Lost in the Movies: Monkey Business (LOST IN THE MOVIES podcast #44)

Monkey Business (LOST IN THE MOVIES podcast #44)



My fifth season focus on "Hollywood Classics" continues after last month's Swing Time with another, quite different Ginger Rogers vehicle. This time she shares the screen not with Fred Astaire but with Cary Grant, Marilyn Monroe, and a mischievous chimpanzee. Grant plays a bumbling scientist who concocts a formula for renewed youth which both he and his wife end up consuming. Howard Hawks directed this zany comedy in the early fifties, at a time when the film could recall the antic energy of thirties screwballs (which Grant himself had starred in) while also passing the torch to a new generation of movie stars, represented by Monroe. It's interesting to consider that, thanks to the industrial disruptions of the shift to sound in the late twenties (which sent many actors to pasture long before they could have expected), these Golden Age icons were among the first to truly age onscreen. How appropriate that, in this case at least, they do so in a story about characters aging down as well as up.

This is the rare episode of Lost in the Movies to be delayed several days (usually I publish a new podcast on the first Wednesday of each month); I was catching up with several different deadlines simultaneously and this got bogged down in the process. These projects were the last of a long line, however, and now I'm on the clear for a mid-August breather. With these words, I finally end three and a half months of endlessly imminent deadlines. What a relief!


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