Call Northside 777: Intriguing Noir/Quasi-Documentary

 

 

 

Call Northside 777 (1948)

Directed by Henry Hathaway

20^th Century Fox, 112 minutes, Not-rated.

★★★★

 

You might immediately notice that Call Northside 777 doesn’t sound like a movie. That’s because it has almost no musical soundtrack. This gives an appropriate documentary effect to a film noir classic that is a documentary of sorts. Yet, it stars James Stewart and other Hollywood heavyweights.

 

It tells a forgotten story from the 1920s and 30s when Prohibition was in effect and Chicago was the gangland capital of the United States. In 1932, a cop was killed inside a speakeasy. Frank Wiecek (wee-check) and Tomek Zaleska, another Polish laborer, were arrested, convicted, and sent to the slammer. Eleven years later,  Brian Kelly (Lee J. Cobb), the editor of the Chicago Times, and reporter P. J. McNeal (Stewart) find a classified ad in their paper offering $5,000 to anyone who can clear Frank’s name. McNeal is assigned to call Northside 777 and interview the person who placed the notice. McNeal finds Tillie Wiecek, Frank’s aged mother, who has washed steps in a public building for 11 years to raise a reward to clear her son.

 

As far as McNeal is concerned, Frank is a cop killer and tells Tillie so. Kelly, though, sees no harm in doing a little bit of digging and McNeal agrees to look into it. Tillie’s plea to talk with Frank rattles in his head. McNeal is pretty sure Frank is guilty, but maybe he can squeeze a week’s worth of human interest stories out of it. To his surprise, McNeal finds discrepancies in news reports and has to resort to subterfuge to get police reports.  After talking with Frank a few times he entertains the possibility that Frank and Tomek were railroaded. Even the warden thinks Frank is innocent, and McNeal is shocked to discover Wiecek’s ex-wife also thinks Frank so. When Frank agrees to submit himself to a new invention, the polygraph, and passes the test, McNeal shifts to advocating for Frank and Tomek.

 

McNeal and the Times build public support, but there are flies in the ointment. Polygraphs were (and remain) inadmissible, thus the only foreseeable way to clear the two men is to convince eyewitness Wanda Skutnik to change her testimony. Is she even alive? Early 20^th century Chicago was a collection of ethnic enclaves; McNeal doesn’t speak Polish and most of Chicago’s Poles had little or no English. Without Skutnik,  there is little chance of reversal. Even worse, as Times attorney Martin Burns (Paul Harvey) advises, bringing mere assertions before a parole board could actually hurt Frank and Tomek when they come before the board in the future.

 

Does McNeal pull a rabbit out of his fedora? I shall say only that what passed for “high-tech” back then came into play. As for the film’s documentary style, the old TV show Dragnet used to begin episodes with these words: “The story you are about to hear is true. Only the names have been changed to protect the innocent.” That’s pretty much the case in Call Northside 777. It was based on the real life cases of Joseph Majczek and Theodore Marcinckiewicz, and a Chicago Times investigation led by James McGuire. To add gritty verisimilitude, director Henry Hathaway got permission to film inside Illinois’ Slaterville Prison, a truly creepy place of tiered cellblocks built in the allegedly more secure panopticon style. Its security is debatable, but it’s noteworthy that the idea came from 18^th century utilitarian philosopher Jeremy Bentham. There’s little doubt of its dehumanization factor.  

 

To strike a critical note, Northside 777 often plays like what we’d today call an infomercial for the Chicago Times. To temper that, the Times was indeed once a powerhouse newspaper quite unlike the anemic merged paper of today.* We might say that Northside 777 is a reminder of what is lost when investigative newspapers are gutted or lost altogether. If young’uns wonder about the title, in 1940 the U.S. population was just over 132 million and not everyone had a phone. (That remained true in the 1950s as well.) A name was given to the operator switchboard exchange and no one needed more than two or three numbers to be connected.** Northside 777 is the number at which Tillie Wiecek  could be reached.

