Caution: This Is Not a Review

Who goes to the Brattle on Sunday afternoons beside CRIMSON reviewers? When a Marx Brothers movie is announced, small children go to the Brattle on a Sunday afternoon, giggling and wriggling and dragging reluctant daddies behind them. Yesterday afternoon they ate up Gerald Mc-Boing-Boing, as well they might, and also, with less reason, the Magoo which followed it. Shortly after the feature film had started, however, they began first trickling and then trooping out, and before it was far advanced, most of them were back on the streets.

Their removal was accelerated by the advent at the front of the house of what S.J. Perelman or somebody used to call a white-faced underling, who interrupted the movie to offer the patrons their money back, and to confirm the suspicion that most of them had been entertaining for some minutes:

In a small but smashing victory for the forces of chaos, the Brattle Theatre yesterday showed the wrong movie.

The Monkey Business which has just concluded a special one-day run at the Brattle was not the Marx Brothers movie of the same name which Halliday and Harvey thought they were buying, but an entirely different film about a chimpanzee who discovers a chemical formula that makes Cary Grant and Ginger Rogers act like ten-year-olds.

This Monkey Business is no great shakes as a work of art, except for an exquisite moment when Miss Rogers drops a goldfish down Charles Coburn's pants. There is a lot of running around and yelling, some funny, some not; Coburn sits on a pie, and squirts water in various directions; Marilyn Monroe, impersonating a blonde secretary, tells Grant, "Mr. Oxley's been complaining about my punctuation, so I've been careful to get here before nine"; the thing ends with Grant and Miss Rogers in a snugly marital clinch.

Monkey Business is notable for the nostalgic look it gives us at the Old Marilyn Monroe, who gives a somnambulistic performance in the style we once knew so well. In a distended sweater, Miss Monroe is an object of considerably more interest than she held for the observers in the children's section of the RKO Eighty-Sixth Street when Monkey Business was new. Miss Monroe and her sweater are not in The Mystery of Picasso and The Red Balloon, which are designed to appeal to higher faculties, and which re-open at the Brattle today.