Knuckleheads and wiseguys

What we need, a new generation of teenage boys going around saying---

"Spread out!"

"Pick two!"

"Oh, a wiseguy!"

"C'mere, porcupine."

"Soitenly!"

"Woo woo woo woo woo!"

And "Nyuck nyuck nyuck."

As you may already know, I loved the Stooges when I was a kid.  I still have a warm place in my heart for them.  But I haven't seen one of their shorts all the way through since I was about twelve and I'm not sure I could sit still for one now.  Twenty minutes of pokes in the eye, hair and ear pulling, nose smacking, face slapping, and other forms of hilarity and hijinx like that would probably not have me rolling on the floor the way it used to.  I'm pretty sure I couldn't stand a 90 minute feature film.

Come to think of it, I couldn't stand it even when I was a kid.  I don't recall enjoying Snow White and the Three Stooges or The Three Stooges Go Around the World in a Daze.

Weird autobiographical note:  I saw those movies in grade school, and I don't mean when I was in grade school, I mean I saw them in school.  The nuns used to treat us to a movie once a month.  Friday afternoons we would all file into the auditorium to watch something like Pollyana, The Miracle of the White Stallions, Five Weeks in a Balloon, or The Ghost and Mr Chicken.  But we also got to watch the Stooges.  I'm surprised mobs of mothers didn't march on the school.  Women aren't supposed to like the Stooges and maybe Sister Mary Carmel, our principal, allowed them to keep us boys placated, but I always suspected she was laughing her beads off at the back of the auditorium.

Like I said, I didn't care for their movies though.  Of course I didn't.  They didn't have Curly in them.  Or even Shemp.

And that's going to be the trouble with the Farrelly Brothers' movie.

No Curly.  No Shemp.

No Moe or Larry either.

Jim Carrey will probably be a better substitute for Curly than Curly-Joe DeRita, but he'll still be a substitute, and I'll accept no substitutes.  The novelty of Sean Penn as Larry will wear off in five seconds.  And the idea of having Benecio Del Toro play Moe is just sick.  When Moe took a hammer or a crowbar to Curly's head, you knew the hammer or the crowbar was going to get the worst of it.  When Del Toro threatens someone with a tool, you expect that someone to end up dead.

I just can't see the point of doing a Stooges movie without the real Stooges.  As Wev McEwan says, the casting might work for a biopic.  At least then Penn, Carrey, and Del Toro would have characters to play.  But Larry, Moe, and Curly weren't characters.  They were shticks.  The plots of their movies were excuses for them to repeat the same bits of business over and over again, and the Stooges were always the Stooges whether they were supposed to be doctors, ice men, private eyes, soldiers, or spies.  If the movie is true to the spirit of the Stooges, then Penn, Carrey, and Del Toro will just be doing impersonations, and no matter how good the impersonations are, the real deal is better, so why not just watch some of the old classics and save the money?

(Make sure you follow the link to Wev's place to see her photoshop wizardry.)

I can see the point, and the possibilities, of doing a Marx Brothers movie.  I wouldn't want the Farrelly Brothers directing it, but it could be done and done well.  That's because the Marx Brothers played characters.  Groucho, Harpo, and Chico were not just Julius, Arthur, and Leonard Marx wearing costumes and clowning around.  And while Groucho was always Groucho, he changed a bit from movie to movie.  Professor Horace Wagstaff was a slightly different person from President Rufus T. Firefly who was slightly differet from Captain Spaulding the African Explorer.  Chico's character varied a bit too, although usually just to the degree of larceny in his heart.  Harpo may have always seemed to have been the same, but the point of the character was that he was never the same.  Except for chasing a pretty girl and stopping the movie dead at some point to play the harp, his essence was his unpredictability.  His capacity for creating chaos was unlimited because he had no shtick.  He was constantly improvising.  Jim Carrey would have lots of room to maneuver as Harpo (not that giving Carrey lots of room is a good thing), while as Curly he'll be constrained by the expected shtick.

Then there's the matter of the jokes.

There are no jokes in a Stooges movie.

Groucho, and Chico, are the sum of their jokes.  They are created by their words.  (Not to get all meta-critical, but Harpo's silence is a commentary on the fact that character is a product of language.  Harpo's frightening because he is wordless and he forces other people into speechlessness, wordlessness, and in the process deconstructs their characters---he robs people of their individuality.)  There's more to playing Groucho than waving a big black cigar and waggling your eyebrows.  You've got to get the lines right, and that doesn't happen just by sounding like him.  The wit and humor are in the jokes, and you have to find them there yourself the way Groucho found them.

This is a way of saying that the Marx Brothers are written characters, while the Stooges are mostly dumbshow and clowning.

This is why stage revivals of Room Service and Animal Crackers have worked.  There are actual plots, the dialog is meant to reveal character and move the story along, and there are characters to play.  Not long after the curtain goes up, the audience can forget they're watching "the Marx Brothers" and get caught up in the adventures of Captain Spaulding.

Meanwhile, on the subject of brothers making movies, besides the Marx Brothers, the Howard Brothers, and the Farrelly Brothers, we have the Coen Brothers, and I hear from Steven Hart that they're going to do a remake of True Grit.  I'm looking forward to that.  But I think I'd also like to see their version of Duck Soup.

