Malice in the Palace

The Three Stooges has always been some of the many actors that I have loved. I love just about every one of the shorts that they have made. I love all six of the Stooges (Curly, Shemp, Moe, Larry, Joe, and Curly Joe)! All of the shorts are hilarious and also star many other great actors and actresses which a lot of them was in many of the shorts! In My opinion The Three Stooges is some of the greatest actors ever and is the all time funniest comedy team!

This is a good three Stooges short. Vernon Dent, George J. Lewis,and Frank Lackteen all performed well. There and many funny scenes here and The Three Stooges are hilarious! There is another short very similar like this one called Rumpus in the Harem. My favorite of the two is Malice in the Palace but I recommend to see both of these Three Stooges shorts!

There are some pretty funny gags in this Three Stooges comedy, and they generally make good use of a deliberately far-fetched, silly setup. It has a couple of slow stretches, but the high points easily make up for them. Most of it relies on standard Stooge gag ideas, with a couple of gags borrowed from other sources and one or two new ideas thrown in.

It starts off with Moe, Larry, and Shemp as the staff of a restaurant in which Vernon Dent and two other heavies plot a diamond robbery. The first part of the movie takes place there, followed by a wacky sequence in which the Stooges attempt to recover the diamond.

The restaurant sequence combines some slapstick with an extended gag that uses a dog and a cat. This gag goes on too long, especially for an idea that was not entirely new, and it mostly ends up slowing things down (although there are other viewers who have found it entertaining). The last part is mostly physical comedy, most of which is done with good timing and an appropriate sense of the absurd.

Overall, it's too uneven to be considered among the best Stooges comedies, but the highlights certainly make it worth watching.

The writers of the Three Stooges over the years really loved to use corny names. Check out the ones here: "Ginna Rumma, Affa Dollar, Hassan Ben Soba, the Cafe Casbahbah, the Emir Of Shmow," and more. For instance, check out the names on a map shown late in the film.

Anyway, this Arab-flavored story turns out to be a diamond heist story with the boys trying to capture it while disguised in Santa Claus suits. Yes, it's as absurd as it sounds! Actually, the main part of this film - almost half of it - is the restaurant bit with the thieves (and two Stooges) thinking they were eating the house cat and dog. Those comedy bits are hilarious especially when Larry and Moe "pet" their food or try to bite into it.

My favorite face in here is Frank Lackteen, one of those tough-looking mugs with the bony, scarred face that would be perfect in an Al Capone gangster film. In real life, he was a Lebanese man who played a lot of bit parts for many years on TV and in the movies, beginning way back in the silent film era.

By the way, note the "trivia" on the title page here under "Fun Stuff" to read an interesting comment about the deleted scene with Curly in this film. Kind of sad, but I'd like to have seen what he looked like.

Overall, this is very entertaining even if much of the material had been used before in various forms.

MALICE IN THE PALACE is probably Shemp's best and most popular short. I can't say it's number 1 on my list, but I'd make it number 5. The best scene is when everyone thinks Larry is chopping up cats and dogs in the kitchen.

My Rating: A++

While this Three Stooges short may feature the Stooges at a time they weren't quite at the level they once were, there's nevertheless one thing this short remains and that's funny. Yes the routine with Larry and the cat and the dog does steal the spotlight and does provide this episode's funniest moments (admittedly a portion of this routine may have been stolen from Abbott and Costello but even if that's the case, the Stooges still put their own distinctive, zany stamp on the subject matter that's for rootin' tootin' certain) but there's also fun to be found later when the Stooges, all disguised as Santa Claus, must get past a huge, hulking bodyguard wielding a great big sword! How they do this proves more surprising than I and I'd assume most other folks would expect and there's even more hilarious, unpredictable Stooges hijinks in this one than that.