Here, proving behind an inkling of a shadow of a doubt that Mr. Blogmeister adores cheap comedy shorts, is the last in a series about the Columbia Shorts Department.
This was no small feat, as clips from even the most obscure Columbia 2-reelers - even unavailable titles which do not star once and future members of The Three Stooges and will never, ever get an official DVD release - have been getting yanked in quantity from YouTube (obviously, one of the 5 or 6 regular readers of this blog works for Sony Pictures).
The big game-changer for theatrical short subjects was the end of Block Booking, which guaranteed movie studios an audience for short subjects and was struck down by a 1948 Supreme Court ruling. With Block Booking in place, studios could say to theatre owners "if you want that Jean Arthur feature directed by Frank Capra, pallie, then you have to take these El Brendel-Tom Kennedy shorts and Columbia Color Rhapsodies and Fables cartoons, too - like it or not".
Television became the key outlet for live-action slapstick, showcasing comedy by Milton Berle, Sid Caesar, Imogene Coca and Lucille Ball, with Martin & Lewis, Abbott & Costello and Ernie Kovacs soon to follow. By the premiere of I Love Lucy, The Three Stooges, seeing the writing on the wall, had made many TV appearances.
The 1950's saw big changes at The Shorts Department. Hugh Herbert passed away in March 1952. Dudley Dickerson, who deserved better than the stereotypical roles he got, left Columbia and appeared in the Mr. And Mrs. North TV series. Vera Vague finished her series and went on to many roles in television. While The Three Stooges and Andy Clyde were "the last headliners standing", Shemp Howard passed away in 1955 - and the team, always troupers, kept soldiering on.
There was, indeed, no post-1954 film of Shemp in these remakes, just stock footage and shots of the back of Joe Palma's head! By this time, the costs of making 2-reel comedies had increased - and budgets had decreased - so much that the new films were often dominated by footage from previous films, anyway.
Behind the camera, even more of a shakeup took place at the Columbia Shorts Department. Del Lord retired. Edward Bernds, who, among many other things devised those ingenious sound effects that created The Three Stooges' surreal universe (and eventually directed numerous entries in the series), left to direct Bowery Boys comedies.
After a brief, unhappy stint directing Columbia 2-reelers, Richard Quine said "no mas, no mas" and transitioned to television and feature films, most felicitously as a key collaborator of comic geniuses Ernie Kovacs and Jack Lemmon.
Sadly, the talented and prolific writer/director Clyde Bruckman, who made comedy magic with Buster Keaton, Harold Lloyd, W.C. Fields, The Three Stooges and other comedians, but did not make a lot of money while delivering those belly laughs to moviegoers, committed suicide in 1954.
Jules White became the sole director - and that meant the eye poking part of the equation really hit high gear in the 1950's. Just about all those patented Jules knockabout variations can be seen in the astonishingly tasteless and yet weirdly funny 2-reeler starring Eddie Quillan and Wally Vernon, Nobody's Home.
Quillan and Vernon make The Three Stooges look refined and genteel in the following gloriously unsubtle piece of work.
And speaking of unsubtle, here's a shameless and astonishingly inept Our Gang ripoff, released theatrically on December 9, 1954, The Mischief Makers in Kids Will Be Kids.
Slapstick and The Three Stooges would continue, but not until Joe Besser, who had starred in comedy shorts for Columbia a few years earlier, came on board as "the third Stooge" to shoot the team's last 2-reelers in 1956-1957.
No doubt Besser could be very funny, often hilariously so, as the following clips from the Abbott & Costello and Joey Bishop shows illustrate.
However, as a Stooge, although he gets plenty of laughs with his patented catchphrases ("not thooooooo hard, you crazeee") and gives the comedy his all, Besser never seems like quite a comfortable fit as a member of the team. Thus, you see such films very late in the team's 24 year run as this, Sweet And Hot, clearly an attempt to launch a musical offshoot series starring prolific television character actress Muriel Landers. Although likeable and a very good songstress, Ms. Landers (who achieved comedy immortality for her memorable cameo as a ballerina in The Ernie Kovacs Show) seems just a tad miscast in a Three Stooges film.
The last of the 190 Three Stooges shorts, Sappy Bullfighters, was released on June 4, 1959, eighteen months after the department closed at the end of 1957.
