Monkey Business

Barnaby, a chemist, is working on a formula to delay ageing. A chimpanzee escapes its cage in the laboratory, mixes its own compound and tips it into the water cooler. From then on, anyone who drinks becomes temporarily younger, which is to say they start behaving like children. Howard Hawks does not build the comedy on a single joke. Everyone drinks it in turn and a different age emerges each time. Cary Grant plays a man of forty as a man of twenty without pushing it too far, while Ginger Rogers's wife goes through a harder collapse. Charles Coburn and a young Marilyn Monroe fill out the cast. Monroe's secretary is a small part carrying one of the most remembered scenes in the film. Its flaws: the idea repeats itself after a while, the sequence with the boy playing at being an Indian is plainly uncomfortable now, and the consequences of the transformation are never taken seriously. Who it is for: viewers who like classic Hollywood comedy and Grant. Who it is not for: anyone with no patience for the cliches of the period.