Rating: NR
Release Date: 02/02/1999
SubTitles: English/French/Espanol/Por
Dubbed: English/Espanol/Por
Sound: 5.1/2
Run Time: 108 min
Distributor/Studio: Columbia TriStar
A sextet of
Three Stooges shorts bracketing the "
Curly era" -- from 1934 and their very first
Columbia Pictures short,
Woman Haters, to one of the last with the legendary third
Stooge,
Micro-Phonies. Three of the six use music as a device --
Woman Haters was the group's only film done in rhyme, a kind of versified comedy about marriage and its pitfalls, done with full musical accompaniment to every line;
Micro-Phonies has
Curly impersonating a female opera singer (while the other
Stooges have some merciless fun with fruit projectiles, distant cousins to
Monty Python's "edible missiles") after a very funny sequence showing them creating havoc at a recording studio; and
Punch Drunks (based on a story by the trio) shows off
Larry's ability on the violin in the course of telling a story of a boxer (
Curly) who can only fight when he hears
"Pop Goes the Weasel." Men in Black, not to be confused with the recent
Tommy Lee Jones/
Will Smith comedy, was the only Stooges short to be nominated for an Academy award -- at the time, it was also a pungent parody of a much better known movie (and play) called
Men in White, telling of the trials and tribulations in the lives of young doctors; the loud-speaker cries of "Calling Dr. Howard, Dr. Fine, Dr. Howard" was a take-off of the original play's stage ambience, as were the
Stooges' periodic pronouncements of their work "for duty and humanity."
Three Little Pigskins, which features a young
Lucille Ball, has the
Stooges mistaken for college football players; a take-off on the University of Notre Dame's "Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse," the boys are instead the "Three Horsemen" from Boulder Dam College. All of the transfers are of good quality, though there is a small edit -- evidently in the existing negative -- in
Micro-Phonies. The menu is fairly straightforward but a little awkward; perhaps someone can explain why it was necessary to list the six shorts on two separate frames of three each, which have to be reaccessed each time one returns to select another short. Still, the quality of the actual material is very sharp and crisp, including the sound.
~ Bruce Eder, All Movie Guide
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