Phoney Cronies

Swedish dialect comedian El Brendel had made a number of Columbia two-reelers from 1936-1945 and this one knocks it out of the park with slapstick comedy and the funny teaming of Brendel and the burly Tom Kennedy. They play movers for a transfer company who are hired to deliver a set of crates to a spooky museum after hours and wind up getting chased by crooks with swords. Dudley Dickerson also steals the show as their bookkeeper/third partner and Monte Collins as a fussy client.

Tom Kennedy, El Brendel, and Dudley Dickerson are a moving company. After they destroy all of Monte Collins' possessions and break the cast on his foot, they are hired in the wee hours to move stuff into a museum. Actually it's a plan to smuggle thieves in in packing crates. Things go wrong.

This is not the first time I've seen Jules White's short-comedy division at Columbia try to replicate a Three Stooges movie. He often reused scripts, and anyway, the Stooges were his most popular series, so this tale of three nitwits who continually set themselves on fire and have pianos dropped on their heads is familiar enough, even if I can't identity the Stooges movie.

This obscure but lively slapstick comedy was probably intended by Columbia for The Three Stooges, but is quite funny as it is. Dudley Dickerson (who appeared in more Stooges shorts than any other black actor) easily steals the show; the sequence where he attempts to catch a mouse in the kitchen is priceless.