Three Missing Links

A B.O. Production, Jilted in the Jungles, shot on location in darkest Africa once the deal is inked.

Two ape men and a gorilla with the iffy starlet. Voodoo love candy turns the tables on a real gorilla invading the set.

Calling All Curs

A companion piece to Raymond McCarey’s Men in Black.

Dognappers infiltrate a dog & cat hospital after a prize poodle.

Oily to Bed, Oily to Rise

This great fable of the Great Depression opens with an elaborate gag sequence about a log that can’t be cut and a wagon with a hole in it, followed by Curly’s seven wishes that come true (he wishes for a car, a cigar, roast chicken and dumplings and hot apple pie, three beautiful girls, a meeting with the crooks who bilked the widow Jenkins, a Justice of the Peace to marry the girls, and quintuplets in honor of the Dionnes).

Three Sappy People

A rich young dame who doesn’t know whether she’s coming or going receives three telephone company repairmen in the guise of psychiatrists.

You Nazty Spy!

Moronika for Morons, who shouldn’t read books anyway so they burn them.

Hailstone the dictator is put up by arms manufacturers to boost their business.

Etc., etc., in a very exact portrait of Hitler, Goering and Goebbels as a triumvirate of loony psychopaths.

Rockin’ Thru the Rockies

Hoofers and showfolk bags by wagon to Frisco, beset by Escrow Indians and a bear, sail a prairie schooner.

Nutty but Nice

The Stooges are proprietors of Ye Olde Colonial Inn. They clear a man of suspicion and return him to his little daughter, who is pining away without him.

This is to be compared with Uncivil Warriors (Civil War) and Back to the Woods (Pilgrim Fathers) for its development of a theme from American History for The Three Stooges.

From Nurse to Worse

It seems a good idea to earn a government pension by enrolling Curly as a canine, but the examining psychiatrist wishes to operate.

Remade for the benefit of Termite Terrace as A Bird in the Head.

Cookoo Cavaliers

Old fish peddlers (cf. Marshall’s Towed in a Hole) give up and go south to Mexico.

Their saloon (spelled “celune”) is a beauty salon, they wreck the local economy of minxes and flee with pistoleras at their backsides.

Boobs in Arms

Greeting-card salesmen sign up under duress, sleep out the war and are hoist with their own canard.

So Long Mr. Chumps

The Three Stooges go to jail via a gag later employed by David Miller in Lonely Are the Brave, and escape via another gag expanded with a wealth of voluminous detail in a famous full-length comedy by Jerry Lewis.

I’ll Never Heil Again

The magnificent sequel to You Nazty Spy! reviews the Axle leaders (Chisolini and the rest) in a conga line against Hailstone and Herring and the Minister of Propaganda as they fight over the globe in Hailstone’s office.

The Three Stooges once again pull out all the stops to get the right note of spot-on madness.

In the Sweet Pie and Pie

Millionairesses-to-be wed The Mushroom Murder Gang on the eve of the hanging (a radio sportscaster covers the event), the real killers confess, the Stooges wage a pie fight in the mansion and win reconciliation.

Loco Boy Makes Good

The old lady’s plight moves chiselers to save Ye Olde Pilgrim Hotel with redecoration, the floor show tells the tale.

What’s the Matador

After a visit to their agents, and a bit of Mexican “doubletalk”, the great centerpiece (a bit of bedroom farce), which was elaborated by Blake Edwards for Capucine and Peter Sellers in The Pink Panther. Then it’s head to head with el toro.

Three Smart Saps

A variation of Poe’s Dr. Tarr and Prof. Fether, in which the Stooges go to prison to liberate the incarcerated warden, and find a rumba in the belly of the beast. An unusual format from Bruckman and White, featuring a long musical number and a photogenic finish.

Sock-A-Bye Baby

The juniorest of Stooges gets left on their doorstep, they feed him celery and radishes and beer and bicarbonate, with herrings.

It’s all a misunderstanding, so they hit the hay.

A Blitz on the Fritz

“Yeah, it went that way.” Langdon “for the Defense...”

“‘Place part in position easiest to the sufferer,’” the First Aid gag from Wellman’s Thunder Birds, “let’s see how it turns out, anyway.”

A general levy (“heil heel!”), a scrap drive outfits the whole army of ‘em.