Little did the boys know that they would soon be introduced to new generations of fans via television and go on to appear in several feature films, with another former Columbia 2-reeler star, Joe DeRita, on board as the new "third Stooge".
While snark-laden 21st century television humor frequently leaves Mr. Blogmeister as sub-freezing as the Atlantic in January, those uncultured, not terribly ambitious 1930's comedy shorts still provoke laughs - not just the creme-de-la-creme from Laurel & Hardy, Charley Chase and Our Gang at Hal Roach Studios, but the randy vaudevillian weirdness of Clark & McCullough, those misguided yet intriguing Vitaphone "Big V" comedies (often featuring Shemp Howard), the no-budget train wrecks from Educational Pictures and yes, even the eye-poking 2-reelers from Columbia.
That said, Way Too Damn Lazy To Write A Blog lifts its half-full glass and says, "here's mud in yer eye" to The Three Stooges, Andy Clyde, Harry Langdon, Buster Keaton, Charley Chase, Vernon Dent, Bud Jamison, Hugh Herbert and all the others who made us laugh - and still do!
The Columbia Shorts Department, which began as the "C" 2-reeler studio to the A's (Hal Roach, RKO), B's (Vitaphone, Universal) and truly low-budget "D" studio Educational, kept chugging along until it represented "the last studio standing" in the field. Some of the greatest creators of silent movie comedy - Buster Keaton, Charley Chase, Harry Langdon - had already come and gone, squeezing maximum creativity and style into tight budgets and tighter shooting schedules.
The good news: The Shorts Department continued producing 2-reelers in quantity long after every competitor had folded their tents. The bad news: an overworked cash cow (The Three Stooges), combined with the inevitable passings, retirements and defections of many talented comedy directors/writers on staff.
By 1945, Curly Howard was visibly ailing, in no shape to continue the daily grind and long hours involved in making motion pictures. Moe Howard pleaded with Columbia Pictures head Harry Cohn to give the team some time off. Cohn refused. Curly eventually had his second stroke on the set during the production of Half Wit's Holiday.
Shemp Howard, then starring in his own solo series for Columbia, was convinced to rejoin the team he had left in the early 1930's. He did so, with enthusiasm. As a result, the Three Stooges got a jolt of fresh energy that carried the series into the next decade.
The third Three Stooges comedy starring Shemp (and #100 in their Columbia series), Hold That Lion, featured a cameo by Curly which turned out to be his last onscreen appearance.
This very funny moment (Curly appears at 8:45) was also the only time all the Howard brothers appeared together onscreen.
Two more parallel developments: dwindling budgets and a growing reliance on the "scare comedy" sub-genre, invariably co-starring the uncredited Guy In A Gorilla Suit. After the success of The Three Stooges' If A Body Meets A Body, everyone on the lot starred in scare comedies.
In some cases, as in this Hugh Herbert-Dudley Dickerson short, the scare comedy formula works, largely due to the cast's formidable character acting skills. By this end of the series in the early 1950's, Herbert & Dickerson were working as a comedy team and the kind of racial stereotype gags that were rampant in movies before World War II were receding.
Meanwhile, the studio continued trying out a wide variety of actors in one-shots and mini-series - and especially in scare comedies.
The wide variety of talent featured in Columbia 2-reel comedies included: Billie Burke, who played "Glinda The Good Witch" in The Wizard Of Oz; voice actor par excellence Sterling Holloway; Stooge-to-be Joe DeRita; radio announcer and Burns & Allen Show cast member Harry Von Zell; Bert Wheeler of the comedy team Wheeler & Woolsey and RKO feature film fame;character actor Wally Brown, who was teamed with screenwriter Tim Ryan (note: Tim's comedienne wife was Irene, later to be famous as Granny from TV's Beverly Hillbillies) - and many more.
All of the aforementioned performers acquit themselves admirably as troupers and showbiz pros in the thicket, shovel and 2 x 4 filled landscape that was Jules White-Land, even when the slapstick just doesn't work.
There is an end to this and it comes in the next installment. The Shorts Department at Columbia survived for 24 years!
The Noir City film festival is back at San Francisco's legendary Castro Theatre for ten days of unbeatable hard-boiled big screen mayhem.
