Bedtime for Bonzo *** (1951, Ronald Reagan, Diana Lynn, Walter Slezak, Peggy) – Classic Movie Review 5660

Director Frederick de Cordova’s 1951 farcical comedy Bedtime for Bonzo has a lot to answer for as the film that convinced its star Ronald Reagan to go into politics. For here is the infamous daft comedy in which the future US President Reagan talks to a chimpanzee and plays its father. Reagan’s serious acting career had ended in him just monkeying around! Ironically, it is now one of the best remembered of Reagan’s films after it became well known in the Eighties during his presidency.

Back in 1951 it was just a pleasantly inoffensive minor farce about a college psychology professor, Peter Boyd (Reagan), who abducts and brings up Bonzo the college chimp (played by Peggy) as a human baby for a hereditary experiment. There is a tiny bit more to it than that. The script carefully builds in a pressing reason for all this, as though reason and reality have something to do with it.

Boyd’s engagement to his sweetheart Valerie (Lucille Barkley), the daughter of Dean Tillinghast (Herbert Heyes), is in trouble after it is revealed that Boyd’s father was a habitual convict. So Boyd starts his secret experiment to prove the Dean’s genetic theory of inherited traits wrong, nicking the science department’s chimp.

He hires Jane Linden (Diana Lynn) to pose as the chimp’s mother while he plays dad, using Fifties-era child rearing techniques. The plot is elaborate but still flimsy, an odd mixture.

Naturally, the monkey steals the show, but Reagan, Walter Slezak as Professor Hans Neumann and Herbert Heyes are also amusing in a film that is easy to scoff at and underestimate.

Also in the cast are Jessie White, Herbert Vigran, Harry Tyler, Ed Clark, Ed Gargan, Joel Friedkin, Brad Browne, Elizabeth Flournoy, Howard Banks, Bill [Billy] Mauch, Brad Johnson and Ann Tyrrell.

It is written by Val Burton and Lou Breslow, based on a story by Raphael David Blau and Ted Berkman), so those are the four guys to praise or blame. Blau conceived the story after seeing research suggesting that a chimpanzee could be raised like a human child, and shares the story credit with his brother-in-law, Berkman. The duo wrote the screenplay for Short Cut to Hell (1957), based on Graham Greene’s novel A Gun for Sale.

Its surprise popularity brought the follow-up Bonzo Goes to College (1952), but Reagan made the wise decision and bowed out, saying he thought the premise was silly.

The following year Reagan was already hitting the TV trail, and his film career ended on a high note with The Killers (1964). But the one-time Warner Bros contract player went on to become the 40th US President. Reagan said he never saw his Bonzo film until 1984.

Sadly, Peggy died in a zoo fire two weeks after the movie’s premiere and Bonzo Goes to College cast a different chimp whose name really was Bonzo. What are the chances of that?

© Derek Winnert 2017 Classic Movie Review 5660

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