Did the resulting influx of cash from the boffo box office success of It Happened One Night lead directly to many new hires in the Columbia Pictures Short Subjects department? If the sheer quantity of short subjects Columbia produced in 1934 is any indication, yes!
Columbia's 2-reel comedy factory hit the ground running in 1934 and a slew of comics, writers and directors were signed by producer Jules White.
Added to the initial behind-the-camera staff of Archie Gottler, Lou Breslow and Ray McCarey (who had been directing comedy shorts for Hal Roach and Vitaphone): ex-Sennett Studio mainstays Arthur Ripley and Del Lord; Hal Roach Studio director James W. Horne, who would soon shift over to Columbia's serials department and make the silliest cliffhangers of all time; the prolific Charles Lamont from Universal and the director of several pre-Columbia Pictures entries in the George Sidney-Charlie Murray series; Jules' brother, writer-director and formerly the chief comedy producer at Fox and Educational, Jack White (a.k.a. "Preston Black"); gagmen Felix Adler and Harry McCoy, as well as Clyde Bruckman, the talented (and ultimately tragic) director-writer who had worked extensively with Buster Keaton, Harold Lloyd, Laurel & Hardy and W.C. Fields.
Columbia had been producing Archie Gottler's "Musical Novelties", featuring Betty Grable, "Bad Boy Of Broadway" Jack Osterman, vaudevillian Lou Holtz, Lois January and Frank Albertson, as well as lots of singing, rhyming dialogue and campy production numbers on a tight budget.
Now, the de facto headliners of a certain Musical Novelty opus were about as far afield from the glamorous Grable as humanly possible: three grotesque, exceptionally geeky - and funny - burlesque comedians known as Howard, Fine and Howard.
All enliven Woman Haters, the fifth Columbia Pictures Musical Novelty, with their wacky antics - and there still is nothing quite as funny as Moe Howard singing. Winsome and hilarious musical comedy gal Marjorie White co-stars.
The Three Stooges - Moe Howard, Larry Fine and Jerome "Curly" Howard - unsurpassed masters of NYUK NYUK NYUK and WOO WOO WOO, joined Leon Errol, Walter Catlett and the (soon to exit) comedy team of Charlie Murray and George Sidney on the Columbia roster. Their Columbia series officially began with Punch Drunks, released theatrically on July 13, 1934. The Three Stooges' onscreen personalities and slapstick formula are already very well-established here, and Curly proves quite the dynamo, a whirlwind of physical comedy energy throughout.
Curly is even better once Mack Sennett Studio avatar Del Lord begins directing Three Stooges comedies and gives the team an ideal showcase for their hilarious brand of mayhem.
Harry Langdon and Andy Clyde, both associated with the Mack Sennett organization, also came on board in 1934.
From Day 1, all of the above enjoyed the customary outstanding support from everyone's favorite character actor, Bud Jamison. They would be joined by Harry Langdon's best friend and frequent collaborator, Vernon Dent, in 1935.
Clyde, like Bud Jamison and Vernon Dent quite the trouper, starred in 2-reelers, first with Sennett/ Educational, then at Columbia, for a quarter century.
Andy stayed almost as long as The Three Stooges at the Columbia Shorts Department, from 1934 to 1956, then embarked upon a successful career doing comic character roles in television.
Andy's amiable persona as "the goofy old coot" wears well and, as a veteran of the Del Lord - Felix Adler gonzo slapstick approach, dating back to such flivver-crashing silent Mack Sennett comedy classics as Super Hooper Dyne Lizzies, he took to the Columbia house style and its accompanying pratfalls immediately.
Andy's first Columbia 2-reelers were released at the end of 1934.
Harry Langdon arrived at Columbia after starring in a series of freewheeling and surprisingly good 2-reel comedies for Educational and Paramount in 1932-1934.
While any film starring a master comedian such as Langdon will have its moments, his Columbia 2-reelers are a mixed bag, mostly due to misguided attempts to shoehorn Harry into Three Stooges style knockabout slapstick.
Langdon, of course, at one point had been a major star and rival to Chaplin for top box-office attraction in screen comedy.
After his 1927-1928 starring vehicles THREE'S A CROWD, THE CHASER and HEART TROUBLE bombed at the box office, Harry continued to work steadily, but was largely relegated to short subjects and occasional character roles in features. His characterization, acting and comic timing were highly original, ultra-quirky and most idiosyncratic.
Although Harry would never hit the level of mega-stardom he attained in silent features again, he continued working in films up to his untimely death in December, 1944. There are many moments in Harry's sound films when his creativity, originality, formidable comedy mojo and abilities as a character actor shine through.