This year's festival, Noir City XI, kicks off with a screening of Joseph H. Lewis' delirious and quintessential "killers-on-the-run" noir Gun Crazy, with an in-person appearance by by the film's shooting star, Peggy Cummins.
The English actress played the femme fatale to end all femme fatales, hell-bent sharpshooter Annie Laurie Starr - and burned up the silver screen in the process.
John Dall - who film buffs know well from Sir Alfred Hitchcock's Rope - co-stars with Cummins as the ultimate "sap for a dame" in this sexually-supercharged 1950 thriller from King Brothers Productions.
Nothing if not prolific, Joseph H. Lewis also directed the truly Kafka-esque My Name Is Julia Ross, as well as dozens of other films, including the fastest paced and most economical East Side Kids programmers ever committed to celluloid.
The Film Noir Foundation deserves mucho kudos, bravos and huzzahs for putting their money where their booze-stained, cigarette-burned, red lipstick-smudged mouths are and presenting newly struck 35mm prints of these classic films for the Noir City fest.
Serendipitously enough, after a series of postings covering the Columbia Shorts Department (producers of enduringly funny 2-reelers starring The Three Stooges and less successful comedy shorts featuring other headliners), here is outstanding classic movie and Golden Age Of Stoogery news from Ron Hutchinson of The Vitaphone Project:
"I am happy to announce that The Vitaphone Project has located a complete Technicolor print of the long-lost Stooges 1933 MGM Colortone short HELLO POP! This is the only lost short with all three Stooges, and also stars Ted Healy and Henry Armetta. The 35mm nitrate print was found overseas and after some torturous steps to get the nitrate packaged and shipped, it is today safely in the hands of my friend Eric Aijayla at YCM labs. Ned Price at WB has ensured the funding of the restoration, and ideally we could see this within a year. The sole known print burned in the big MGM fire in the 1960's."
Harry Langdon and All-Star supporting actor Bud Jamison died. El Brendel was let go. Curly Howard fell ill as The Three Stooges were becoming box-office champs.
Yet more changes transpired behind the camera. Jack White stopped directing and moved into the story department, where he would remain through production of the last Columbia comedy short, Sappy Bullfighters. Sennett Studio veteran Harry Edwards joined in 1942 - presumably to replace producer-director-writer Charley Chase - and was extremely prolific over the next four years. Sound engineer Edward Bernds, who had worked in just about every capacity for Columbia Pictures and the shorts department, was promoted to director, and proved to be very capable, in particular directing The Three Stooges.
Not surprisingly, The Three Stooges' sustained popularity prompted a plethora of similar knockabout comedies with varied stars - and even more varied results.
Sometimes these efforts succeed. Other times, the completed films present clubfooted, unintentionally funny train wrecks rather than conventionally humorous comedy shorts.
Nonetheless, the "scare comedy", frequently used to excellent advantage by The Three Stooges, soon became a staple at the Columbia Shorts Department - and would remain so well into the 1950's. Another example of this sub-genre, Pardon My Terror, starring Gus Schilling and Richard Lane, sure looks as if it was written specifically with The Three Stooges in mind.
Long after competing comedy fun factories had shut down, Jules White's department didn't just keep going, it initiated new series, even as The Three Stooges and Andy Clyde kept cranking out funny 2-reelers like clockwork.
1940's headliners included "once and future Stooge" Shemp Howard, the team of Gus Schilling & Richard Lane, character actor Hugh Herbert and radio star Barbara Jo Allen (a.k.a. "Vera Vague") from The Bob Hope Show. Most starred in frame-by-frame remakes of films Charley Chase and Andy Clyde made for the Shorts Department in the 1930's.
Although Barbara Jo "Vera Vague" Allen rivals Lucille Ball, Polly Moran, Una Merkel and Marjorie White among the best comediennes to ever work for the Shorts Department, her starring vehicles for Columbia frequently recall the title to the 1968 thriller, No Way To Treat A Lady.
The Vera Vague comedies repeatedly bring up the question, "should a likeable and attractive comedienne get the same treatment as Moe Howard"?
The answer, even given the subsequent slapstick success of Lucille Ball and Joan Davis, is NO, absolutely not. . . not now, not ever. However, some of Charley Chase's Columbia 2-reelers were remade with Vera, with good results, as in the following, Doctor Feel My Pulse.
