Prior to finally seeing 1951’s Bedtime for Bonzo, all I knew about the film was all the jokes about it around the time Ronald Reagan was president. I remember how appalled many people were that the star of something this bad could possibly get elected to the highest office in the land. If I had a time machine, I’d go back and tell those people, “You won’t believe how much lower that bar will be set in the future.”
I have read reviews where some critics believe this comedy has been unfairly maligned. But now I can confirm it is even worse than its reputation. This is as bad the worst sitcoms of the 70’s through the 90’s, with a plot that could have been the premise for one.
The films opens on a crisis at a college, and we see all manner of emergency vehicles descending upon the campus. A great many students are flocking to wherever the vehicles are headed. One way this scene would be significantly different if remade today is everybody would be running from the emergency.
The professor played by Reagan arrives and learns from a colleague (Walter Slezak) their test subject has escaped. At first, they had held Slezak at bay by wielding a scalpel. Then they crawled out the window and onto the ledge several stories up. Reagan goes out on the ledge to talk them down. The way the shot is framed telegraphs something is wrong, even if the viewer doesn’t have any additional information beforehand. When the camera pans left, it is revealed their escapee is a chimpanzee. Glad he didn’t jump, or these would have been rhesus pieces all over the place.
Reagan manages to prevent the chimp from committing suicide, or whatever he had in mind. I don’t understand why anybody thought it had ever been in danger, as it has been effortlessly crawling around all over the brick façade before Reagan brings him back inside.
The day is about to get worse. The dean (Herbert Heyes) has discovered Reagan’s father was a master criminal. In the eternal debate between nature and nurture, Heyes is a firm believer in the former, and so cuts off the engagement between the professor and his daughter (Lucille Barkley). He also says he expects the man’s resignation at the end of the term.
Given some of the actor’s conservative policies when he became president, I was surprised by some of the sentiments his character expresses here. In defending his father, he explains the man had been born in a slum. He says that, if he had been raised under different circumstances, he wouldn’t have had to resort to crime. I’m sure there are others who feel differently, but I always believed his social policies when he became president suggested each person needs to pull themselves up by their own bootstraps, even if they are too poor to afford boots.
Reagan decides to try a sociological experiment on Bonzo, the chimp he had talked off the ledge earlier, where he is going to teach an animal the difference between right and wrong. That’s right: he’s going to impart human ethics onto an animal. “Even a monkey brought up in the right surroundings can learn the meaning of decency and honesty.” Oh my head…
He believes it takes a traditional household to raise a monkey, so I guess all those primate mothers in the wild all around the world had been doing it wrong. He tries to hire a nanny but, as nobody with a shred of sanity would expect, six women all turn down the offer to play nursemaid to a monkey in the house of an unmarried man. Reagan is frustrated when multiple agencies recommend an animal trainer, and this seems to offend him. But, really, isn’t that what he is planning to do? He wants to train the animal out of the animal.
Then along comes Diana Lynn, who insists she play mamma and Reagan play pappa. They teach Bonzo how to do things like sit in a chair at the dining room table instead of sitting on the table itself. They make him wear clothes. Basically, they try to teach him to be as unlike his true nature as possible. All the while, the “parents” deliver cringe-inducing dialog such as, “An Oedipus complex already? I’ve only been his father for a week.”
I was repeatedly slack-jawed at the stupidities this film keeps piling on. Characters behave completely unlike actual human beings in their effort to anthropomorphize a chimpanzee. I was especially stunned by how Reagan and Lynn seem to repeatedly forgot Bonzo will freely climb out of windows and into trees. They forget he not only can easily climb and descend trees, but that this is an environment he can navigate better than walking on the ground. And don’t get me started on the scene where Bonzo steals a diamond necklace from a jewelry store’s display window. Nobody—not anybody who works at that store, not anybody with the police—notices a bizarre child’s cowboy hat Bonza had left at the scene of the crime. That we are shown him leave the hat there and then not have any follow-up is an insult to the intelligence of the audience.
Then again, I think the creators of Bedtime for Bonzo had nothing but contempt for their audience. The mentality seems to be that, if people are stupid enough to see a movie where a monkey is raised like a human child, then they deserve what they get. As for myself, I may have found the monkey’s high jinks cute and amusing at times, I was kind of hoping it would start enacting the terrifying sitcom stage incident from the movie Nope and give the filmmakers what they deserve.
Dir: Frederick de Cordova
Starring Ronald Reagan, Diana Lynn, Walter Slezak
Watched on Kino Lorber blu-ray