My Romantic Comedy Blogathon Entry: "Monkey Business," or My Chemical Romance

This is part of the Romantic Comedy Blogathon co-sponsored by Backlots and Carole & Co. Visit them for more entries!

Cary Grant enters the 1952 film "Monkey Business" bespectacled and befuddled -- so much so that he is given verbal direction by Howard Hawks:

Hepburn ...

... Rogers.

Seeing Grant like this brings to mind "Bringing Up Baby" -- also directed by Howard Hawks, also featuring Grant in glasses as an absentminded man of science, also featuring a female lead (Katharine Hepburn in "Baby," Ginger Rogers in "Business") wearing a dress without any back to it.

So can I help it if I like "Monkey Business" more than "Bringing Up Baby"? To me, it's a more consistently funny, if sometimes too silly, movie -- on the other hand, to me the charms of "Bringing Up Baby" have always been intermittent.

"Monkey Business" also has a quality that I value more as I grow older -- perspective. The married couple at the center of this romantic comedy, Barnaby (Grant) and Edwina (Ginger Rogers), have been together for a while, but are still very much in love. They tolerate each other's imperfect qualities with an easy affection and can look back fondly on a past when they were more physically romantic with each other. Considering their numerous real-life marriages, Grant and Rogers play a contented, committed couple very convincingly.

Miss Laurel displays the new stockings that Barnaby
helped invent. He's very interested in her acetates.

Barnaby is preoccupied because he's a chemist working on a new formula that won't come together -- a kind of youth elixir that will be marketed as B-4, with a phoenix rising from the ashes as its logo (in today's market it would be a smiling guy giving a woman a footlong hot dog). Barnaby's elderly boss, Mr. Oxley (Charles Coburn), is particularly interested in perfecting the formula for many reasons, not the least of which is his secretary, Miss Laurel (Marilyn Monroe). As Oxley explains to Barnaby, "Anybody can type."

Back in the lab, Barnaby still isn't having any luck with B-4, and to make matters worse, the test monkeys keep escaping from their cages. While the janitor is changing the bottle on the water cooler, one chimp mixes his own formula by dumping chemicals into the cooler reservoir. Going against scientific protocol, Barnaby tries his formula and then washes it down with some H2O from the cooler. Then he tries it out.

(To be able to turn cartwheels in your late 40s? Well played, Cary Grant.)

Barnaby thinks his own formula has worked, but we know the truth -- hey, the movie isn't called "Barnaby Business." Barnaby's dose of the simian solution is enough to revert him to the showoffy teenage stage, and he hooks up for a day of fun with Miss Laurel that includes driving a new MG and going swimming:

Next to try the formula is Edwina, whose energy level goes through the roof and who dances the evening away with an exhausted Barnaby:

Edwina has taken Barnaby to their honeymoon hotel. There she reverts to her wedding day, which means she locks herself in the bathroom crying and Barnaby falls down a laundry chute. It's totally nonsensical, and it brings to mind this exchange from "Bringing Up Baby," just after Grant slips on an olive dropped by Hepburn and crushes his hat.

Hepburn: Well, Joe here was just showing me a trick, and the olive got away. 

Grant: First you drop an olive and then I sit on my hat. It all fits perfectly.

Finally, both Edwina and Barnaby unknowingly take larger doses of the mixture and revert to childhood. Child Barnaby smears his face with war paint and recruits the neighborhood kids in his plan of revenge against a romantic rival (Hugh Marlowe) for Edwina, and Hawks favorite George "Foghorn" Winslow adds spice:

Oh -- and Barnaby and Edwina get into a Laurel and Hardy-style paint fight:

Meanwhile, back at the lab, Oxley is convinced that Barnaby's formula is successful, and an effort is made to buy him out:

Soon enough, the origin of the formula is discovered, the chimps are put back into their cages, and Edwina and Barnaby emerge older and wiser. We end where we begin -- with the Fultons going out for the evening:

Barnaby: You're old only when you forget you're young. ... It's a word you keep in your heart, a light you have in your eyes, someone you hold in your arms.

Edwina: My, I'm glad I'm going out with you tonight.

As much as I love "Monkey Business," it disconcerts me to read about what Howard Hawks thought of it. Apparently only Grant's character drank the formula in the original script, but when Rogers saw that she was missing the fun, she wanted the script changed so that Edwina drank the formula as well. To Hawks, Rogers's desire messed up the picture.

I couldn't disagree more -- I'm not always a fan of Rogers's late-career performances, but her comic work in "Monkey Business" ranks right up there with her work in "The Major and the Minor" or "Bachelor Mother." That accomplishment is all the more impressive when you consider that Hawks reportedly badgered her on the set and let her know she wasn't his first choice for the role. For a guy who had a hand in creating some memorable feminist characters, Hawks definitely had his piggish, crotchety side -- maybe he could have used a dose of B-4.

