Monkey Business (1952)

The screwball comedy genre was more or less played out by the early 40s but Howard Hawks never really gave up on the genre. He made two attempts to revive it, the first being Monkey Business in 1952, the second being the excellent and criminally underrated Man’s Favorite Sport? in 1964. It is with the first of these that we are concerned today. In Monkey Business brilliant but absent-minded chemist Dr Barnaby Fulton (Cary Grant) is trying to find a formula that will eliminate some of the symptoms of ageing. He doesn’t succeed but one of the chimpanzees he’s using in his experiments finds the formula by accident. The chimpanzee puts the mixture into the water cooler. Barnaby drinks it and the middle-aged scientist finds himself thinking he’s thirty years younger. He buys an MG sports car and has a bit of an adventure with his boss’s luscious but ditzy secretary Miss Laurel (Marilyn Monroe). His wife Edwina (Ginger Rogers) is the next to inadvertently sample the formula. She becomes an amorous teenager and wants to relive their honeymoon, which has unfortunate results for poor Barnaby. Even more mayhem ensues when they both take a larger dose - they both think they’re ten years old! Barnaby has always suspected that their lawyer Hank had designs in Edwina, so he enlists the help of a group of children playing Cowboys and Indians, dons war-paint and decides to scalp Hank. Of course you know that eventually everybody will sample the formula and there will be a great deal of inspired craziness. Cary Grant and Ginger Rogers really let themselves go and they’re both terrific. Charles Coburn is amusing as Barnaby’s boss. Marilyn Monroe doesn’t get much to do but she’s good and she impressed Hawks enough to lead him to cast her in his next movie, the wonderful Gentlemen Prefer Blondes. The movie starts a little slowly but the pace soon picks up and it becomes classic Hawks screwball comedy. It’s all good-natured fun with perhaps more sexual innuendo than you expect in a Hawks movie. The Region 4 DVD is without extras but it’s a decent transfer. The DVD cover gives the impression this is a Marilyn Monroe movie but she is strictly a minor player here. A good cast, plenty of the ludicrous situations that characterise this genre and plenty of laughs - there’s really no reason not to enjoy this movie.

How to Marry a Millionaire (1953)

How to Marry a Millionaire was a major hit for 20th Century-Fox in 1953. It’s a frothy comedy with a star-studded cast.

Lauren Bacall, Marilyn Monroe and Betty Grable are three New York models who share an apartment and a vocation. Their vocation is quite simply to marry millionaires. Schatze Page (Bacall) is the brains of the outfit. She’s the one who came up with the idea that it was no good just hoping a millionaire would come along. You have to make it happen. You need to get organised. You have to be scientific about it.

The first step is securing a suitable base. Millionaires are unlikely to be interested in a girl who lives in a slum. Schatze has solved that problem. She’s rented a luxury apartment. Fortuitously the owner has had to flee the country to avoid the IRS. The three women between them can only just manage to pay the rent. When they need to buy food they sell an item of furniture. The fact that they don’t own the furniture is a minor detail.



Finding suitable millionaires isn’t that easy even when you’re highly organised but Schatze does eventually find a promising prospect in oil man J. D. Hanley (played by an ageing William Powell). He’s 30 years older than her but he does have 30 million dollars and that’s good enough for Schatze. Meanwhile she’s trying to avoid the attentions of Tom Brookman (Cameron Mitchell). She thinks he’s very cute but she’s convinced he pumps gas for a living and she sees no future for herself with a man who isn’t rich. What she doesn’t realise is that the slightly shabby Brookman is in fact a fabulously wealthy millionaire. He just doesn’t like wearing neckties, and he’d rather have a burger than go to a fancy restaurant.

Meanwhile Pola (Monroe) keeps running into the owner of the apartment who has returned to the US but is still on the run from the taxman. She doesn’t know who he is but she ends up taking a fateful flight to Kansas City with him, during which she discovers that some men most certainly will make passes at girls who wear glasses.



Loco (Grable) has found a millionaire but he’s married. And she’s found a guy she really likes but he’s penniless.

Of course you know that the girls are going to learn that love is more important than money. The slightness of the plot isn’t a problem. There’s plenty of potential here for sparkling comedy but somehow it just doesn’t quite come off. The problem is that Nunnally Johnson’s script is a little short on verbal fireworks. There’s plenty of comic talent here but the payoff isn’t up to expectations.

The weakness of the script doesn’t make much difference to Monroe since much of her humour in this film is physical. But Bacall and William Powell desperately need witty dialogue and they don’t get enough of it.



Powell in particular seems strangely flat. He still has the charm and the sparkle in his eye but he’s not given enough to work with.

Grable is also a bit of a weak link. She was probably a decade too old for the role and her character seems to be a bit superfluous.

With television having a devastating effect on the movie business Hollywood responded by putting their faith in big pictures. Fox went all out with this one. It’s in Technicolor, it’s in Cinemascope, and there’s even an extra touch of pomposity in the form of an overture. The intention was clearly to transform a lightweight comedy into a Major Cinematic Event. I personally quite enjoy 50s Hollywood excess so none of that bothers me very much and the movie does have that wonderful Technicolor lushness. And it evidently paid off at the box office.



