Woman Haters (1934, Archie Gottler)

An entire Three Stooges short with dialogue in rhyme! And usually not so great. The plot goes that new members of the titular club have sworn off women, then each one is caught alone with the same blonde girl (Marjorie White of sci-fi musical Just Imagine). They sing too much in this one and the rhyming doesn’t work, but they do hit each other a whole lot.

Not trying to make sense of the historical context of these shorts, I ended up watching “the first official Three Stooges short” per a professor of Stoogeological Studies. Director Gottler wasn’t a Stooges guy but had a regular gimmick (his other movies feature “dialogue all in rhyme” and “young men competing for the affections of a beautiful blonde”).

Aged Stooges:


World of Glory (1991, Roy Andersson)

And I rewatched this, after catching up with You, The Living.

The Glass Harmonica (1968, Andrey Khrzhanovskiy)

I’ve seen this style before, some hinged limbs but most “motion” is cuts or fast fades between drawings. The townsfolk are greedy and private, and all beauty is kept away from the people by spooks in black suits. They hear the glory of a glass harmonica, then see the government thugs destroy it, and get back to hoarding wealth, transforming into animals until there’s a wacky war of mixed-up creatures in the town square. From the first half of this you’d never predict it would have such wild character design. Our glass-wielding dude come back a-strummin’ and turns the people from abstract art back to realism – the hoarder becomes generous, everyone so enlightened that they float into the sky, rebuilding the town commons they’d looted earlier, even after the agent of money smashes the instrument again. I don’t think any glass harmonicas are heard in the symphonic score, nor do glass harmonicas look like the portable glass pipe organ the animated musician strums like a guitar. Not only was this banned for screening in soviet territories, the director was ordered into the navy for two years.


A Return (2018, James Edmonds)

Houseplants, sheep, and windowlight, superimposed and cut with stuttery editing. The soundtrack is all crashing ocean waves until the last couple minutes when new tones arise, sounding coincidentally like a glass harmonica. A short and pleasant abstract piece.


Seven Songs About Thunder (2010, Jennifer Reeder)

Uniformed marching band girl flees through the woods, is later found dead by apparently-pregnant jean-jacket Libby, who narrates about death and reincarnation. After offending her psychiatrist (who later offends her husband), Libby keeps getting calls on the dead girl’s phone with its “Sweet Child o’ Mine” ringtone, finally calls in the dead girl to the cops. Kind of a stagy, unreal short film, low-budget but accomplished. The psych’s husband went on to play Anne Hathaway’s brother in Dark Waters.


And I Will Rise If Only to Hold You Down (2012, Jennifer Reeder)

Dancer alone, saying aloud insults and affirmations… another marching band girl running, this time getting home safely. Mostly locked down shots (the last movie kept gliding in straight lines towards then past the characters), dialogue repeating in different contexts.


The Three Stooges in Termites of 1938

I’ve got this Stoogeological Studies zine sitting on my desk, but I haven’t seen the Three Stooges in action since I was a kid. Let’s watch some classic shorts and see if they hold up.

Muriel (Bess Flowers, “Queen of the Extras”) wants the escort bureau to get a date to Mabel’s party, but maid Etta “sister of Hattie” McDaniel calls the exterminators instead. Larry/Curly/Moe are in their office attempting to blast the mouse with a cannon, but the mouse blasts them – a real Wile E. Coyote situation – Chekhov’s crate of “gopher bombs” sitting on the floor. At the party they’re alternately trying to mingle and exterminate critters. Since our guys start eating first, the fancy people all take their table manners cues from them – they cause a ruckus and get ejected. Characters are named Clayhammer, Mrs. Batwidget, and Lord Wafflebottom. This was loads better than Ferrari. Stooges also have a short called Ants in the Pantry, and between that title and this one, I’m getting Ants in Your Plants of 1939 vibes.


Wee Wee Monsieur (1938)

These Stooges movies are more complicated than their <20 minute runtime would suggest. Multiple locations and a lotta plot here, but it doesn't lose focus from the main attraction: conking people on the head. Our guys are broke Parisian artists, fishing out the window to steal from food carts while completing their masterpieces, then chased off by landlord and cop, and join the foreign legion not realizing it's the army. Put on guard duty by Sgt. Bud Jamison (of the Chaplin Essanays), their charge is immediately kidnapped. Now on a rescue mission, they need a disguise because “no white man has ever entered” the palace of whatever exotic land we’re in – I feared the worst, but they all dressed as Santa Claus, conking suspicious guards and loading ’em into the sack. Masquerading as harem girls they save Captain Gorgonzola from the enemy (recurring antagonist Vernon Dent) and harness the man-eating lion to get home (well, back to base at least).