 

Rob Weir

 

*  Today’s merged Chicago Sun-Times has a circulation of around 57,000, a shadow of the 200,000 the Times once had on its own.

 

** My parents had a party line (look it up). I don’t recall the numbers, but the operator exchange was Colony.

 

 

How to Make Sex Boring: All Fours and How to Sleep at Night

 

All Fours (2024)

By Miranda July

Riverhead Books, 326 pages.

★

 

How to Sleep at Night (2025)

By Elizabeth Harris

William Morrow Books, 290 pages.

★★

 

Did I get your attention with the headline? Good. Be sure to tread lightly around these  two books. 

 

 

 

All Fours has gotten a lot of attention for being transgressive and bold. It is both of those things, but too bad few have asked if it has anything to say. Not really.

 

An unnamed multi-media artist who conducts interviews with women about sex gets caught in her own anthropological web. After many years of libertine hook-ups–more with women than men–she married Harris, a music producer, and, they have a  “they” child, Sam, because mom doesn’t want to force Sam into any category. (One wonders, though, about her insistence upon having baths with Sam.) The crisis point is that she is now 45 and fears she’s on the downward curve of being attractive or libidinous. She has just gotten an unexpected royalty check from a whiskey company, though it was something she wrote about hand jobs. She plans to drive from Los Angeles to New York and perhaps interview a pop star. This surprises Harris who says there are “Parkers” and “Drivers” and she is definitely a Parker who might not be up to a cross country journey.

 

Turns out he’s right (on several levels). She gets no further than Monrovia, California, checks into a motel and stays there for nearly a month, all the while pretending to be driving to or being in the Big Apple. At a petrol stop she meets Davey and falls in lust with him, though he’s much younger. Luckily his wife Claire is a designer whom she pays scads of money to transform her shabby motel room into a luxury suite. It will be the site of her frantic bouts of masturbation. She fantasizes sex every which way and manages to lure Davey to her suite. No intercourse occurs, but there is a degrading lap dance and a cringe-worthy insertion of her tampon. Davey seems more fixated on becoming a dancer. Nonetheless, she develops a deep fixation on Davey that takes a toll on her marriage. Harris agrees to live in an open relationship, she meets Davey’s mother and a friend who was once Davey’s sexual partner and coach. A perimenopause diagnosis exacerbates her midlife crisis and I reckon we are supposed to applaud her return to her premarital lesbianism.

 

This polarizing book has been reviewed by some a “funny,” and by me as pathetic. If you want a middle position, numerous reviewers took Miranda July to task for trying too hard to be offbeat and outrageous. I can live with that, but I can’t live with the novel’s illogical scenarios or soporific writing. 

 

 

 

How to Sleep at Night has more depth, though its four central characters would be boring were not three gay and the fourth conflicted. Ethan, a junior high history teacher, and Ethan, a lawyer, have been married for nine years and are parents to young Chloe. Ethan’s sister Kate is a lesbian and a well-known TV journalist in New York City who has lost her mojo and joie de vivre. Nicole is married to Austin, has recently moved from Atlanta to New Jersey,  and is playing the roles of upper middle class housewife and mother to Sarah. In college, she dated Kate. Think they’ll get together?

 

Ethan is the problem figure. He wants to run for Congress as the “future” of the Republican Party; Gabe is to the left of Bernie Sanders. There are some amusing James Carville/Mary Matalin moments, but if you’ve been paying attention to politics, you know that Ethan's “makeover” to suit party bigwigs will be fraught and that both Gabe and Ethan will be driven to a breaking point.

 

Author Elizabeth Harris is a far better writer than Miranda July, as one might hope of a New York Times reporter, yet as noted, the major thing that distinguishes the dilemmas of her central characters from run of the mill malaise is that each is gay, lesbian, or bisexual. (To be fair, Harris does has an intriguing subplot on journalistic ethics.) Harris, has a wife and child, which I mention solely because there is a lot of passionate lesbian sex in her novel, but Ethan and Gabe are confined to pecks on the lips and hugs. For me, the characters lacked maturity. It’s as if they are recent graduates rather than adults in their late 30s. 

