High Quality Content by WIKIPEDIA articles! Monkey Business is a 1952 screwball comedy film directed by Howard Hawks and starring Cary Grant, Ginger Rogers, Charles Coburn, Marilyn Monroe, and Hugh Marlowe. To avoid confusion with the famous Marx Brothers movie of the same name, this film is sometimes referred to as "Howard Hawks' Monkey Business." Cary Grant plays Dr. Barnaby Fulton, a research chemist working on a fountain of youth pill for a chemical company, who is trying to develop an elixir of youth, urged on by his commercially minded boss Mr. Oliver Oxley. One of his chimpanzees Esther gets loose in the laboratory and pours some chemicals into the water cooler chemicals that just happen to have the rejuvenating effect for which Fulton is searching. Unaware of the monkey's antics, Fulton tests his latest experimental concoction on himself, and washes it down with water from the cooler. Naturally, he soon begins to act just like a 20-year-old, and spends the day out on the town with his boss's secretary Miss Lois Laurel. When Fulton's wife Edwina learns that the elixir "works," she drinks some, again washing it down with water, and turns into a prank-pulling schoolgirl.