My Diamonds and Gold Blogathon Entry: "Charade," or Cary Nation

This post is part of the Diamonds and Gold Blogathon, co-hosted by Wide Screen World and Caftan Woman. Please visit them and check out the other entries as well!  

Telegram from Time magazine: "How old Cary Grant?" 

Grant's response: "Old Cary Grant fine. How you?" 

In movies like "Bringing Up Baby" and "Monkey Business," Cary Grant wears glasses for comic effect.

In the 1963 film "Charade," he wears them to see -- and to send us one of several messages that he is older, if no less Cary Grantish.

"How do you shave in there?"

Grant was in his late 50s when he made "Charade," not that it matters to us. But it mattered to him. He was a little squeamish about playing a romantic lead opposite Audrey Hepburn, a woman who was his junior by a couple of decades. (Never mind that in real life he was chasing after the 25-year-old Dyan Cannon.)

So Grant worked with screenwriter Peter Stone and director Stanley Donen (in the last of their four pictures together) to gently and cleverly emphasize the fact that he wasn't a spring chicken anymore.

The result? Not only does "Charade" satisfy as a suspense film and as a romantic film, it also has the unusual combination of offbeat warmth and genuine heat between the leading characters. It's easily Grant's most self-referential film, made at the perfect time -- just as his legendary film career was winding down, by his choice. The character of Peter Joshua (the first names of Donen's two oldest sons) is distilled Cary Grant -- the essence of a dozen or more of his films and of the onscreen persona of the man who helped make them classics.

The movie opens with a shock -- a body being thrown off a high-speed train whizzing across the French countryside, the face of the victim suddenly filling the frame, frozen in death.

The stiff is Charles Lambert, a bit of a ne'er-do-well who was on the verge of being divorced by wife Regina (Hepburn). His death saves her the trouble, and the non-stricken widow has already found a new male friend and possible conquest -- Joshua, who she has just met on a skiing trip while Charles was getting offed by a stranger on a train.

Charles's funeral is one of several great set pieces in the movie. The only mourners, if you can call them that, are Regina, her best friend and the detective investigating the case, who sits in the back and clips his fingernails. But it also attracts some rather threatening characters -- Scobie (George Kennedy), Tex (James Coburn) and Gideon (Ned Glass):



Regina has no idea who the men are, or what connection Charles had with them. She gets the story from state department honcho Bartholomew (Walter Matthau) -- Charles, Tex, Scobie and Gideon were buddies during World War II who hijacked a gold shipment. Then the men went back to America and Charles stayed behind with the loot. Now it's 20 years later and the men want it -- but they don't know where Charles hid it.

Regina's only protector is Joshua, who reappears in her life after their encounter on the skiing trip. He seems to be the right man in the right place at the right time.

But is he? Regina can't tell -- she comes to learn that he has several identities, but she also can't fight her attraction to him, which comes as no surprise to anyone in the world, because the guy is Cary Grant.

Grant brings all the tools in his arsenal to "Charade" -- the tan, the white dress shirts that set off the tan, the monochromatic suits and ties (so as not to fight with Hepburn's Givenchy wardrobe and color palate), and the bemusement (and concealed pride) that someone as young and attractive as Regina is chasing him. He is tough when the situation calls for it, but not above being goofy just for the hell of it:



As essential as Grant is to the success of "Charade," it's frightening to consider that he almost didn't make the movie. Donen tells the story that, initially, Grant had committed to make a movie with Howard Hawks and had to turn Donen down -- then Grant read the script for the Hawks movie, "Man's Favorite Sport?" and jumped back into "Charade."

Grant appeared in just two more movies -- as a grizzled beachcomber in 1964's "Father Goose" and as a grandfatherly matchmaker who connects Jim Hutton with Samantha Eggar in 1966's "Walk, Don't Run." (The movie was a remake of "The More the Merrier," and Grant played the role Charles Coburn won an Oscar for in the original.) After that, Grant became a "normal" citizen, free to wear his glasses all the time -- and he did.










While we're on the subject of aging gracefully, here is "Charade" director Stanley Donen at age 72, accepting a Lifetime Achievement Award at the 1997 Academy Awards by breaking into song and a little soft shoe. This is one of my very favorite Oscar moments:


 

"She Done Him Wrong," or The Way West

As Lady Lou, Mae West first sashays into "She Done Him Wrong" -- and into pop culture history -- by entering Gus Jordan's Place, where she is the featured, um, entertainment. But first she stops to say hello to a child:

At moments like this I think of movie censor Will Hays.