 

Rob Weir

Fire Exit: Morgan Talty's Identity Dilemma

 

 

Fire Exit (2024)

By Morgan Talty

Tin House, 235 pages.

★★★★★

 

Morgan Talty is a rising name in Native American fiction. He authored Night of the Living Rez, a short story collection. This makes Fire Exit his debut novel. Talty is a member of the Penobscot Nation in Maine.

 

Fire Exit concerns itself with questions of blood and percentages. How Penobscot must one be to be an Indian? That’s not an academic question. Unlike the antebellum South where a single drop of African blood made one “black,” Talty tells of “The Book,” a literal counting of percentages; to be in The Book, one must be at least 25 percent Native. It matters for federal recognition and, in Maine, to determine who is included in the Indian Claims Settlement Act. Talty invites us to “laugh” in his preface, though his protagonist Charles Lamosway is obsessed by the question:

 

There is nothing strange about a white person wishing to be Indian. It’s comical, if anything. And white  people saying they’re Indian happens all the time, and it’s laughed at by Native people…. I get it. I do. I’m not skeejin–not Native… . But I feel that I am…. No place makes a Native a Native. It strengthens it… but it’s not the deciding factor.

 

Or is it? Charles flunks the 25% rule. His mother, Louise, married a white man, but her second husband, Fredrick, was Native, hence Louise and Charles could live on the Penobscot reservation. It was Charles’ step-father “whose love… made me feel Native.” Fredrick taught him about Penobscot ways and customs. Louise continues to live on the reservation because she married an Indian, but Charles is officially “white” and had to move away after Fredrick’s death. Now he stares across a river that separates him from Native friends and culture. To paraphrase, Charles knew what it was like to belong and not to belong.

 

Fredrick died in a hunting accident in 1996, which deprived Charles of his chosen identity, teacher, protector, and provider of love that his cranky mother withheld. In 1967, Fredrick and Charles built a 500 square foot house on the other side of the river when Fredrick sold his camp to pay bills. He and Charles lived there, but it’s all Charles’ now and it could use some TLC that he has neither the time nor inclination to give it.   

 

It would fair to say Charles is adrift. In the greater Bangor area, the closing of pulp mills left the region with a per capita income that remains 40 percent lower than the average for Maine. Lately Charles has spent a lot of  time crossing the Penobscot River in his battered truck; Louise has dementia and sprints between lucidity and living in the past at the speed of light. She needs various treatments (including electroconvulsive therapy), so Charles spends a lot of time taking her to the hospital. He also looks out for Bobby, who is a cross between a friend, a hanger-on, and a problem. Bobby’s an alcoholic prone to creating havoc–not exactly the best company for Charles who has been sober for 22 years. Bobby is helpful, though, when Louise needs care and Charles is busy trying to make a living.

 

An even bigger burden rests on Charles’ mind. When he was younger he fell for a lass named Mary whom he impregnated. That ended their relationship because of the ostracism associated with giving birth to a partially white child. Mary subsequently married Roger, a Penobscot. As fate would have it, his house is directly across the river  from Charles’. Charles hasn’t had contact with his biological daughter (Elizabeth) since she was a toddler, but he watches her from afar. She’s now a young woman who assumes she is Native. Charles, however, wonders if she has a right to know who she really is.

 

Fire Exit is ultimately about blood, identity, family, culture, and the damage that can be done by making an “incorrect” choice between truth and fiction. We go deeply inside Charles’ mind, one so conflicted that there is no need for Talty to resolve or sermonize. Instead he present us with universal puzzles: Who am I? What makes me, me? What duty do I owe to truth? You will notice that most of the Penobscot have Anglicized names. Nobody ever said there were easy answers to moral dilemmas. If you’re wondering, there is a fire in the book, but is there an exit?