Tassels in the Air (1938)

The previous two were directed by Canadian hero Del Lord, this one is by Charley Chase. Bess Flowers and Bud Jamison are having the house redecorated, come to visit a snooty artiste decorator’s office but our guys have mislabeled the office doors, so they get hired for the decorating job. They start out by painting the antiques, not that anyone notices, but I caught them apologizing a lot in this one, aware of their own incompetence for once. Curly fails to learn pig latin, and has a nervous condition where he goes barking mad when he sees tassels. Lboxd useless as ever, the top three user reviews call it “the worst Three Stooges short,” “one of their best,” and “the median.”

Bud is sent to mix some polka-dotted paint:

My re-introduction to WC Fields. I must’ve either seen him on TV when I was eight, or maybe I just know him through cartoon caricatures. He kinda seems like someone whose routine is best appreciated by an eight-year-old, so maybe I should’ve let it rest. A lightly enjoyable short feature with some poor moments (a stupid-talkin’ negro joke comes right after a penny-pinching shylock joke).

All comedies wrongly think they need a handsome young romantic couple in the cast, so comically alcoholic Fields (named Sousé, heh) has a daughter (Una Merkel of The Bat Whispers) in love with some dude named Og. He also has a shrew wife and hateful mother-in-law, but more important is his bartender (Shemp Howard).

Fields gives some bad car-repair advice, stumbles into a job directing a film, then pretends to have foiled a bank robbery, earning himself a job as a security guard.

“You talkin’ to me?”

He gets bank clerk Og to steal money to invest in a junk-stock scam, then has to spend the rest of the movie diverting an auditor (rain-thin Sturges regular Franklin Pangborn, the same year he did Christmas In July). One of the bank robbers (named Repulsive Rogan, nice) returns and steals the now-valuable stocks in a second holdup, and Fields actually helps stop him this time, earning the respect of his now-wealthy family.

Pangborn, not feeling so well:

Criterion:

He is a pathetic, bad-tempered figure who curses everyone under his alcohol-scented breath—everyone, that is, save Joe the bartender (played by the positively restrained Shemp Howard, the intellectual’s Stooge) who patiently administers Sousé’s medicine. . . And in typical Fields fashion, his fortune is not made through honest effort but by luck, circumstance, and beautifully timed accidents, later turned into heroic epics by Sousé as he exaggerates his role in each. Here and elsewhere, Fields accurately nails the American tendency to inflate one’s importance, especially if money and fame are at stake.

“It’s a great script – feel how much it weighs.”

Seeing how it’s Academy Awards season, I’ve been watching bizarrely oscar-related movies… first Susan Slept Here was narrated by an oscar statue, and now this one, the only movie to be nominated by accident. It seems a song called “Pig Foot Pete” appeared in an Abbott and Costello movie with the same singer (Martha Raye) and songwriters who worked on this movie, which probably accounts for the never-properly-explained discrepancy of “Pig Foot Pete” getting Hellzapoppin’ awarded an oscar nomination. It’s all beside the point, since nothing stood a chance against the song White Christmas from Holiday Inn.

The story involves mistaken identity, Martha Raye (Monsieur Verdoux) running after Mischa Auer (My Man Godfrey) because she believes he’s an eligible millionaire, while he tries to score Jane Frazee – but the movie (based on a fourth-wall-smashing hit broadway play) is really just an excuse for popular comics Ole Olsen and Chic Johnson to riff on everything around them, including the film itself. Goofy-looking Hugh Herbert (whose “hoo-hoo-hoo!” laugh supposedly inspired the creation of Daffy Duck) of Footlight Parade, Sh! The Octopus and The Beautiful Blonde From Bashful Bend, also wanders about making jokes.

Chic and Ole – don’t ask me which is which:
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Movies like this (and there aren’t many movies like this) make the phrase “screwball comedy” seem inappropriately applied to such relatively calm, normal films as Bringing Up Baby. Surely the Marx Brothers movies were an influence. I’d like to think that Frank Tashlin, who was working in cartoons at the time this came out, was heavily influenced by its high-energy cartoony gags and unhinged self-reflexivity. Some of the jokes (many of the jokes!) are very bad, but you’ve gotta forgive them because overall the movie is too amusingly nuts to dislike.

Frankenstein’s Monster, about to helpfully toss Martha Raye:
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Kevin Lee: “The show-stopper is the much celebrated Lindy Hop sequence involving several Black domestic servants who without warning launch into the most jaw-dropping swing number captured on film.”

Here’s the precursor to that swing number, which is indeed jaw-dropping:
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Director Potter would work with all the biggest stars in his other films, and eventually make a sequel to this year’s biggest oscar-winner Mrs. Miniver.

Pretty girls are roasted on a spit in hell – the movie opens with this!
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The legal battle of Olsen vs. Johnson vs. Universal Pictures has led to the commercial unavailability of their work for so long that if it finally came out now, in sparkling restored deluxe DVD editions, nobody much would care since they are barely remembered. Good job there, guys.

Martha mooning after Mischa Auer:
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NY Times called it “an anarchic collection of unfunny gags,” but then, they also spelled “alittle” as one word.

Once and future stooge Shemp Howard is the film projectionist. I love how he, not the cameraman, can change the framing of the movie by panning to follow women in swimsuits.
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