See, "She Done Him Wrong" was based on West's Broadway hit, "Diamond Lil." But Hays didn't like that title. He had no problem with lines like the ones above, but he didn't like the title?!

So "Diamond Lil" became "She Done Him Wrong," one of those rare classic films that today's audiences respond to as gleefully as most theatregoers did in 1933. The movie comes on like an 1890s melodrama, but the woman at the heart of it is grounded in the pre-code 1930s -- if not the more sexually sophisticated 1970s.

And in 1933 "She Done Him Wrong" hit movie houses like a Vegas payoff.

By that fall, as the ad at left reports, the movie was held over or brought back by popular demand at more than 900 theatres -- a record that hadn't been equaled since "The Birth of a Nation."

The success of "She Done Him Wrong" has pretty much everything to do with the self-possessed Miss West. She floats above the trifling plot like a well-padded bubble, descending only to make spicy wisecracks, pitch woo with co-stars Cary Grant and Gilbert Roland and raise an eyebrow every so often.

Lady Lou loves men and diamonds, not necessarily

in that order, and surrounds herself with both. She is so treasured by saloon owner Gus Jordan (Noah Beery Sr.) that he has commissioned a large painting of her, scantily clad, for the saloon. Lou: "I gotta admit it's a flash, but I wish Gus hadn't hung it up over the free lunch."

Lou's juggling several men at the same time with a kind of genial insolence -- Gus, Captain Cummings of the local mission (Grant), a slimy political boss (David Landau), a suave Russian swindler (Roland) and her imprisoned old flame, Chick (Owen Moore). And when she isn't collecting diamonds from her admirers, she's taking the stage at Gus's to sing songs like "Easy Rider":



"I wonder where my easy rider's gone," a nice song about a missing jockey. Wait a minute -- could that have sexual connotations?! Apparently Will Hays didn't think so!

Lou goes to visit Chick in prison, and just the sight of her -- and the thought of what she's up to when he's not around -- drives Chick to escape and head to Jordan's place. Oh -- and there's also a counterfeit ring operating within the saloon, and an undercover cop who's trying to crack the case.

But really, none of that matters very much. Everything comes to a screeching halt to focus on Lou whenever she starts playing a guy, especially if it's one who looks like Cary Grant:



And in the end, when the counterfeiters are caught and the problem of Chick and the political boss are disposed of, we're left with Grant and West in a carriage:



Funny how the effect of him taking the diamonds and rings off of one hand has practically the effect of stripping her naked. 

Random thoughts that didn't fit anywhere:

"She Done Him Wrong" was directed by Lowell Sherman, who, that same year, directed "Morning Glory," for which Katharine Hepburn won an Oscar. Imagine working with Katharine Hepburn and Mae West within the same year. Sherman was also an actor, playing the doomed dipsomaniac director in "What Price Hollywood?" He died in 1934.


The Media History Digital Library is a great resource of vintage Hollywood fan magazines and trade papers. It's fun to look through them and see letters written in support of Mae West when the censors started circling like vultures. Here are a couple of my favorites:

What's this I hear about Mae West being "bad medicine" for our young girls? Who got the idea and from what source? Mae West simply has the ability to reveal all her beauty of character, her sweetness and womanliness in such an enchanting manner that men, young and old, go down on their knees. I'm for her. There is nothing about her wonderful performance to arouse antagonism.

M. Watkins, Elmore, AL
-- Hollywood magazine, February 1934

Everyone is talking about Mae West. Her curves, her beauty, her personality, her excellent selection of words. But do you know what I think? I think she is the most clever little psychologist in Hollywood. She has something for everybody. Fat to please fat ladies, beauty and personality for the thin ones and sex appeal and scanty costumes for the men.

S. Flanagan, Ventura, CA
-- Hollywood magazine, April 1934

Hmmm. I'm betting S. Flanagan is a guy.

A Tale of Two Johnsons: "The Front Page" and "His Girl Friday"

This post is part of the Journalism in Classic Film Blogathon, co-sponsored by Comet Over Hollywood and Lindsay's Movie Musings.

The difference between "The Front Page" and "His Girl Friday" is pre-code versus post-code, scene chewers versus scene stealers and, above all, Hildebrand Johnson versus Hildegarde Johnson.

Both films are love stories embedded in hard-boiled comedies about the newspaper business. But by turning ace reporter Hildy Johnson from a man in "The Front Page" to a woman in "His Girl Friday" -- and not just any woman, but the ex-wife of her boss, editor Walter Burns -- director Howard Hawks adds an extra dimension to the Johnson-Burns relationship while keeping the cynical tone of the original story.

Based on the play by Chicago-based reporters Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur, "The Front Page" takes place in a city of big shoulders, a toddlin' town, a windy city that, on the advice of studio lawyers, isn't specifically named.