 

Rob Weir

 

 

 

 

Hundres of Beavers is Just.Plain.Camp!

 

 

Hundreds of Beavers (2022/2024)

Directed by Mike Cheslik

Cineverse, 108 minutes, PG-13.

★★★

 

 Rabbits, and wolves, and raccoons, oh my! And hundreds of beavers. Sort of. Hundreds of Beavers is one of the sappiest movies I’ve ever seen. Yet … it’s so camp that you can’t look away. Like an old Henny Youngman comedy routine, you tell yourself that you’re not going to laugh, but you do until your face hurts!

 

Hundreds of Beavers was cowritten and directed by Mike Cheslik and could be called his Covid project, as he filmed it in the dead of a Wisconsin/Michigan winter during 2019-20. It unexpectedly grabbed people’s attention at a few film festivals in 2022, and gained wider release in 2024. It’s so unusual that it almost defies description. It’s what you might get if you crossed a Buster Keaton silent film with Looney Tunes, some Charlie Chaplin slapstick, a snowy Road Runner episode, Rube Goldberg, W. C. Fields’ 1933 short The Fatal Glass of Beer, and cosplay. Wait! Did I say cosplay? I’ll get to that. It’s also possible it has a hidden serious message that has eluded most reviewers.

 

It opens with a cartoon that spared no expense in the making because it was probably drawn in a morning, with the afternoon devoted to writing a song that tells the sad tale of Jean Kayak (Ryland Brickson Cole Tews). Jean is a maker of hard cider who likes his own product too much. When his orchard and cabin burn down, Jean is left with nothing. That’s not a good thing at any time, but it’s especially perilous in the north woods during the early 19^th century–long before any social services. This gets us to the cosplay part. Jean tries to make a go of it as a fur trader; all of the animals, including sled dogs and a pantomime horse are humans in bargain-basement costumes ordered from a Chinese mascot Internet site. Thus we have 6-foot tall beavers, rabbits, and other beasties. All Jean can see is food in the form of wily rabbits that elude him. The snow blows furiously, always in a direction that threatens to extinguish the fire he makes by rubbing sticks together. The snow “effects” reminded me of Fields declaring, “It ain’t a fit night for man nor beast,” except that after the opening song there are silent-film title cards and the film is devoid of sound except for chirps, grunts, ummms, and ahhhs.

 

Jean’s only chance of survival is to become a trapper, a pursuit at which he is hopelessly inept. He falls in with Master Trapper (Wes Tank) and also encounters Indian Trapper (Luis Rio), but Master Trapper and his dogs meet an unfortunate end, so Jean must secure enough hides to take to The Merchant (Doug Mancheski). He’s a rifle-toting skinflint with set prices for everything and a singular talent for missing the spittoon as he chews tobacco. Jean is also attracted to The Furrier (Olivia Graves), but he has no chance with her unless he can provide “hundreds of beavers.” Watching Graves eviscerate the animals is hysterical, as she is clearly pulling plush innards from them.

 

As the movie come-on puts it, Jean must go from “zero to hero,” which he does by developing fiendishly silly ways to trap animals. (with X’s in their eyes of course!) And what are the beavers up to as they construct a dam that rises like a skyscraper of wood? Two beavers dressed like Dr. Watson and Sherlock Holmes are roaming the woods as well, but are they any match for the increasingly adroit Jean? His furry superhero suit alone must be seen to be believed.

 

If this sounds as if it’s like the dumbest idea ever for a movie, it just might be. It could also be one of the smartest! Hundreds of Beavers was made for $150,000 and has paid off many times over. You could also see the film as a warning; nature was decimated by the real fur trade. Or maybe it’s just fluff. Hundreds of Beavers has cultists called–what else?–“the beaverati.” I again emphasize that the special effects are more surreal than real, assuming you could teach elementary school-aged designers about surrealism. How to rate it? If you’re serious, a 1 is in order; if you simply surrender, it’s a 5, so I split the difference.

