Monkey Business | The New Yorker

Starting with the credit sequence, a mini-meta-masterwork in which Cary Grant repeatedly misses his cue, Howard Hawks’s 1952 science comedy is a summit of comic invention. Grant plays Barnaby Fulton, an absent-minded chemist with Coke-bottle glasses who’s working on a rejuvenation formula that turns out to work all too well. Though he’s happily married to Edwina (Ginger Rogers)—and Hawks saucily highlights the erotic spark in their long (albeit childless) marriage—Barnaby’s first act under the formula’s influence is the hot pursuit of his boss’s secretary, Miss Laurel (Marilyn Monroe). The jokes strike below the belt, as with a fish jumping into the pants of a doughy C.E.O. (Charles Coburn) and Barnaby’s gaze at Miss Laurel’s “acetates,” but a mightier madness erupts when restored youth regresses further to full-blown childhood, which, for Hawks, is no realm of lost innocence but a whirl of wild jealousy and murderous passion. The simians of the title are present throughout, as the kissing cousins of the men of reason whose laboratory houses them.