We are in press room of the Criminal Courts Building, on the eve of an execution. A cop killer named Earl Williams will be hung at dawn. There is lots of evidence that he is mentally ill, but there is also an election coming up, and the sheriff and mayor are determined to sacrifice Williams to win the law-and-order vote.

The press room is filled with reporters representing every newspaper in town -- a relic of the days when you could use the phrase "every newspaper in town" and mean more than one.

The 1931 film "The Front Page" goes right from opening credits to black humor on the gallows:



The 1940 film "His Girl Friday," on the other hand, begins with a reunion. Hildy Johnson (Rosalind Russell) is back in the newsroom of The Morning Post after a long vacation, which has included a divorce from the paper's editor, Walter Burns (Cary Grant). There are greetings all around -- Hildy is clearly a pro and has an easy camaraderie with her fellow ink-stained wretches.

Hildy, in a tailored suit and mannish hat, has returned for one last meeting with Walter:



Hildy has another surprise for Walter -- she's gotten engaged on her vacation, to a nice insurance salesman named Bruce Baldwin (Ralph Bellamy), and she's leaving the newspaper. For the first time in the movie, the fast-talking editor is speechless. But Walter gets the wind back in his sails after a few seconds, and then he insists on meeting Bruce:



In "The Front Page," we first see Hildy (Pat O'Brien) when he enters the press room, letting Walter (Adolphe Menjou) know via phone that he's leaving the paper to get married and to go into advertising in New York City.

The funny thing is, the relationship between Menjou and O'Brien's characters seems more romantic than the one between Russell and Grant. Menjou says things like, "so you're leaving me for marriage" and "I love you, you crazy mug." Even Peggy, Hildy's fiance, knows it: "You adore each other!," she says. On the other hand, "His Girl Friday" is, in the tradition of Howard Hawks's films, free of practically all spoken terms of endearment. Affection and attraction might be demonstrated in other, more visual, ways -- and in a Hawks movie, often dialogue that has nothing to do with love ends up having something very much to do with love.

After the interlude with Walter, Hildy and Bruce, "His Girl Friday" also moves to the Criminal Courts Building. In both films, Hildy is surrounded by a wisecracking pack of character actors playing wisecracking reporters. In the 1931 version, the group includes Edward Everett Horton, Walter Catlett and Frank McHugh (as "McCue"). In the 1940 version, we have Roscoe Karns, Cliff "Ukelele Ike" Edwards and Regis Toomey.

We also have a more humanized look at the condemned man, Earl Williams, in "His Girl Friday."

With the promise of a nice commission for Bruce, Walter agrees to buy an insurance policy, so Hildy agrees to cover the Williams story. Hildy greases the palm of a prison guard to get a one-on-one interview with Williams (John Qualen) and we see two things -- that Hildy is a crackerjack reporter and that Williams is just plain crackers.

But before Hildy can write up her interview, Williams escapes. The reporters scramble to cover the story and Burns heads down to the press room to keep Hildy focused on the story and off of leaving with Bruce. To keep Bruce on the sidelines, Walter constantly sends trouble Bruce's way. (When he pays a woman to accuse Bruce of mashing so he'll get arrested, Walter describes him thusly: "He looks like that guy in the movies -- Ralph Bellamy.")

Maybe just to see if he can get away with it in an early talkie, director Lewis Milestone moves his camera whenever possible in the 1931 film. This circularly-staged scene, consisting of just a conversation between Hildy and Walter, makes you kind of dizzy:



Hawks's direction, of course, is completely the opposite. It never draws attention to itself -- he directs the cast instead of the camera. And in "His Girl Friday," especially, the cast does the heavy lifting, including overlapping dialogue that plays almost as if it's being ad-libbed. Watch this wondrous scene between Grant, Russell, Clarence Kolb as the crooked mayor, Gene Lockhart as the crooked sheriff, and the great Billy Gilbert as the guy delivering a reprieve for Williams -- someone the mayor and sheriff shooed away earlier:



(Another inside joke in that scene, as Grant's character refers to Grant's real name, Archie Leach. The 1931 film has plenty of names dropped as well, including "Judge Mankiewicz" and a guy in a speakeasy named Benchley.)

As faithful as the 1931 film is to the play, and as filled as it is with pre-code craziness, including one character giving the finger to another, I have to say I prefer "His Girl Friday." It represents smooth, expert Hollywood movie making in the best sense -- everyone involved, especially Grant and Russell, are hitting on all cylinders. It is the work of supremely assured craftsmen and performers, all moving at top speed. By comparison, Menjou and O'Brien -- especially O'Brien -- pitch their performances to the back row of the theatre.

You can see for yourself, since both films are in the public domain. Here's "The Front Page":


And here's "His Girl Friday":