How meta!
Anyway, this looks a bit… I mean, it’s a DVD, because it hasn’t been released on bluray, which is odd in itself, because:
Howard Hawks/Cary Grant/Ginger Rogers/Marilyn Monroe! And no bluray!? Did the prints get lost so they can’t do a 2K release? Is it in the public domain?
But once it gets started for real, it looks pretty good — it was just the pre title sequence that looked like it was nineteenth generation.
Oh, is Hawks trying to do a new Bringing Up Baby? Cary Grant is doing another absent-minded professor, and there’s another wild animal (this time it’s a chimpanzee)…
That’s an impressive ape.
So the gag in this movie is that the Cary Grant character is experimenting with a youth serum. When he took it, he became reckless, but fun. When she took it, she became a total nightmare, which is unfair to Ginger Rogers, who’s fantastic at doing outrageous comedy — but she doesn’t really get much of a chance with this script.
It’s a funny movie. But it also feels so… misguided? It’s like they went “OK, we have Grant and Rogers. We don’t have to write a script”. Instead just the sheer idea of having them behave first like teenagers, and then like ten-year-olds would be enough to carry the movie. And it almost is! It’s funny, because these two actors are amazing at what they do.
But compare it with Bringing Up Baby… It had so much funny repartee, and a script with lots of interesting bits. This is just lazy. I mean, on the writers’ part. So the bits when Grant and Rogers aren’t whooping it up, it just sits there.
Monkey Business. Howard Hawks. 1952. ⚃
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