Still, even in the best of circumstances, there were difficulties translating Langdon's unconventional and hilariously bizarre Little Elf characterization from silents to the less surreal world of talkies. Although Harry's comic skills are not just intact, but as good or better as in his 1920's heydey, it is a bit jarring to hear his pixilated character as well as see him.
When given a director who understood what his characterization was all about, Harry proved capable of outstanding work, with his character role in the Great Depression-era classic Hallelujah, I'm A Bum, directed by Lewis Milestone a standout.
Since Harry had the most difficulty fitting into the Shorts Department's slapstick formula, even with former silent era collaborators Arthur Ripley and Harry Edwards (the third, Frank Capra, the studio's Grand Poobah, periodically visited the set) at the helm, in some Columbia films, everything clicks, while in others, his characterization gets lost in the shuffle.
In such films as the following 1935 Columbia short, I Don't Remember, directed by Jack White, the characterization seems inconsistent, at times crossing the line between "lovable little elf eccentric" and "psycho" - and at that point, not even such capable supporting players as Vernon Dent, Geneva Mitchell and Mary Carr can save the proceedings.
In A Doggone Mixup, he is cast with an aggressive and combative spouse, which undercuts the comedy at every turn - one can't comprehend why she is with Harry in the first place. Langdon may have needed more time, more sympathetic collaborators and a higher budget enabling more attention to detail - and none of these were available to him at Columbia.
In the late 1930's, several more top comedians, directors and writers - more guys who MADE silent movie comedy - would be hired by Jules White to make Columbia 2-reelers. So the story continues in Part Three.
We all know now that on the morning when the Mayan in charge of the calendar woke up, his wife refused to have sex with him, his kid whined unrelentingly before starting a pointless argument - and then his bosses complained about the design of the calendar!
I'll admit it. I'm a sucker for comedies produced by the Columbia Shorts Department. Qualified to start a 12-step group for Men Who Love The Three Stooges Too Much? Yes.
Ted Okuda and Edward Watz' book The Columbia Comedy Shorts has done a super job of documenting the history, the back stories and content of every darn 2-reeler the authors could track down (and it's amazing just how many they did track down).
Still, even with Ted n' Ed's fine book, the comprehensive research found on The Shorts Department AND this listing from the Turner Classic Movies website, Mr. Blogmeister is tossing his best dilapidated, dog-eared Three Stooges fedora into the ring and presenting the following overview of Columbia's 25 years of classic comedy shorts - with, of course, the inevitable film clips to illustrate.
Columbia Pictures, Harry Cohn's "Little Poverty Row Studio That Could", did not produce their own comedy shorts in the early 1930's, but had been a very active distributor, especially in animation.
At one point, the studio distributed both Walt Disney cartoons and the series from the animation studio Columbia Pictures organized under de facto producer - and husband of the prolific and pioneering silent era animation distributor Margaret Winkler - sales executive Charles Mintz.
At the Charles Mintz Studio, veteran animators Ben Harrison and Manny Gould had been cranking talkie Krazy Kat adventures out for Columbia release as early as 1929.
Ex-Fleischer Studio artists Dick Huemer, Sid Marcus and Art Davis headed a second production unit, which had been busy making the Toby The Pup cartoons for RKO, and launched the Scrappy series in 1931.
In 1934, the Mintz Studio began production on the Columbia Color Rhapsodies series, their entry into the "let's ape Disney's color Silly Symphonies" sweepstakes. While there are enjoyable and entertaining Columbia Color Rhapsodies, the move to "make 'em cute" and emulate the Disney approach had the effect of muting the studio's strengths - originality, surrealistic abandon and cartoony weirdness - while magnifying its weaknesses (frequently nonexistent storylines).
Having distributed some live-action shorts as well, most notably Larry Darmour Productions' low-budget Mickey McGuire comedies (starring Mickey Rooney), no doubt Columbia Pictures chieftain Harry Cohn was itching to compete with the big boys in the comedy short subject market. Cohn hired Jules White and Zion Myers to get the new comedy shorts department up and running in 1933.
The department's first films included the Musical Novelties series, and 2-reel comedies starring Ziegfeld Follies comic (and W.C. Fields cohort) Leon Errol, the bespectacled, ubiquitous character actor Walter Catlett, vaudeville star Lou Holtz and the team of Mack Sennett Studio comic Charlie Murray and George Sidney
The rubber-legged, double-jointed, boozed-up, ever-philandering Errol, most recently in the wonderfully titled Three Little Swigs, was concurrently starring in comedy shorts for Paramount, Vitaphone and Columbia.
Leon started his sporadic starring vehicles for the Columbia Shorts Department with Hold Your Temper. After starring in such strikingly bizarre and funny Columbia comedy shorts as One Too Many and Honeymoon Bridge (both written by ex-Sennett actor/screenwriter Harry McCoy), Leon would move on and headline a long-running series for RKO Radio Pictures (note: the hoodlum on the right in the following frame grab from Leon's RKO comedy The Cactus Cut-Up is character actor Emil Sitka, a future cornerstone of Columbia and especially Three Stooges 2-reelers).
