Director: Stanley Kramer
Cast: Spencer Tracy, Milton Berle, Sid Caesar, Literally Everyone
Have I Seen It Before: Oh, sure. It was one of my parents’ favorite films. At the tender age of ten, I was entranced both by anything with the Three Stooges in it, and by the fact that it could only be contained by two (count them, two!) VHS tapes, which obviously meant it was a movie meant for grown-ups.
I’m sad to report that the Stooges show up for all of five seconds, do absolutely nothing*** it bored me to tears—such is the relationship of a ten-year-old to a grown-up movie.
Did I Like It: Spoiler alert: I must have dozed off—and at that for maybe a moment—and missed The Three Stooges entirely.
That doesn’t exactly bode well for a revised take on the film.
If comedy really does live in a close-up, then nobody bothered to tell Mr. Kramer. The scope is too epic, and the pace doesn’t speed up to justify such things.
Maybe I’m still just a ten-year-old at heart.
*Really, that thing runs a couple of weeks and it careens wildly into a few weeks where no one felt like laughing for any reason whatsoever. Thank goodness the President wasn’t a character (they probably could have fit Vaughn Meader in there, right?) or they would have had to burn the negative.
**I being in that time of life where a boy ought to find them fascinating; a boy is never truly a man until he realizes that The Marx Brothers are so much funnier than the Stooges that it isn’t really even a contest
***Is a Stooge even a Stooge without slapstick? They’re firemen who appear in one shot, and it only hints at a dumber, but far more entertaining movie. Incidentally, this review is having almost as many footnotes as this movie has cast members.