Monkey Business at BAM

Howard Hawks' great screwball comedies --- Bringing Up Baby and His Girl Friday --- are so splendid and so canonical that it's easy to forget he made others. That neglect is especially unfortunate in the case of Monkey Business, a riot of a movie featuring megawatt star power (Cary Grant, Marilyn Monroe, Ginger Rogers, Charles Cobrun), not to mention a pair of very dextrous chimpanzees. Screening as part of a Cary Grant series at the Brooklyn Academy of Music in Fort Greene, Monkey Business reminded us of the occasional appropriateness of the cliche "they don't make 'em like they used to." For all its silly slapstick and simian antics, it's unmistakably a comedy for adults, laced with double entendres and propelled by the desire to recapture the passion, sexual and otherwise, of youth.

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