Is It Worth the Watch?

Screwball comedy is a fragile genre. If you have wacky characters, you need a realistic scenario, and vice versa. If both the characters and the story are bizarre, there’s nothing for the audience to cling on to, to identify with.

I think that’s the problem with 1952s Monkey Business. Director Howard Hawks certainly knows his way around screwball comedy, he directed the genre-defining classics His Girl Friday and Bringing Up Baby. Both are hysterically funny (and also star Cary Grant), and, to be honest, Monkey Business has moments where I heartily laughed out loud. Unfortunately, overall it fizzles.

The premise of an absent-minded professor inventing a formula that reverses aging is brilliant, and I’m guessing in the 1950s it was enormous fun watching Grant and Ginger Rogers behaving like unruly children after testing it on themselves. But today this is a movie that seems to be bursting with potential and supplies some outstanding comic acting, but falls short on the laughs. You’ll smile all the way through, but it ends up feeling like one massive set-up to a joke that never pays off.

Meanwhile, Marilyn Monroe as a ditzy secretary delivers one of the funniest performances of her career. I wish I could’ve seen a lot more of her character.

Is It Worth The Watch? It’s pleasant, it’s even entertaining, it’s certainly not a waste of time, it’s just not laugh out loud funny. And that’s what it really wants to be.

1952

97 minutes

Starring – Cary Grant, Ginger Rogers, Charles Coburn, Marilyn Monroe, Hugh Marlowe, George Winslow, Kathleen Freeman

Director – Howard Hawks

Screenplay – Ben Hecht, Charles Lederer, I. A. L. Diamond, Harry Segall (story)