I seem to be out of tune with the chorus of praise sung for this short, as I would place it only in the middle of the pack of Curly shorts.
This is a rare instance—rare at least among the shorts with Curly—of a Stooge short that does not conform to the profound observation of the great Stooge commentator Homer Simpson: "Moe is their leader!" It seems to me that Moe is much less of a leader in this short than in most others and that he does not set the direction of the action as much as Curly does. Moe takes the lead when he grabs the court officer's revolver and shoots the court clerk's toupee, and again later when, despite not having been sworn in as a witness, he takes over from Curly the job of narrating and re-enacting events, putting Curly's "coconut" into the letter press and compressing it.
But it is Curly who first takes the most prominent role as witness and then shows uncharacteristic initiative by proposing to re-enact the events about which he has been called to testify. Most of the bits that seem to me funniest center on him: the attempt of the clerk (James Morton, soon to reappear in
A Pain in the Pullman in one of his most memorable Stooge roles as "Paul Payne, heartthrob of millions") and the judge to swear him in, the attempts of the defense attorney and the judge to get him to "address this court as 'your honor,'" his turn in the printing press (particularly his needing a conk on the head from Moe to get his jaw closed again), his disastrous handling of the supposedly unloaded revolver, which fires repeatedly, removing again the toupee of the luckless court clerk, and his attempt to subdue the escaped parrot, first with a hammer, which he applies to each of the heads of the jurors in turn, and then with a fire hose.
Moe has a funny turn as a human barrel organ and Larry has his moment of triumph in which he yells like Tarzan, which, as several people have remarked, is noteworthy enough just for how bizarre and out-of-character it is. But Curly is both the center of comic energy and the generator of most of the action in this short.
I don't expect much in the way of plot in a Stooge short, but for some reason the implausibilities in this particular one have always seemed to me grave enough to spoil much of it. A parrot has been brought into the courtroom for no good reason that I can see, but simply as a setup for a contrived plot device in which the parrot squawks "Find the letter!" and then, after some hijinks, the Stooges find a note attached to its leg in which a certain Buck Wing confesses to the murder. Are we supposed to believe that the murderer, after killing Kirk Robin (the name is a play on an old nursery rhyme, "
Who killed Cock Robin?"), took the time to train the parrot to repeat the phrase, or that the parrot just formed the words spontaneously? Even more bothersome is the supposition that a murderer would have written a confession in the first place. Why would he do that? And having done it, why would he attach the confession to the parrot's leg? I don't find these arrangements credible even in the way in which I find, say, bullets that bounce off people's posteriors credible as parts of the Stooge universe. They are not funny but merely lame.
One of the attractions of a courtroom as the setting for a movie or a play, whether comical or serious, is that it imposes rigorous forms and procedures within which the action must unfold. In the case of the Stooges, the very nature of courtroom procedure is the antithesis of everything that they stand for: disrespect for authority and for hierarchy of every kind, lack of seriousness, and an incapacity for self-restraint. Thus, the title of the short nicely encapsulates its comic program: the Stooges in a court of law cannot fail to produce the very opposite of the conventionally commanded "order in the court," namely disorder in the court. This program seems to me well carried out in the initial business with getting Curly on the stand and taking his testimony, and later when the shooting starts and the parrot gets loose. But the business of the dance act, however diverting at may have been to audiences in 1936, is tedious to me and in any case is certainly superfluous to the comic action, which concerns the Stooges and their unlucky victims alone.
One feature of this short that lingers in my impression of it as a curiosity is the performance of Edward LeSaint as the judge. I had to look up the page for the movie to learn his name, and I was abashed to discover that he is the same actor who appeared in
Half Shot Shooters as Major Smith, the officer who tries to question the Stooges after they have been deafened. It has always seemed to me that as the judge in this short he is in a certain sense too life-like: not in the good sense of being a convincing actor but in the bad sense of coming across as if he were a real judge trying his hand at movie acting. All the other courtroom players--those playing the clerk, the two attorneys (Stooge worthies Harry Semels and Bud Jamison), the court officer, even the members of the jury--seem to "get it" as far as playing broad comedy is concerned; but LeSaint, it seems to me, does not. To me, the judge, rather than appearing as a foil for the anarchic comedy of the Stooges (as does Vernon Dent later on), seems simply to belong in a different movie.
I'm sorry that I've written at such length, as I fear that people won't want to read such long comments. But once I get started with an idea about a Stooge short, I feel the need to work it out as clearly as I can!
