Loco Boy Makes Good

Times sure have changed. All one has to do is look at sign in a Three Stooges short. Here, the opening scene reads, "Haven Haven Hotel - Rooms $1 A Month - Free Showers When It Rains." Corny? Of course, but those signs in these films during the 1930s and 1940s were always fun to read, whether it advertised what line of work the Stooges were in for a particular store, or where they happened to be.....or, in this case, where they've just been thrown out of for nonpayment of rent. Hey, they were only eight months in arrears.

Later, a sign says, "The Chisel Inn Hotel - presents Nil, Null & Void - 3 Hams Who Lay Their Own Eggs - Appearing in the Kokonuts Grove."

Ouch.

Corny or whatever, the boys have a good heart and try to help an old lady keep her motel. She's being threatened with eviction and she can't afford to spruce up the place and get more business. The Stooges offer their help. As they try to fix up the place, they go through some of their typical-but-funny screw-ups.

I guess it's just "saba-toogee," as Curly says....but they get the job done somehow and the place looks stunning! Despite their ineptness, the Stooges always help out nice people in need, an endearing quality of these nitwits. Here, they bail out this nice old lady.

Along the way, we get entertained by an inadvertent magic act by Curly, which is fun to watch. So is his dancing. Curly was pretty light on his feet "for a fat guy," as his partner points out.

Overall, this was an excellent Three Stooges movie, filled with a lot of laughs. The boys were on a roll during this period.

That Great Swing music heard during Curly's dance scenes is by Skinnay Ennis' Orchestra . This music was played in the Columbia film"Blondie meets the Boss",during a Dance contest with Ennis' Band featured. One of the tunes played is a number called "Rockin' the Town",that was also in the Columbia film"Start Cheering"(also with the Stooges). Benny Goodman played the number on a Broadcast . The Ennis version also was heard on a Jukebox in the Columbia film, "The Werewolf". Columbia sure knew how to use up their stock footage and music. Curly shows what a fine dancer he was,in these scenes and Dorothy makes a very cute partner.

Larry, Curly, and Moe gets kicked out of the Happy Haven Hotel. Moe finds a newspaper story about a lawsuit against a hotel and has the idea to fake an accidental fall. Curly steps on a bar of soap and the Stooges are ready to stage their scam on the Ye Olde Pilgrim Hotel. They get angry when an evil businessman threatens to take away the hotel from the old lady who owns it. They volunteer to fix up the hotel for her.

Curly switching places with the other guy at the window seems strangely fun. It's not actually funny but it has a quirkiness to it. I love hammering the nail with Curly's head. I hope that it doesn't hurt. Rolling out the floor is fun. Quite frankly, the best way to end this is for them to screw up the renovation so badly that the entire building implodes upon them. The party is a hit and miss affair. I don't really like the tomato throw. The magic jacket is fine although some of the slower parts have obviously been cut out. It would have been smoother to finish this with the bad construction. The point should be that they are so incompetent and could never fix up the hotel.

In their first film released in 1942, January's "Loco Boy Makes Good," the Stooges use their renovation skills to update an elderly woman's rundown hotel to put her back on financial footing. Upon completion they hold a dinner gala at the hotel where a dance band entertains the guests. The film's script was co-written by Clyde Bruckman, a former director of Laurel and Hardy silents who helped write most of Buster Keaton's classics. Bruckman's fondness for alcohol in the mid-1930s constricted his filmmaking solely to scriptwriting. In his later life, he got lazy and purposely recycled gags from his and others' previous works. He borrowed one skit from Harold Lloyd's 1932 "Movie Crazy" where Curly mixes up his suit jacket with a magician's containing several props, including a rabbit, a bird and some mice. Lloyd sued Columbia Pictures, particularly Bruckman, co-writer Felix Adler and director Jules White, for half a million, claiming they violated his copyright protection. Lloyd won the court case. Other lawsuits followed by suing Bruckman's habit of stealing ideas, especially one studio, Universal Pictures, costing it thousands of dollars. By the mid-1950s Bruckman, 60, was so unemployable despite television needing scriptwriters he shot himself with a gun borrowed from Buster Keaton, leaving his body to medical science, writing, "I have no money to pay for a funeral."

In this short subject the Stooges get tossed from their dwelling for lack of rent payment. They get an idea to sue a hotel by having Curly slio on a bar of soap, but Curly can't get a slip and fall right.

But that's OK because the hotel's a rundown place owned by a sweet old lady who they feel sorry for. She hires the boys to fix her place up and there's a nice bit with them trying to lay down a linoleum floor.

Come the nightclub opening and from a dignified supper club it turns into a participatory burlesque house courtesy of the Stooges.

This on has a lot of laughs.