkey Business | |
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Promotional movie poster for the film |
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| Directed by | Howard Hawks |
| Produced by | Sol C. Siegel |
| Written by | Ben Hecht Charles Lederer I.A.L. Diamond |
| Starring | Cary Grant Ginger Rogers Marilyn Monroe Charles Coburn Hugh Marlowe |
| Music by | Leigh Harline |
| Cinematography | Milton R. Krasner |
| Editing by | William B. Murphy |
| Distributed by | 20th Century Fox |
| Release date(s) | September 5, 1952 |
| Running time | 97 minutes |
| Country | United States |
| Language | English |
Monkey Business (1952) is a screwball comedy film directed by Howard Hawks and starring Cary Grant, Ginger Rogers, Charles Coburn, Marilyn Monroe, and Hugh Marlowe. To avoid confusion with the famous Marx Brothers movie of the same name, this film is sometimes referred to as Howard Hawks' Monkey Business.
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Dr. Barnaby Fulton (Grant), a research chemist working on a fountain of youth pill for a chemical company, is trying to develop an elixir of youth, urged on by his commercially-minded boss Oliver Oxley (Coburn). One of Dr. Fulton's chimpanzees, Esther, gets loose in the laboratory and pours some chemicals into the water cooler — chemicals that just happen to have the rejuvenating effect for which Fulton is searching.
Unaware of the monkey's antics, Fulton tests his latest experimental concoction on himself, and washes it down with water from the cooler. Naturally, he soon begins to act just like a 20-year-old, and spends the day out on the town with his boss's secretary Lois Laurel (Monroe). When Fulton's wife Edwina (Rogers) learns that the elixir "works," she drinks some, again washing it down with water, and turns into a prank-pulling schoolgirl.
Things get out of hand when her newly quick temper induces Edwina to make an impetuous phone call to her old flame Hank Entwhistle (Marlowe), who, knowing nothing of the elixir, believes that Edwina is truly unhappy in her marriage and wants a divorce.
Meanwhile, more and more people at the laboratory are drinking the water and reverting to a second childhood, with predictably hilarious results. In the end, of course, everything works out, with help from the elixir itself.
Monkey Business is reminiscent of Bringing Up Baby (1938), which also starred Cary Grant and was directed by Howard Hawks, but had a leopard instead of a chimpanzee. The denouement, involving a chemical that causes a board of directors to act like schoolchildren, is shared by Lover Come Back (1961), a Doris Day–Rock Hudson vehicle, although in that film the chemical — in pill form — simply causes everybody to get extremely drunk.
Hawks said he did not think the film's premise was believable, and as a result thought the film was not as funny as it could have been. Peter Bogdanovich has noted that the scenes with Cary Grant and Marilyn Monroe work especially well and laments that Monroe was not the leading lady instead of Ginger Rogers.
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