Comments

[Bill Altreuter]

I've always liked the story that had it that a Stooges script set the scene, then had the direction, "The Stooges ENTER and do their stuff." Probably apocryphal, but I can still choose to believe it if I want to.

It is worth noting that The Marx Brothers stage hits were written by some pretty big names. George S. Kaufman wrote The Cocoanuts and Animal Crackers (and the screenplay for A Night at the Opera) although all of these had elements and gags from their vaudeville act. Irving Thalberg, a famous control freak produced A Night at the Opera and A Day at the Races-- probably their two best pictures. The Stooges, g-d bless them, never had the benefit of collaborators of that quality. It's true that the Marx Brothers' brand of comedy was more scripted, but I'm not so sure that it is accurate to say that the Bros. movies were more character driven than the Stooges-- or even that much more cerebral. The Stooges made bad puns too, you know.

I'd be inclined to ascribe the difference between the two acts as being more or less the difference between vaudeville and burlesque. But what do I know-- I'm a W.C. Fields man.

[Strider]

A remake of "True Grit"? Are you fucking kidding me? The arrogance! Who're they gonna get to play Rooster Cogburn, John Goodman? Why not do a remake of "The Searchers" and "Lonesome Dove" while they're at it?

[Dave Sikula]

I'd have let Michael Chiklis play Curly again. He nailed it in that TV movie. But for the rest, you're dead on. The Stooges relied on material they'd honed in vaudeville and nightclubs; they knew what they were doing because they'd been doing it forever, and it was organic to them. Anyone else doing that material just as material is going to suffer.

I saw the Stooges in person when I was seven. They did a personal appearance (along with "The Three Stooges in Orbit") at the brand new movie theatre in town. I had a seat right down front and had the time of my life; they were exactly what a seven-year-old wants in sophisticated humor.

"Why you ...!"

[KLG]

"Not to get all meta-critical, but Harpo's silence is a commentary on the fact that character is a product of language. Harpo's frightening because he is wordless and he forces other people into speechlessness, wordlessness, and in the process deconstructs their characters---he robs people of their individuality."

Lance, you did...but you are dead on, as usual. Keep up the good work!

[SweetSue]

It is worth noting that The Marx Brothers stage hits were written by some pretty big names. George S. Kaufman wrote The Cocoanuts and Animal Crackers (and the screenplay for A Night at the Opera) although all of these had elements and gags from their vaudeville act.
You're right, Bill, and please don't forget the great S. J. Perleman. I think "Groucho" was Perleman's alter ego.
Why didn't the producers hire Seth Rogan as Curly? He's already-um-portly. And isn't Jim Carrey six foot two or three? Penn won't be able to reach Carrey's noggin much less bash it in.
Count me as a former little girl who loved the original Three. I've never understood where the idea that girls don't laugh at the Stooges came from.
The saddder part of me thinks it's because a patriarchal society doesn't like to see girls or women laugh period.

[minstrel hussain boy]

your analysis of the stooges not being up to the length of a feature film is spot on lance. in burlesque or vaudeville they were what is called "transition acts." have you ever been to one of those megasize reviews in vegas where right after a big ass production number a magician, or a guy who plays accordian while riding a unicycle on a card table comes out for a few minutes? those folks aren't there to carry the show, or do anything but hold your attention while the stage crew changes the set and the girls change pasties.

10 to fifteen minutes of stooges is funny, stupid, violent, fast paced funny. thing is, after ten minutes you are ready for more t&a.

[chachabowl]

A Coen Bros. version of "Duck Soup"?
Javier Bardem as Harpo. 'Nuf Said.

[Ken Houghton]

"True Grit's the only movie that I've understood in years" -- was likely false for the song at the time, and certainly won't be true of the Coen Brothers, whose adaptation of either The Odyssey (they claimed) or Howard Waldrop's A Dozen Tough Jobs (much more likely) had the virtue of a soundtrack.

[Connie]

Funny you should post this now. Yesterday I almost bought Steve a birthday card with a recording of the three stooges yucking it up. I said almost...
Today (the 29th) is his B'day, by the way!

[Kevin Wolf]

Paraphrasing what I said in comments over at Shakesville, when everybody started piling on the Stooges for not being the Marx Bros: That the Marx Brothers made movies of real genius is not a stick to beat the Stooges with, besides which Moe has that covered.

I've always enjoyed the Stooges and still do. I put them on and sort of half-watch and can do so for hours, stopping on occasion to closely watch a particular bit. I'm sure much of the draw is nostalgia, but I've even grown to like some of the later shorts, so I think there's something intrinsic to the whole thing that is just plain likable. (Speaking of later shorts, you could get all "meta" again looking at Joe Besser's character, the "sissy," and its relation to prior incarnations of the same type, as personified by, say, Eric Blore. Pauline Kael has a few things to say about that "type.")

Anyway, I can't help liking the Stooges. They are what they are -- no more, no less. They are not ironic. They're self-referential only in that they repeated shtick for decades. The Stooges movie under discussion -- that anyone would even consider it -- shows how far we've come from the Stooges' film heyday and, even moreso, from the vaudeville that spawned them. And not necessarily in a good way.

[actor212]

The scary bit of the Coens doing the Marx Brothers is the sad thought that somehow, they'll sneak Nic Cage into it.

Maybe as Zeppo...I can live with that.