This screwball comedy with tired blood shows why people were staying home watching television in 1952. Hard to believe that a movie with so much talent (Howard Hawks, Ben Hecht, a great cast) could just sit there on screen, alternately lifeless and shrill but never for one minute funny. Yet it has a bewilderingly high reputation -- maybe people look at Cary Grant in thick "professor" spectacles and think they're seeing comic genius, or maybe it's the monkeys: they act just like people! Actually in this film it's the reverse, and watching Grant and Ginger Rogers monkey around in middle age is just painful. That said, it's an improvement on their earlier teaming, Leo McCarey's jaw-dropping Nazi-fighting screwball "Once Upon a Honeymoon" -- in that movie, as in this, the two stars do nothing for each other. Too bad Rogers turned down "His Girl Friday" and "Ball of Fire"... I wonder if this movie was Hawks' revenge, because he films her with an ice-cold indifference that leaves her stranded on the screen.
Review of Monkey Business