George Sidney & Charlie Murray, the stars of the popular The Cohens & The Kellys feature comedies for MGM and Universal, headlined one of the Columbia Shorts Department's first series.
The last of the George Sidney & Charlie Murray mini-series, Back To The Soil, was released theatrically on August 10, 1934.
Unlike the Three Stooges comedies, the George Sidney & Charlie Murray series remains the definition of "rare and hard-to-find"; only the most dyed-in-the-wool film collectors, classic comedy geeks and professional archivists have seen them since their original release in winter 1933-1934.
Several Sidney & Murray shorts were directed by Jules White. One, Fishing For Trouble, co-stars Walter Brennan and 1920's Christie Comedies star Billy Dooley, A.K.A. "The Goofy Gob", in one of his very few talkies.
Murray & Sidney did appear in the following Paramount Pictures Hollywood On Parade short, entering at 8:03. This seems to be the only readily available bit of theirs in a sound film other than a cameo as Cohen & Kelly in The Stolen Jools.
However, the series that would inadvertently spawn the Three Stooges comedies - and very likely prompt way more than Three Little Swigs from Harry Cohn - was the studio's Musical Novelty series, directed by songwriter Archie Gottler.
Rhyming dialogue, showgirls, goofy songs and goofier plots were the order of the day in these ultra-campy 1933-1934 shorts. The following Musical Novelty, UMPA, the second film in the series, stars Jack Osterman, a.k.a. The Bad Boy Of Broadway. Its music will be quite familiar to anyone who has seen the fifth Musical Novelty short (which includes the first appearance in a Columbia 2-reeler by The Three Stooges), Woman Haters, more times than they care to admit.
Now thatWoman Haters, released on May 5, 1934, just happens to be the first of 190 Columbia shorts starring The Three Stooges, just arrived from MGM and no longer working with Ted Healy.
The Three Stooges personalities - and those of perennial Columbia 2-reeler supporting players Bud Jamison and Monty Collins - are pretty well delineated even in this Archie Gottler Musical Novelty short. All handle the rhyming dialogue and singing with panache. Woman Haters is a personal favorite, as vivacious co-star Marjorie White shines and the sheer incongruity of Moe Howard crooning gets me laughing every time.
Arguably, the most significant thing that happened to Columbia Pictures during the 1933-1934 season was the runaway box-office success of Frank Capra's sprightly Depression-era screwball comedy, It Happened One Night, released theatrically on February 23, 1934. To say It Happened One Night was an enormous hit would be an understatement; it won the Academy Award for Best Picture, made Clark Gable a megastar and earned the studio tons of money.
Just how the influx of do-re-me at the height of The Great Depression specifically impacted the Columbia Shorts Department we cannot empirically say, but the next thing you know, prominent comedians were signed and several more series were added to the Musical Novelties on the Columbia Pictures release schedule - and we'll take that up in Part Two.
Yes, indeedy do, as this poster by festival co-producer Psychotronix Scott Moon proclaims, on this coming Saturday, December 15, flying in the face of everyone's better judgment yet again, the KFJC Psychotronix Film Festival returns to besmirch the hallowed halls of Foothill College's Room 5015 from 7-11PM!
Now what does Psychotronix mean, anyway? Good question!
"Psychotronix" is a variation on Michael Weldon's absolutely essential book, The Psychotronic History Of Cinema, which remains the one and only source covering all varieties of under-the-radar B-films: monster movies, exploitation, horror films, science fiction, rock 'n' roll revues, etc.
Reacting against the very idea of devoting a screening to one director, one genre or one series, our 16mm celluloid concoctions expand the concept by adding a few more ingredients to the celluloid cauldron. For starters, we like snack bar ads and kidvid gone wrong, terribly wrong.
Also included in the delirious mix: weird cartoons, 1930's comedy shorts, vintage TV commercials, silent film clips, well-meaning but awkward educational films, Scopitones and Soundies.
There will very likely be at least one clip from the festival's inspiration, Mr. Ernie Kovacs.
Our modus operandi: throw a wide variety of footage from different places, genres, techniques or time periods together for no apparent reason. If we can establish a subject link or a Monty Python-esque visual or verbal link between the segments, great, but this is not absolutely necessary. Or to make a further Python reference, this could be called the "And Now For Something Completely Different" approach to film programming.
As far as content goes, the more obscure, the lower the budget, the more under-the-radar, the more pointlessly bizarre, the better.
We consider the evening a smashing success when the audience starts heckling the entertainment before the projection lamp goes on.