 

Rob Weir

 

 

The Novel Pearl is a Gem

 

 

 

 

Pearl (2024)

By Siân Phillips

Alfred A. Knopf, 210 pages.

★★★★

 

Pearl is one of those small gems that falls into your lap and when you finish, you’re glad that it did. It was long-listed for the 2024 Booker Prize that ultimately went to Hernan Diaz’s Trust. It’s hard to argue against that choice, but to quote from the book’s back cover, Pearl is “an exceptional debut novel… a mystery story and a meditation on grief, abandonment, and consolation.”

 

Marianne Brown is eight-years-old and her brother Joe is still in nappies. Their father Edward teaches at a local college in Cheshire, but we infer that he’s an underpaid adjunct. The family lives in a ramshackle home and mom is a 1970’s free spirit who tends a large garden, decorates with flowers and herbs, and fills Marianne’s head with folk tales, poems, rhymes, songs, and a few mainstream stories such as Charlotte’s Web. Then the unthinkable happens. Marianne is in the garden, but when she looks up, her mother is gone. Did she wander off to a visit someone? That’s the presumption, but she doesn’t come back. Searches turn up nothing other than faint footprints by the swift-flowing tidal river. Did she slip and fall in? What is the meaning of an unmarked gravestone near the river’s mouth?

 

Marianne does not adjust well. She becomes a perpetual school truant and once she learns how to game the system, stops going altogether. She carries with her the verses, folk wisdom, and stories that her mother taught her but at several junctures she forgets how to read and has to learn anew. Thus, she knows a lot about some things but very little about the things society values. She fervently believes, however that the key to the mystery of her mother’s disappearance resides in a poem titled “Pearl.” Like Marianne and her mother, it’s an enigma. “Pearl” is an important work from 14^th century England, but it’s long (1,212 lines of alliterative verse), difficult, and scholars to this day are not certain who wrote it or exactly what it means. For many years it was said to be about a father who has lost his daughter, but best guess now is that it’s an allegory on death and heaven written as a dream vision. Some have speculated that the same hand also wrote Sir Gawain and the Green Knight.

 

That tells us a lot about Marianne. By the time she’s a teen she’s socially gauche, fearful, and resistant to change. When Edward relocates his family to a house in the village, it is henceforth the New House that fails to measure up to the Old House, where Marianne takes refuge from time to time, though the place is falling into ruin. Then again, so is the New House–note the personification via capitalization–because a generalized stasis besets all three of the Browns. Marianne always calls her father “Edward,” and why not? It’s not as if he’s any better at playing the adult role than either of his children.

 

Imagine the burden that Marianne carries–Joe was an infant when his mother left–even though she acts as if she’s fine. We see through her eyes and feel her hopes, frustrations–an unreliable girlfriend when she’s 15– and her anxieties as she tries to carve out a life that makes sense to her as she drifts into adulthood as a single mother and art therapist. Even the Old House is rebuilt with new unorthodox (but monied) owners.

 

I don’t mean to suggest that Marianne is a sad sack for life. Perplexed, yes. Yearning to solve the mystery of her mother’s disappearance? Yes, again. It would be more accurate though, to say that hers is decades of coping in which sadness, pluck, curiosity, and intermingle. Over time, some memories dim and others become bathed in brighter hues. One commentator aptly called Marianne’s a “splintered reality.” I tend to call Pearl a ghost story without spectral visitors.

 

As a final observation, note that each chapter is introduced with a rhyme or verse that packs metaphorical meaning. Each, including embedded song lyrics, are part of the English folk tradition. You can enrich your reading experience by searching for the source material. Here are two song links, one for “Raggle Taggle Gypsies”* and the other for “Tam Lin.”  I can’t resist the second as it involves two of my favorite musicians ever, lead vocalist Sandy Denny (R.I.P) and guitarist Richard Thompson. 