Dizzy Detectives

New cops (late of carpentering doors in floors) catch the mysterious ape man robbing the city into a panic, also a wolf in sheep’s clothing.

Back From the Front

Sailors sunk in the merchant marine get aboard the S.S. Schickelgruber for a shakedown cruise.

Further adventures of Hailstone and Herring and the Minister of Propaganda, briefly.

Dizzy Pilots

A draft deferment to build the Buzzard (this takes place in the Republic of Cannabeer).

The special rubber coating coats Moe, he fills with gas and soars.

The test flight fails, they’re in the Army now (Boobs in Arms).

Crash Goes the Hash

Pressmen break the grand story for a rival newspaper of sorts, Prince Shaam of Ubeedarn will not marry the Van Bustle dame, because he is a sham.

The Yoke’s on Me

Japs escape from a relocation center to menace the farming Stooges, their ostrich eats blasting powder and drops egg-bombs.

Gents Without Cents

The girls upstairs have an acrobatic dance act, help the boys fill a slot for Manny Weeks at a shipyard revue.

“Two Souls and a Heel” is the Niagara Falls routine (“slowly I turned”) with a double interest, “At the Front” is the story of a gallant rider.

No Dough Boys

Jap soldiers vanquished in a Latherneck shaving-cream ad take a break from the photo shoot still in uniform and cause alarm, then stumble on a Nazi hideout and three Japs from a sunken submarine.

The Pacific theater, complete with The Three Stooges’ impressions of Jap gymnasts “right from the Winter Garden in Berlin.”

Idiots Deluxe

Moe’s on trial for mayhem, his nerves were shot, he tells the judge, and there was a bear in the woods…

If a Body Meets a Body

This is the classic haunted house gag given a tight analysis for maximum effect, and hinges largely on two gags spoiled by the plot summary, namely the bird-in-an-object (sometimes a roast turkey but here a skull) and the deflation of the final cash amount.

Beer Barrel Polecats

What, No Beer? So the Stooges brew some and go to jail, per In the Sweet Pie and Pie and So Long Mr. Chumps.

Uncivil War Birds

An exceptionally fine perception of “so great peculiarities” from the losing side, ultimately.

Three Loan Wolves

A furious gangster threatens pawnbrokers with his protection racket, they fend him off while his moll dumps her sister’s infant on them.

The tale is told in flashback to the kid, now old enough to be a wiseacre.

G.I. Wanna Home

The postwar housing crunch viscerally realized as a satire, even a vacant lot is no home for long, so the demobbed Stooges bring their new wives home to a handmade house, the final gag expresses the comedown.

Rhythm and Weep

Suicidal showbizzers band together for the Stooge Follies under the auspices of a bonkers nabob.

Half-Wits Holiday

A Dissertation upon Roast Pygmalion. It begins with a stellar and instructive example of academic jibber-jabber, then abstracts the posturing for its real content, before redressing all indignities in the end, having borrowed George Bernard Shaw for the purpose.

Hold That Lion!

The Stooges have an inheritance, it’s swiped by an investment broker.

A feline on the crook’s train drives them into his arms, they count the money.

Fiddlers Three

The Three Stooges as Shakespearean clowns to Old King Cole, they save his daughter the princess.

The world doth not know what it misseth, that ye fools were not hired for the Bard on film (but see Gottler’s Woman Haters, and there is Trevor Peacock as Tony Lumpkin).

Heavenly Daze

Shemp goes to hell, unless he can reform the Stooges.

Varied slightly, but retaining the fountain pen that writes under whipped cream, as Bedlam in Paradise.

Sing a Song of Six Pants

The rare theme would have been stated by Samuel Fuller in Tigrero.

A bank robber hides out as a store-window dummy in a tailor shop, leaves incriminating evidence and comes back for it.

“You came in to me,” says needling Shemp.

All Gummed Up

The landlord in his second childhood, the pharmacists with a youth formula.

An extensive picture of the Cut Throat Drug Store and its clientele. The formula has a false start with Mexican jumping beans.

The landlord’s wife celebrates with Marshmallow Jumbo (Bubble Trouble).

I’m a Monkey’s Uncle

Love and war among the cavemen.

The Ghost Talks

The sterling original of Creeps, a tale of moving men and the spirit of Peeping Tom, who only is moved by Lady Godiva.

Hokus Pokus

The Great Svengarlic walks the Stooges out on a skyscraper flagpole, and that’s not all, the girl in a wheelchair they faithfully serve is an insurance fraud.

