Search - Three Stooges - Dizzy Doctors on DVD

Four great shorts, two weak ones

Anyechka | Rensselaer, NY United States | 08/01/2006

(4 out of 5 stars)

"For the most part, the shorts included here are great, even though most of them don't really fit in with the supposed theme of medical matters or being doctors. The shorts included are:

'Dizzy Doctors' (1937), the title short. This is a really strong and funny entry, with the boys forced by their wives to go out and get jobs instead of sleeping all day and being lazy. They find work as salesmen for Brighto, which they mistakenly believe is cleaning fluid. They eventually find out it's really medicine, and while hiding from a cop whose uniform they destroyed and a man whose car they ruined, they get into the back of an ambulance and wind up at a hospital, where they begin selling and demonstrating Brighto. Maybe not one of their topmost classics, but I'd consider it a strong second-tier classic.

'Termites of 1938' finds them working as exterminators who are called to a fancy party because the dimwitted maid of the lady of the house accidentally called Acme Exterminators instead of Acme Escort Bureau. They don't realise that the guests believe they are from an escort service, and for awhile the guests are imitating their uncouth table manners. The charade falls apart while they're trying to play musical instruments, when a bunch of mice get loose and they're able to get started with exterminating the place, in the process tearing the house apart, of course. When the errant husband of the hostess comes home, things get ugly. Another strong second-tier classic.

'Brideless Groom' (1947) seems to be most people's favorite Shemp short, and it probably is his most famous short. While it is hysterically funny and an undisputed classic, I personally don't hold it as my favorite from the Shemp era (though it probably would be somewhere on my Top 10 list). It also seems as though even most people who ordinarily dismiss him out of hand or don't like to watch him just because he wasn't his equally hilarious baby brother really like this short.

'The Tooth Will Out' (1951) was originally intended for inclusion in the awful 'Merry Mavericks,' the short that was released just prior to this one, but the scene in the dentist's office ran so long that it had to be left out of the final finished product. Instead of throwing the footage away, it was reused and made into its own short. The first half is great. The beginning, showing the boys losing two jobs in fast succession and then being chased down the street by a cleaver-wielding chef, hearkens back to a lot of their shorts from the Thirties and early Forties. It's also kind of uncommon to see one of their shorts shot in an outdoor location, even for just one scene, by this point in their career, since Columbia's budget had declined so much that more often than not they were reduced to filming everything in an apartment or some other indoor location. The scenes in the dental school are also pretty good. However, the pace just slows down and it gets much less funny in the dentist's office. The Old West setting also kind of gives the short a schizophrenic feel; I know it originated in footage from one of their Western shorts (a genre that never really suited them), but the first half seemingly takes place in the modern era. It's one of those cases where the individual scenes are funny, but taken together, they just don't flow well or feel very even. They're more like sketches than a coherent whole. The ending is also pretty abrupt.

'Listen, Judge' (1952) contains recycled elements from earlier shorts ('A-Plumbing We Will Go' [1940], 'They Stooge to Conga' [1943], 'An Ache in Every Stake' [1941], and 'Crash Goes the Hash' [1944]), but it's a shining example that a short that's remade from bits and pieces of earlier ones doesn't automatically have to be dull or unfunny. There are so many hysterical scenes in this one, like the exploding birthday cake, the boys' attempts to fix the doorbell by pulling the wiring out from the walls, and Shemp's attempts at preparing and cooking a turkey (in my opinion almost as funny as his attempts at cooking in 'Baby Sitters' Jitters' [1951]). Although as great as this short is, it's kind of sad to realise that 1952 was really their last consistently great year. There were some notable exceptions during the rest of their run, as there always are (such as 'Goof on the Roof' [1953] and 'Blunder Boys' [1955]), but from 1953 on the majority of their shorts were nothing more than remakes with liberal stock footage, not that many shorts with original plots and 100% fresh footage.

'Bubble Trouble' (1953) is just one of those pitiful remakes with so much stock footage that it's a wonder why the producer and director even bothered to shoot the new footage at all. Even the original, 'All Gummed Up' (1947), wasn't that great to begin with. Over half of the footage here is pirated from that earlier short; the only changes are that the scene showing the boys and Mrs. Flint (Christine McIntyre) eating the cake with bubblegum was moved from the end to the middle, and that Mr. Flint (Emil Sitka) turns into a gorilla instead of a baby, and Moe turns into a gorilla as well, after getting chased around the room and clobbered by Mr. Flint. At least here the ending scene was better than in the original.

These shorts may not all have anything to do with the self-professed theme of the disc, and there are two clunkers, but overall it's a pretty good collection."