 

Rob Weir

* Irish legend Christy Moore sings "Raggle Taggle Gypsies." I chose this one be/c it has close caption so you can se the lyrics. The cc isn't great but it will give you an idea. If you'd like Tam Lin lyrics, click the link.

 

 

North Woods an Unsual Novel

 

 

 

North Woods (2023)

By Daniel Mason

Random House, 384 pages.

★★★★

 

North Woods is easily the most unusual novel I read in 2024. You could call it one homestead, one orchard, and three centuries. You could just as easily call it humans, the natural world, and the supernatural. Or perhaps ecstasy, murder, madness, and decomposition. Any tags you use will say much but not very much about this imaginative work form Daniel Mason.

 

However you approach it, don’t give up. I nearly did as it didn’t seem to hold together. Characters are dead and reappear, time passes, yet seems elastic. How does a 20^th century schizophrenic connect to a Colonial farmer or a 19^th century luminist painter? Did I mention the steamy passages on beetle sex? But suddenly I got it and realized I was reading something extraordinary.

 

It helps to break free of linear history. Insofar as calendar time matters the novel begins in the 1760s when a pair of Puritan lovers, one of whom is a minister, flee from the social strictures of Massachusetts Bay colony and take refuge in the Berkshires woodlands. A veritable microcosm of American history unfolds on the same acres. To the degree that there is a central character, it would be Charles Osgood, a British officer in the French and Indian War who leaves the army and also finds sanctuary in the area, buys the land from a local minister, has several black workers, and raises twin daughters Alice and Mary who are so close they finish one another’s thoughts. Charles is obsessed with fruit, acts the part of a Berkshires Johnny Appleseed, and raises a very special apple that grew from a seed once swallowed by a dead British soldier. The fate of Alice and Mary is unexpected and unsettling.

 

You name historical character types and they appear in North Woods: Native Americans, slaves and slave catchers, a crime writer, spirit mediums, numerous farmers, librarians, ministers, shopkeepers, pen-pals, professors, a Gilded Age  snob, members of a historical society, police, housekeepers, a woman who hears ghosts…. Again, how does all of this meld? Mason has written an epistolary novel, that is, one in which left behind letters, documents, journals, and notes contribute to the novel’s structure. Some of these connect characters in real time; others fold the past and various presents into one. This to say that traces are left from the past. Most New Englanders could read and write–but in this novel we have to be careful with time, as it seems to be leaky. 

 

If you lose your way, I suggest you think of how things connect to three anchors: Osgood, Robert, and Nora. The Osgood sections can seem like a Farmer’s Almanac at times, but fecundity and decay is one of the book’s themes. Robert is diagnosed as schizophrenic (and might be), but as he wanders through the woods with the intent of “stitching” (healing the world) by numbering each tree and stone he encounters, he hears voices. Does he? If time is leaky, is Robert crazy? North Woods opens with a couple and comes to a stunning end with another, Mark and Nora. Nora, a university student, is as obsessed with nature as Osgood was with apples and, as a modern-day person, has a lot of science to back up her fascination with plants and soil. She’s also under psychological care, though, so perhaps she too is mad as a March hare.

 

I’m sure many of you are far better versed in biology than I, but it is my contention that Mason wants us to contemplate the relationship between decomposition and the law of conservation of mass, but he doesn’t want us to stop there. The unstated question is what about transcendence? What indeed? Does anything ever “disappear?”

 

Some critics have argued that Mason has so many irons and questions in the fire that there are rather dramatic tonal shifts and foci. I’d call that fair criticism, but I go back to an earlier remark. Stick with this novel; when you get it, you can’t shake it. I’ll leave it to you to determine if North Woods is brilliant or pseudo-intellectual if, of no other reason, I’m not sure!

 

Rob Weir

 

 

 

 

Is Monkey Business (1952) the Worst Movie Ever?

 

 

 

Monkey Business (1952)

Directed by Howard Hawks

20^th Century Fox, 97 minutes.