It’s certainly not a bad movie. It has some amusing moments and it’s enjoyable enough. Its deficiencies only really show up when you compare it to a movie like Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, released earlier in the same year. Gentlemen Prefer Blondes has the energy and the wit and the style that How to Marry a Millionaire tries to achieve but falls a little short of.

Definitely worth seeing.

Don't Bother to Knock (1952)

Don't Bother to Knock is an interesting and highly entertaining 1952 thriller featuring possibly Marilyn Monroe’s finest ever dramatic performance.

Monroe plays a young woman with problems who gets a job as a babysitter in a New York hotel. Richard Widmark is also good, as a man who tries to make an assignation with her but gets more than he bargained for. Anne Bancroft, in her first film role, is very good as Widmark’s torch singer girlfriend who has just told him it’s all over between them. And the always entertaining Elisha Cook jr is extremely entertaining as Monroe’s uncle who works as an elevator operator at the hotel.

Monroe’s performance is exceptionally subtle and very moving as she gradually loses her grip on reality, and it’s free of those annoying mannerisms that she adopted in so many of her movies. Versatile and underrated British director Roy Ward Baker does a solid job and the tension is maintained very effectively.

One of Monroe’s less known films, but one of her best. Not quite a film noir but very close to it in style and substance. Highly recommended.

This movie and Niagara (which is certainly a film noir) gave Monroe her strongest straight dramatic roles and in both cases she acquits herself admirably.

Interestingly enough Monroe doesn’t sing, but Bancroft does. Well her character does anyway although the voice was dubbed.

Niagara (1953)

Niagara, made in 1953, is filmed in Technicolor. There are no shadows. It’s all bright sunlight. And there is no trace of the mean streets of the big city - it all takes place at Niagara Falls! All of which would normally disqualify it from being film noir. But film noir is what it is.

A young honeymooning couple (the charming Jean Peters as Polly Cutler and the unbelievably annoying Max Showalter as her husband) arrive at their cabin at the Falls to find that the previous occupants have not yet checked out. They and the manager are met at the door by a half-dressed, rather disheveled and somewhat confused Rose Loomis (Marilyn Monroe). She begs them to just let her husband sleep. The kind-hearted Cutlers agree to take another cabin.

The mystery about the Loomises deepens. They seem a very mis-matched couple. Rose is young, very sexy and very flirtatious. George (Joseph Cotten) is middle-aged, bitter, withdrawn and bad-tempered. Trouble starts to brew at a barbecue when Rose shows up in a red dress. This is not just a red dress. This is the red dress to end all red dresses. This is the kind of red dress you wear when you expect that you’ll be wearing nothing but a smile long before the evening is out. And Marilyn fills this red dress very nicely indeed. She wears it like she’s the kind of girl who often wears dresses like this.

Pretty soon George is smashing up records and throwing things about and generally throwing the sort of tantrum you throw when you know your wife is wearing that dress for a man, but that man is not you.

Young Polly tries to befriend George. It seems he’s been in an army hospital, the sort of hospital they send combat fatigue cases to. There’s no doubt he’s suffering from combat fatigue, but you have to wonder if the combat in question has been on the battlefield or in the bedroom. And you have to wonder if maybe part of the problem is that the Loomis’s married life may be a little bit too quiet in the bedroom department, that maybe the last shots were fired there quite some time ago but that Rose is still ready, willing and able to report for duty in that area, and that if her husband can’t carry out out his duties in that area she’ll find some other man who can.

So far it looks like there are troubled waters ahead, and then George mysteriously disappears. A tearful Rose explains that he was very upset the night before, and she indicates that he may have done something foolish. There are still plenty of plot twists to go and I won’t spoil them for you.

The style of the film is reminiscent of Hitchcock’s 1950s Technicolor period, but the mood is pure film noir. There’s a femme fatale, although she’s not an entirely unsympathetic femme fatale - she’s obviously had a lot to put up with from the sort of man who back in the 50s would not have been likely to give an unhappy wife her freedom. There’s a tortured noir anti-hero, battling personal demons and being a very typical noir anti-hero - he just can’t see that he’s becoming the bad guy.

The use of the Niagara Falls locations is truly inspired. Maybe it’s not quite as clever a use of a location as Hitchcock’s more famous use of Mount Rushmore, but it’s pretty close. There are some exciting action sequences, there’s mystery and there’s suspense.

Jean Peters is very good in the main supporting role. She’s overwhelmed by the powerhouse performances from the two leads, but she still does a fine job.

Joseph Cotten does the man slowly unravelling thing exceptionally well. He never quite goes over the top. There’s always a sane part of him that knows that things are going out of control, and that just deepens the tragedy. And then there’s Marilyn Monroe. She’s quite superb. She’s frighteningly sexy, but it’s a nicely judged performance rather similar to the one she gave in the very underrated Don't Bother To Knock. She’s scary, but you want to save her.

This is a top-notch mystery thriller with a genuine film noir feel to it. Highly recommended. And it demonstrates that the Monroe mystique really was more than hype, that she really could act.