Yes, We Have No Bonanza

Yes, We Have No Bonanza (1939)

*** (out of 4)

Set in the Old West (although there are cars here), the Three Stooges find themselves working as waiters but their goals are to marry the woman they love who also work in the bar. That's nearly impossible as the girl's father owes money to the bar owner but the boys set out to get their riches in gold and think they find it. This certainly isn't classic Stooges but there are enough funny moments here to make it worth viewing. One of the best gags is a scene where Curly throws Moe a bear, which he catches but when he tries to throw Larry one he misses and it ends up all over Moe. Other nice gags include a sequence where the boys think their mule has eaten a stick of dynamite as well as another great one when they finally discover some money. The start of the film also has Moe and Larry singing a couple songs, which are pretty good, although the woman singing with them are pretty bad. I'm not quite sure why so much of the film takes place in the 1800s yet we then get a few moments with cars that would make you think it was current times. This here really isn't that big of a deal as there are plenty of laughs.

It's not the old west that the Three Stooges are doing their thing in Yes We Have No Bonanza. Instead Moe, Larry, and Curly are in the more modern west of Roy Rogers B films with people using automobiles as much as horses.

The boys are working as waiters, singing waiters even in a saloon where they hope to make a stake and go prospecting. Lending authenticity to this western spoof is traditional movie western villain Dick Curtis who owns the saloon the Stooges work in.

Both in the town scenes and later out on the desert I have to say that Dick Curtis looked like he was as enjoying this as much as the Stooges. In a sense Curtis was like Douglass Dumbrille who was a serious villain in many films, but then did comic villains and did them well with people like Abbott&Costello and the Marx Brothers.

I guess the title sort of gives it away that the boys don't get fame and fortune, just a lot of laughs.

I know I've seen this one a million times,BUT Is this the one where Curley says"Ain't Nature Wonderful"?I have a tapeworm's lunch bet on it! According to your guidelines, a comment have to be 10 lines or more. I don't think anyone of the Stooges shorts had more than ten lines of dialog, and you want 10 lines of comments? That's stretching things a little, don't you think, unless of course, the one's submitting comments are a bit on the long winded sort. I'm having difficulty stretching this request longer then I have proceeded so far. I still need two lines in order for this request to go through. I've already over burnt the toast for the tapeworm lunch, on the pure premise that I will be losing this bet in the first place, because this isn't the type of site I was looking for. A place where Stooge devotees could get an answer to questions that goggle doesn't even possess. Is that 10 yet?Well I'll be a monkey's uncle. It rottenly is! And I know that was spelled wrong, Spelt, if you're from the U.K.

Larry, Curly, and Moe work at a western saloon. They try to help three sisters who are working to pay off their father's debt to the saloon owner. The saloon owner and an accomplice had robbed a bank for $40k. The Stooges mistakenly assumed that they had found a gold mine. They hope to mine the gold themselves to pay for the girls' debt.

A lot of this is too stupid even for a Stooges short. Why would they assume that the guy had a good mine simply by his $20 coin? I know it's the Stooges. It doesn't have to make sense but I don't like it. Maybe it would be better if the loot is a bag of gold nuggets and one of the nuggets fell out of the guy's pocket. As always, I love the humor and I love Curly. Overall, this is a good fun short.

In May 1939's "Yes, We Have No Bonanza," the Stooges appear as singing waiters at an Old West saloon alongside three gorgeous singing cowgirls whom they harbor marriage hopes. They decide to go prospecting for gold to save the ladies' father from debtors prison. By chance they arrive at the same location the loot the saloon owner's associate had buried after robbing a bank. While setting up camp, Moe lights a fuse of dynamite to blow a hole in the ground just before Curly hits him on the head with a rock. In anger Moe throws the lighted stick of dynamite at Curly, missing him but landing at the feet of their working mule Yorrick. Panicking, the two are preoccupied with fetching water to douse the fuse while their dog snatches the dynamite and places it into a case of food. The explosive blows up, and they think Yorrick is scattered in a million pieces, with slabs of meat landing on their head. Moe, saddened by their mule's demise, quotes from Shakespeare's 'Hamlet,' "Alas, poor Yorrick, I knew him well." In the opening scene of "Yes, We Have No Bonanza," Curly is seen riding an Ingo-Bike, otherwise known as an 'Exercycle." Popularized in the mid-1930s, these unique bikes contain a platform where the rider rocks back and forth propelling the large rear wheel to project the bicycle forward. One group of enthusiasts traveled on these bikes in the late 1930s from Chicago to Miami in 30 days. The Stooges' film received its name from Curly's line said late in the short, paraphrasing the popular 1923 song, 'Yes, We Have No Bananas." It's remarkable the title was used to name the long-running 1960s Western TV series, 'Bonanza,' with Lorne Greene and Michael Landon. The 14-season television program's name is also a term miners use when they strike gold or silver.