Unfortunately, Charley wasn't alive to pilot Vera's series and gently steer it away from the trademark Jules White knockabout humor that, while perfect for The Three Stooges, simply doesn't translate from comedians to comediennes. Among his numerous contributions behind the camera, Chase directed The Bargain Of The Century, starring Thelma Tudd and Zasu Pitts, as well as silent era comedies for Mack Sennett featuring such comediennes as Louise Fazenda.
Need convincing that eye-poking humor is not a good choice with comediennes? Watch this uneasy, macabre Vera Vague vehicle, Hiss And Yell, directed with diabolical relish by Jules White. Vera is funny but boy, do bizarre shorts like this one give a new, foreboding meaning to the "Merrily We Roll Along" theme song that opens the non-Stooges Columbia comedy shorts.
Only somewhat more suited to the inimitable Columbia 2-reeler format was Hugh "Woo Woo" Herbert, ubiquitous comedy relief from countless RKO comedies and Warner Bros. musicals.
The ever-fluttery Herbert ended up starring in scads of Columbia 2-reelers, often in tandem with the aforementioned Dudley Dickerson. When cast or miscast as a girl-chasing Romeo, the results can be hilarious in any language.
As for the Stooges, they continued making hilarious films - well, at least until the deteriorating health that led to Curly's hospitalization on January 23, 1945 (after the filming of Idiots Deluxe) became painfully obvious onscreen. The team, however, is still in excellent form in the 1942-1943 season.
More to come in Part Six, as the Shorts Department continued well into the Eisenhower administration and the age of television.
Events dramatically impacted the Columbia Shorts Department as the 1930's ended. The Three Stooges became so popular that the boys began doing occasional guest shots in feature films. Charley Chase died of a heart attack in 1940, Buster Keaton left after completing the 1940-1941 season and Harry Langdon returned to Columbia for another series. Andy Clyde continued cranking out 2-reelers and consistently getting laughs.
Chase's tragic and premature death on June 20, 1940 meant that the Columbia Shorts Department and the movie business lost his unique, inventive and sophisticated approach to comedy. One suspects that Charley, as his brother James was, remained quite the well-kept secret in show business as a producer/director/writer of short subjects. Here's just one of the pieces Chase created for Columbia, the Swinging The Alphabet musical number from Violent Is The Word For Curly.
Watching both the films he directed for other comedians and his own starring series for both Hal Roach and Columbia, one wonders how Charley didn't end up collaborating with such top feature film luminaries as Preston Sturges and former Roach Studio cohorts Leo McCarey and George Stevens.
The Three Stooges made several of their very funniest films in 1938-1941, but trouble was afoot. Whether it was a result of getting bashed on the noggin repeatedly onscreen or his hard-partying, hard-drinking lifestyle offscreen, Curly Howard, arguably the funniest guy on the Columbia lot, began having serious health issues.
At first, Curly's difficulties are not readily apparent, but would be increasingly obvious onscreen as the decade progressed.
Nonetheless, the team, especially in collaboration with director Del Lord, continued their winning streak of hilarious films from the late 1930's into the early 1940's.
After completing a stint writing gags for the Laurel & Hardy features from 1938-1940, the brilliant comedian Harry Langdon returned to Columbia.
Langdon's 1940's series is definitely a cut below his first Columbia Shorts Department films in 1934-1935; Harry frequently gets buried in slap-poke-gauge slapstick humor, but gives the 2-reelers his all in any case.
Langdon would continue starring in short subjects for Columbia - with, unfortunately, diminishing returns as time went on.
At one point, Harry was teamed with El Brendel, the exceptionally goofy Swedish dialect comic who had headlined his own Columbia 2-reeler series after stints in features and short subjects with Fox and Vitaphone. Although Brendel's solo vehicles for Columbia could do the shorts department proud and put an enjoyably peculiar spin on the trademark slapstick, the results of the teaming with Langdon were curious at best. The knockabout comedy does not work for Brendel, either.
The slapstick-packed story of the Columbia Shorts Department continues in Part Five as the studio hires headliners to launch new series and the comedy factory's behind-the-camera staff changes substantially.
