Monkey Business

Monkey Businessⁱ attempts a retell of the story of Serge Voronoff (the monkey gland manⁱⁱ), well gutted as for an American audienceⁱⁱⁱ. The result is an oddly depopulated intellectual space, in which even Grant can pass for human (however briefly) and in which Rogers utterly shines as a jewel of (sadly derelict) womanhood. Her Edwina Fulton character in here's perhaps my favourite depiction of an adult female in LA's own Bollywood history ; and if in my hands she'd soon enough & in short order be tasting between Miss Lois Laurel's nylons... well, that just speaks to everyone else's inadequacy to life.

The nylons in question.

1. 1952, by Howard Hawks, with Ginger Rogers, Marilyn Monroe, Cary Grant, Charles Coburn, Hugh Marlowe.

   Charles Coburn is his usual "odd uncle" / old lecher mini partner of Monroe's that was peddling tiaras in GPB. Hugh Marlowe is the specialist sniveling cur / "other man" (Hollywood's own version of Franco Fabrizzi). Cary Grant, this spiritual father of Hugh, is really not so much better, this being one of the few films where his aloof hammy goose act finds any kind of traction (he rather ruins than helps A&OL for instance ; he doesn't appreciably hurt HGF chiefly because it's such unloved shit to begin with).

   Nifty, huh, this whole thing with abbreviating movie titles. You rather enjoy the little puzzle it confers, don't you ? [↩]

2. No kidding, one of the fathers of endocrinology, as well as transplantology and the whole "forever young" Midwestern pseudo-religious, cvasi-philosophical gargle (that periodically burbles up into US discourse like methane in a swamp, in the same hazy cloud as "stereoscopic vision" etcetera, viz "futurism", FM-2030 and so on) is this historical character whom The NY Times & co tried to pooh pooh and downplay with his death (after having reverently supported while he lived) chiefly because the idiotic Americana he (to them) embodied is (to them) too pricelessly valuable to be connected to any man (lest it be buried with him). It is, as far as the monkey brains populating the New World are concerned, to be the chief treasure and inheritance of MANKIND!!! instead.

   Anyway, the isolation of testosterone in the lab proved the naive notions embodied in The White City (were you, with me, at the Chicago exhibition way back when ?), of "man" as font and source of all things -- in a very direct and therefore directly manipulable manner -- didn't actually hold much water. It may be true that woman, without man, is nothing, nor any other soil, nor any other thing ; but it's not true that the state could then extract the magic fluid / philosophal stone "making up" the man out of the body of the man, to then go about blessing and enobling random things at will. Goats don't turn to gold if injected with testosterone, cities don't flower, marble doesn't shine, it's not that whoremone that's the word of god, spirit ineffable, the very dove in question. Awww! [↩]

3. Just in case you were wondering about the bizarrely spurious involvement of a monkey, and perhaps thought (in very American fashion, I readily grant), it's some sort of code for blacks or something along those lines. [↩]