Malice in the Palace

Structurally this is a magnificent variant of Oily to Bed, Oily to Rise, with a reprise of the Santa Claus gag (“Who goes there?” “Santy Claus!” “Aw, there ain’t no Santy Claus!”), and a long opening sequence that looks like a sketch for Samuel Beckett’s Film. The cinematic coup is a one-minute take of a detailed comic map, at the end of which Moe’s hand appears to point the route to the stronghold of Shmow, whose Emir, Omagosh, is seen in the film’s topnote reading the funnies and giggling with the diamond from the Tomb of Rootin-Tootin on his turban.

Dunked in the Deep

A Cold War espionage caper filled with gags that are beautifully absurd, like Shemp’s hammock gag (cigarette ignites oil drum full of rags, ship rocking moves drum under hammock, burning ropes drop Shemp on drum).

Hugs and Mugs

The Three Stooges as upholsterers discover there’s more to women than meets the eye, and iron the stuffing out of some crooks.

Love at First Bite

The Stooges get stiff waiting for their war brides (an Italian, a Viennese, and a Parisian), land on the dock with a dynamite blast, and give a warm welcome.

Self Made Maids

A Dalinian portrait session with girls and flowers and ants leads to engagements all around, but the father-in-law is an interposition.

The painters in kilts try the Highland fling, but have to bow down and tickle the old man’s foot.

Three Hams on Rye

The Bride Wore Spurs on Broadway, with The Three Stooges as stagehands guarding against a critic and acting in the “Southern scene” (Uncivil Warriors), a show-stopper.

Slaphappy Sleuths

“Brainy detectives” go undercover as gas station attendants to stop a string of holdups.

A tribute to the automobile in its middle movement, where Emil Sitka gets his flivver poppin’.

The Onion Oil Co., “In Onion — There Is Strength”.

Baby Sitters Jitters

A very important remake of Mutts to You (dir. Chase) for the intricacy of the parlor comedy around a simple job of babysitting for a divorced couple.

Don’t Throw That Knife

Another model (What’s the Matador) Blake Edwards had for the bedroom farce in The Pink Panther.

Census-takers encounter a jealous husband and knife-thrower in a magic act with his wife.

Scrambled Brains

The Cymbeline theme of the prospective father-in-law, who has poor Shemp so jittery he sees three hands playing the piano when he practices, four even.

Or is it Nora, the nurse with the hideous face he sees as pulchritude?

Pest Man Wins

A Dalinian remake of Ants in the Pantry.

“Oh, Madame! You have ants!”

“Don’t get personal, Fifi.”

Madame is a pâtissière, entertaining restaurateurs.

A Missed Fortune

The Mystery Motor program calls Shemp, it’s a Bunyan 8. They’re in the chips, floozies want in on the action. The Government takes it all.

Corny Casanovas

Larry and Moe wear themselves out fighting over a dish Shemp’s also engaged to, she bashes him and takes a powder.

Wedding preparations include a machine-gun tack applicator for reupholstering the davenport.

He Cooked His Goose

Larry the wonder-worker with women, they’re like clams in the palm of his hand.

Revised as Triple Crossed, to favor the intrigue.

Three Dark Horses

A masterpiece of the Stooges’ art. Stooges hired as delegates for one candidate switch to the other for a bribe at the convention.

The key gag is Wick and Digger bashing each other across the delegates, it ends in a bath even among crooks, “so it shouldn’t be a total loss.”

The parrot-in-a-turkey gag also reaches a pinnacle here.

Cuckoo on a Choo Choo

A railroad car named Schmow, and yet the principal spoof is of Harvey.

Shemp is a rumpot who won’t marry the girl whose younger sister can’t marry Larry unless he does (it’s a family tradition), they’ve stolen the car, Moe is a railroad dick in love with the older sister.

Shemp sees Carrie, a six-foot bird, the whole situation stinks.

Up in Daisy’s Penthouse

Pa Stooge is set to marry into a gang of crooks.

Ma’s heartbroken, Shemp, Jr. and Moe and Larry take action.

They go over the side, of course, but land on their feet more or less.

It happened in Lord’s 3 Dumb Clucks.

Booty and the Beast

This time (Hold That Lion!) it’s a housebreaker and safecracker they unwittingly help, but the Stooges with lion on train retrieve the dough.

