Monkey status: One spider monkey
The year is 1992. After 1989’s Batman took the world by storm, Tim Burton was coasting on a wave of unexpected Hollywood success that meant that he could tackle basically any project that he wanted. He has just made Edward Scissorhands, a film that combines both a personal story echoing his own self-perceived isolation as a youth with his unique visual style.
He could go on down this road, inflating quirky little Goth-lite scripts into star vehicles and Halloween costumes for years to come. But Warner Bros is hungry and the taste of blockbuster success that they savoured in 1989 has only set them salivating more.
Batman Returns is a film that Burton made on condition. He would return and helm the second instalment of Batman on the big screen so long as he could take the film and… well, do whatever the hell he wanted with it.
The result was a scene in which Danny DeVito, dressed in miserably tattered Victorian pyjamas and bedecked with flipper-like appendages for hands, an enormous raptor like nose and an almost perfectly spherical body, drools green and black goo onto his chin while he bellows the following to a battalion of penguins conducting a secret rendez-vous in an enormous underground chamber in the sewers beneath Gotham City:
“My dear penguins, we stand on a great threshold! It’s okay to be scared; many of you won’t be coming back. Thanks to Batman, the time has come to punish all of God’s children! First, second, third and fourth-born! Why be biased?! Male and female! Hell, the sexes are equal, with their erogenous zones blown sky-high! Forward march! THE LIBERATION OF GOTHAM HAS BEGUN!”
What a time to be alive.
So in a film with a man dressed like a bat who has his own brand of blank CD-ROMs, an enormous rubber duckie villain vehicle, a horde of intelligent penguins, a Trumpian figure who is dressed up like a character from a Fritz Lang film, a woman who has an apartment with two separate spacious rooms and still feels the need to use a murphy bed, a group of political campaign staffers who barely bat an eye when their boss nearly bites somebody’s nose off – in the words of the Penguin, it’s not a little, it’s a LOT! – well surely in all of this bizarre chaos there must be a monkey.
And there is.
The Penguin’s lead henchman is a man with an organ grinder that conceals a tommy gun, played by Vincent Schiavelli. Schiavelli had previously appeared alongside DeVito in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. (Eds. note – must rewatch to check for monkey action). But this time it’s Martini giving the orders, but the Organ Grinder is not alone – he is accompanied throughout most of the film by his trained circus monkey.
This spider monkey’s name seems to be lost to the annals of history, but it dominates the screen whenever it appears, dressed in its bellhop’s uniform, taking care of keys and delivering letters.
Apparently it was quite the personality on set, as well. below Check out Danny DeVito recounting the story on The Graham Norton Show in full grisly detail, but the cliff notes are: In a scene where the monkey was meant to hand a letter to DeVito, it instead decided to leap at him and sink its jaws into his general scrotal area. Apparently drooling purple slime and looking like a creepy homicidal mutant puts monkeys on their guard – who’d have thunk it.
Luckily, Danny DeVito can’t have held too much of a grudge against the non-human primate kingdom, as he is set to produce and star in The One and Only Ivan, next years premier gorilla picture which may or may not set the world aflame with a fresh bout of monkey fever. Only time will tell.
I mean, its not the first time that DeVito has changed life as we know it and revolved it in a more monkey-leaning direction just by appearing in an ape picture:
Stay tuned.
Is there a monkey in it? 