Jiggers, My Wife

Tired, forced comedy, obvious and predictable at every turn. Shemp and the rest of the cast have done this kind of thing a thousand times before--and better-- and they give it "the old college try", but the script by Zion Myers is pure by-the-numbers hackwork and producer Jules White does his usual terrible "everything but the kitchen sink" style of directing. It looks cheap, it IS cheap and it doesn't work at all. Not worth your time.

During the 1940s, Shemp Howard made a bunch of short comedies for Columbia Studios--the same folks that were making films starring his brothers, Moe and Curly Howard (of The Three Stooges). Many of them seemed a lot like second-rate Three Stooges films and in a few cases the films were remakes of his brothers' shorts. Many others were essentially films featuring Shemp and his wife fighting....this is one of those pugilistic shorts. As usual, Early Cantrell plays the angry wife and in this case she thinks he was out cheating on her when he was actually out playing poker with his friends. To try to make her happy, Shemp decides to buy the wife a used car...unfortunately, the woman selling it turned out to be Shemp's old girlfriend...and the wife completely misunderstands and thinks he's fooling around on her.

Overall, this is a very typical but not especially funny short...much like Shemp's "Open Season on Saps". Not particularly inspired nor all that enjoyable....a case of pretty much the same old stuff.

Shemp and a moment of Jules White, with Zion Myers waiting for more obvious comparisons of the Columbia B-Ranch, incredible leftovers & how incredibly comfortable this old discussion still is for a geek like me--not casting any lame comebacks, obviously against anyone else who enjoys the old comfort.

Apparently this stuff has enough chemistry and sparkle to challenge Bud, Lou, Chico and any other dead comedian I can think of (all except the Besser fan-club).

The nuisance is, I know Ms. McIntyre and Shemp always make it enough, so I'll just say I enjoy the 7/10 split....

Early Cantrell is mad at husband Shemp Howard because she thinks he spends nights out playing poker (true) and cheating on her (false). When Shemp goes to buy a car from Christine MacIntyre, Early follows him, and the broken dishes and fighting follows.

It's a standard sort of comedy short for producer-director Jules White: violent, loud sound effects and lots of broken props of the sort that are made to be broken. It was his stock in trade, and had been since the silent days, when he was directing shorts for his brother, Jack White.

It's written by Zion Myers, a cousin of Jules, and his producing partner in early sound days, when they were in charge of a couple of Buster Keaton's poorer features and the Dogville shorts at MGM. Myers was the brother of silent star Carmel Myers. Born in 1898, by 1924 he was directing Jimmy Aubrey shorts. After he and Jules White were booted from MGM, he worked on a couple of the Astaire-Rogers movies -- he was also a cousin of director Mark Sandrich. He died in 1949.

Shemp Howard and Early Cantrell basically reprised their roles from Shemp's first solo short Open Season for Saps, a remake of the 1937 Charley Chase comedy The Grand Hooter. The standard plot is another "mistaken identity" story involving Shemp getting mixed up with another woman (Christine McIntyre, obviously) interested in buying his rickety car from him. Tom Kennedy also appears briefly as Shemp's pal who gets most of the brunt of the slapstick gags, along with Symona Boniface as a nosy neighbor and Cy Schindell in his usual over-the-top performance as McIntyre's jealous serviceman husband. Not much else to say, but not one of Shemp's best.