Goofs and Saddles

If you're keeping score, yes, another one of Curly's GREATEST hits. Insanity on wheels.

Wild Bill Hiccup (Moe), Buffalo Billous (Curly) and Just Plain Bill (Larry) are hereby ordered by General Mustar (stone-face Theodore Lorch) to nab every dang cattle rustler they can get their hands on. Shoot and ask questions later!

The Three Bills (way, way out west!) eventually wind up at Longhorn Pete's (Stanley Blystone, of course) saloon. Where the action is! The place is full of no-account rustlers, but first lets have a crooked game of cards? Deuces WILD. A game you have to see. Thanks to Felix Adler's nuttier than nuttier script, Curly is the ultimate GOOF, with or without a saddle. And then there's the matter of a monkey?

The gang saddles up and chases Moe, Larry and Curly to a remote cabin, and it looks like curtains for them, although they have a secret weapon? -- a meat grinder that doubles as a machine gun! Another laugh out loud bit that makes this film a class comedy act.

Many familiar faces from B westerns; Sam Lufkin plays the colonel and Ethan Laidlaw plays the rustler boss. Ethan later moved to tv westerns, appearing in HAVE GUN, WILL TRAVEL. Look for silent screen comedian Snub Pollard as a baddie. Snub was also in tv westerns, like DEATH VALLEY DAYS, playing old timers.

Famous footnote. Joe Palma made his Stooge debut in this film. Joe later worked as a double for Shemp in the 50s, in scenes he did not complete following his death. That was him in the background shots, looking a lot like Shemp.

By the way, Larry's Just Plain Bill character was a nod to the famous radio soap opera of the same title.

Not to be missed if you're the ultimate Stooge-a-holic. Remastered on Columbia dvd, generally by decades, 30s, 40s and 50s episodes. Big thanks to METV for running these oldies Saturdays.

I'm not a fan of Westerns, even parodies of Westerns, so when I finally sat down to watch this one I kinda groaned. That groan only lasted about two seconds, because the genius of the Stooges overwhelmed whatever trepidation I had about the genre.

It's also worth noting that this is now one of my favorite Stooges films because I always especially loved when they did gags with animals. This film includes not one or two or three but four animals key to the story, thus perhaps why I loved it so much, in spite of being averse to Westerns. Highly recommended, even if you hate the genre!

This is one of the Stooges better efforts and one of their best westerns (apparently Moe didn't like doing westerns, but since they turned out to be very popular with their fans, Columbia overrode Moe's misgivings). Curly is at his peak, and there are some very funny and very clever gags (the boys disguising themselves as bushes to spy on the rustlers' camp, a "rigged" card game they play with the head bad guy, the great Stanley Blystone) and even Larry has more to do than usual, and does it well. The Stooges look like they were actually having fun making this one--Moe's aversion to westerns not withstanding--and it shows. A very good short by the boys.

Goofs and Saddles (1937)

*** (out of 4)

Spoof of the Old West has The Three Stooges playing Wild Bill Hiccup, Buffalo Bilious and Just Plain Bill as the three are sent out to try and gather information on some cattle rustlers. This here is a pretty good short as it contains a nice amount of laughs as well as some funny physical stuff but I wouldn't necessarily call it a classic. The highlight would have to be a scene where the three dress themselves as trees so that they can spy on the enemy but they end up getting too close and one of the bad guys things he sees a rabbit jump into the bushes. Axe and gun play soon follow. Another nice sequence is a poker game where the Stooges start cheating without knowing the man they're playing with just killed three other men for doing the same thing. The nice shoot out at the end makes for an entertaining way to spend 20-minutes.

Buffalo Bilious (Curly Howard), Wild Bill Hiccup (Moe Howard), and Just Plain Bill (Larry Fine) are scouts working for the US Calvary. They are sent off to catch a gang of cattle rustlers. I would have done something more imaginative with the card game. Maybe the guys could somehow draw five jokers. The found note could be shorter and funnier. I do love the meat grinder idea. It's a fun way to use gunfight. This is fine Stooges.