😵

 

When I was writing The Marx Brothers and America, I Googled their 1931 Paramount film Monkey Business. I often got redirected to a 1952 movie of the same title that  starred Cary Grant, Ginger Rogers, and Marilyn Monroe. (Most titles are not copyrighted and can be reused even if they are completely different movies.)

 

I stumbled across the 1952 Monkey Business at the library and impulsively pulled the DVD from the shelf. The verdict? It might be the worst movie ever made! I can hear you scoff. There are scores of dreadful movies so how can I assert that this is the worst of all time? I shan’t quibble; perhaps it’s only the third or fourth worst. At the very least it affirms the old actors’ dictum: “Never make a movie in which you appear with a monkey.” Marilyn Monroe should have listened because the chimp in question was a way better actor.  

 

Dr. Barnaby Fulton (Grant) is an absent-minded employee for Oxly Chemicals. He dreams of developing something that will secure him a cushy professorial job. (Okay, that’s funny! ) He is so fixated on a formula that he can’t execute the simple tasks of taking his key from his pocket, turning off the hall light, and turning on the porch light so he and his wife Edwina (Rogers) can go to a dance. She’s fine with that and strips to her undergarments (which were considerable in the 1950s!), grabs an apron, and begins to make eggs for Barnaby. Their lawyer friend Hank (Hugh Marlowe) stops by to ask why they’re not going out and Barnaby flits about trying to cover Edwina’s bare back, garter-belt, and stockings. Are you rolling in laughter yet?

 

As it transpires, Barnaby is working on a reverse aging formula. Gee, I wonder why nobody else ever thought of making a fountain of youth parody. But before we get to that, we meet Oliver Oxly (Charles Coburn) and his new secretary Lois Laurel (Monroe), who can’t type or think. She can, however, pull up her dress to show Barnaby how the acetate nylons he designed don’t tear. It’s nice to see practical science in action in movies, isn’t it? Barnaby is called into his lab because Rudolph, one of his oldest chimps got out and is bouncing around like an infant. But is it Rudolph or did the lab assistant/janitor put the wrong jersey on six-month-old Esther? Stop! The suspense is killing me. Rudolph/Esther gets out of the cage again, mixes chemicals, and dumps them in the water cooler. When Barnaby returns, he tries his own vile formula, takes a drink of water, casts off his glasses, and does a somersault. He feels like he’s 20. Are we having fun yet?

 

Respected Hollywood writer Ben Hecht worked on the script, but it’s pretty easy to know where this is going. All manner of “hysterical” things occur: Barnaby buys a sports car and goes on a reckless joy ride with Lois. Who knew that new sports cars came with bathing suits in the trunk? We see Grant do a high dive into a local swimming pool while Lois stands on the side being ogled by local youth. Barnaby will even get a Mohawk from some kids playing “Indians” and a lipstick-staining kiss from Lois. Tee hee.

 

Pretty soon everyone gets in on the act–note I did not say acting–when Edwina makes coffee from the lab water. She too cavorts about like she’s decades younger, thereby rekindling Barnaby’s flame. Luckily that means that Monroe is reduced to a minor character again. The effects, of course, are temporary and the formula non-reproducible, but we get the final indignity of a switcheroo that makes Edwina think that a sleeping baby is an overdosed Barnaby. Guffaw!

 

Yes, I know I’ve loaded this review with spoilers. Although you can watch it for free on YouTube I’m saving you from temptation. The really funny thing about Monkey Business is how a talented director such as Howard Hawks, who gave us gems such as Scarface, His Girl Friday, and The Big Sleep, got suckered into this Jerry Lewis-like dud. Moreover, he directed Grant and Kate Hepburn in Bringing up Baby (1938), one of the funniest screwball comedies ever made. Grant was a nerd in that one as well, so I can only conclude that leopards are funnier than chimps and Hepburn a better actress than Monroe.

 

Rob Weir