Loose Loot

The summation of Hold That Lion! and Booty and the Beast, with a theatrical theme on the funfair side and pirate girls and Napoleon (Frederick the Great is evidently a magician).

Tricky Dicks

Cops at the station house, detectives, grill a murder suspect whose polysyllabic confession evades them. The real killer likes the thrill, they keep brushing him off when he comes to confess, he opens up with an inexhaustible revolver and is subdued.

The Stooges of Section 13.

Spooks!

A 3-D remake of A Bird in the Head, which opens with the Stooges in bed being awakened by a man shouting at them, “Gentlemen!” “Where?”, they reply.

This is where the spectator gets his eyes gouged by Moe, his behind kicked by somebody, and the blowtorch and the flying pie are not withheld.

Pardon My Backfire

Garage mechanics ejected from their girls’ home by the prospective father-in-law deal with a horn at work and then a bunch of crooks on the lam.

In 3-D, the spectator is a Stooge.

Rip, Sew and Stitch

A close variant of Sing a Song of Six Pants.

The sonnenfleck gag (Pierrot Solaire) is gone, and the bank-robber’s moll, but the tailors get their reward.

Bubble Trouble

The Stooges as pharmacists restore the landlady’s youth and make a monkey out of the landlord, also Moe.

Musty Musketeers

The wooers of Fiddlers Three in close combat with the villain, a magician with designs on the princess.

Pals and Gals

A further analysis of Bernds’ Out West (crook mistakes sore vein in Shemp’s leg for gold mine), with material from Lord’s Goofs and Saddles.

Knutzy Knights

Squareheads of the Round Table, with a play-within-the-play on weeping for your supper, rendered by King Arthur’s troubadours.

Shot in the Frontier

Love and gunfights in the Wild West (cp. I’m a Monkey’s Uncle), with pointed reference to Zinnemann’s High Noon.

Scotched in Scotland

A dark house mystery in a well-lighted place, the castle of a Scottish earl. The staff are schemers after the old man’s goods, even wear masks to frighten the Stooges away, detectives.

Fling in the Ring

A crooked fight fixed so the Stooges’ Chopper Kane don’t win. The Gorilla breaks his hand in a rage over a cream puff in the alley behind the Majestic Arena, so all bets are off.

Of Cash and Hash

Caught in the crossfire at an armored car robbery, the Stooges are treated as suspects.

Shivering Sherlocks rearranged to give the theme of innocence assailed.

Bedlam in Paradise

Shemp’s dream of Uncle Mortimer as God, converting Moe and Larry.

He wakes up with his ass on fire.

Gypped in the Penthouse

A diamond-hungry dame puts Larry and Shemp in the Woman Haters Club. When her husband Moe joins, they grocerize her.

Stone Age Romeos

Intrepid explorers bring back footage from I’m a Monkey’s Uncle, starring themselves.

Wham-Bam-Slam!

Listless Shemp is revived by the malarkey of a quack and his fraudulent flivver, it’s the excitement of the discovery.

Hot Ice

A-1 Correspondence School graduates apply at Scotland Yard, and as yard men pick up the trail of the Punjab Diamond.

A brilliant variation of Crime on Their Hands (and The Hot Scots), directed by Edward Bernds.

Blunder Boys

In which Larry is an unconscious war-hero, Moe is sesquipedalian, and Shemp a year of days off.

Even going to college isn’t enough for them to catch the Eel, a robber in ladies’ clothing.

Husbands Beware

A re-composition of Brideless Groom with a Keatonesque prelude on surreal married strife and a gag ending.

Creeps

Sir Tom’s defense of the castle against movers, a fairy tale of “knights and ghosts and killings and murders” for the Stooges, Jr.

Flagpole Jitters

The astounding alteration of Hokus Pokus that makes Svengarlic the hypnotist a ganef and the reward for his capture a beneficence.

For Crimin’ Out Loud

A close variant of Who Done It? sends the Miracle Detective Agency to the rescue of a racket-bound city councilman, and proves that what puts a fire under a detective is a hot clue.

Rumpus in the Harem

The girls have to pay a virgin tax or go to the Sultan, “and we don’t have the money!”

The great variant of Malice in the Palace.

Hot Stuff

Urania has a new secret rocket fuel, Anemians want it.

The Stooges have to concoct something in a lab, it eats through the floor down to the cell below, freeing the captive Professor and powering a jeep to safety, combustively.

Scheming Schemers

Plumbers bring up a diamond ring from the washbasin, rescue a Van Brocklin portrait from thieves, and rearrange the plumbing and wiring so the real Niagara Falls pours through the television screen, all in the same day.

Commotion on the Ocean

The famous watermelons used to carry atomic secrets to the enemy.

Janitors, would-be reporters, lackeys, forced stowaways in the getaway, the Stooges get the goods.

Hoofs and Goofs

The Stooges’ sister, with her startling resemblance to Moe, is one year dead and a cart horse about to deliver a foal, in Joe’s dream about reincarnation.

Muscle Up a Little Closer

A satire on a Strindbergian theme, with a very dry remarkableness about the quick unprepared gags, a sort of transistorized drollery in the blowtorch work, and a rare “gag perdu” conveyed by the sound of one hand slapping, which prepares the ultimate triumph of the sound effects department.

A Merry Mix-Up

Three treys of Stooges, all brothers, to top Laurel & Hardy in Our Relations, and with a Marty joke.

Bachelors, bridegrooms and husbands, mismanaged by the girls at a champagne breakfast, and a waiter.

Space Ship Sappy

A voyage to the backward planet Sunev, where the natives all are cannibalistic Amazons.

Guns A Poppin!

The second version of Idiots Deluxe.

The bear drives off with Moe’s car, never to be seen again.

Wild Bill Hiccup and the sheriff shoot it out in and around the cabin.

Horsing Around

Joe’s dream of their sister reincarnated as a horse and dam continues unabated as the Stooges bring her to her mate, Schnapps the Circus Horse, about to be shot for an infirm leg.

Rusty Romeos

A recipe for flapjacks, then Corny Casanovas, Larry’s fancy footwork, and Joe with a surprise ending.

Outer Space Jitters

The Venusians serve inedible food, you chew and chew it, move your jaw with your hands yet, and even that doesn’t help. You take a drink of water and have to spit it out. “That’s not water,” they tell you, “it’s battery acid.”

Naturally you make a break for it, especially when a reanimated monster (Dan Blocker) is on your tail. On your way back to Earth, you fill your pockets with gold bricks like an Israelite fleeing Egypt.

But it’s all a bedtime story for the tots, isn’t it? Of course, but one look at the babysitter and you’re out the window in a dash.

Not so funny, you would say, nowadays. Oh, funny, funnee!

Quiz Whizz

Joe doesn’t buy the Brooklyn Bridge with his TV winnings, “that was sold yesterday.”

The crooks make them Montgomery wards (All the World’s a Stooge). A blonde leads Larry and Moe blindfolded, Joe has to eat his guardian’s cigar.

But they get wise, turn the tables and get the drop and the check, E Pluribus Unum.

Fifi Blows Her Top

Gents in a Jam, with an admixture of Love at First Bite, going back to the original Laurel & Hardy Unaccustomed as We Are— for the finish.

Pies and Guys

The Amalgamated Association of Morons, Local 6⅞, gets the point of a Pygmalion bet.

Imaginary cuisine, “just like the cans my mother used to make,” a cat’s dinner is preferable.

Reading lessons make them all, in Moe’s word, “pedantic”.

A general pie fight is the last word (Hoi Polloi, Half-Wits Holiday, Pest Man Wins) on the subject.

Sweet and Hot

Dr. Gansamacher cures Tiny of her great aversion to singing and dancing in public.

Larry is the booking agent, Joe is Tiny’s brother.

Her father whipped her when she was a lass, to wean her of stage fright.

Flying Saucer Daffy

Joe the Cinderella of the outfit gets a picture of a spacecraft from beyond the galaxy, world fame, and a couple of galactic beauties.

Larry and Moe get time in jail for purloining his spoiled snapshot of a squirrel.

Oil’s Well That Ends Well

A recapitulation of Oily to Bed, Oily to Rise, with a variant theme of uranium-hunting, and Joe on top of it.

Triple Crossed

A stirring soap of marital intrigue starring Larry as the heel, Joe as the schmow, and likewise Moe.

Sappy Bull Fighters

Los comicos americanos have a bull act in the Plaza de Toros, Joe fights a real one.

What’s the Matador, abstracting the love interest for a truth stranger than fiction.