This short has two great sequences: the business with the Chinese cabinet at the beginning and the cream-puff fight at the end. But the long stretch in between the two seems to me mostly pretty dull.
It's a delight to see Vernon Dent, the Stooges' irascible, cubical nemesis, in his first full-sized role, as Mr. Morgan Morgan. But it is regrettable as well as inexplicable that he disappears from the action after punching Curly and Larry. Perhaps he just
took Mrs. Morgan and went home. [
Correction: That can't be right, because Mrs. Morgan is there for the cream-puff fight that follows.] On the one hand, one would have liked to see him continue through to the end of the short. On the other, it's hard to improve on the ending that the short has, in which the tallest and haughtiest of the three ladies who have been outraged to be hit by cream puffs gravely summons the Stooges from their hiding place ("Boys! Boys!") and then the three give the boys all together a concerted conk on the head with pieces of modeling dummies.
"Hi Lee, Hi Lo": Moe, after showing what initially seems like a sympathetic understanding of what Curly and Larry are doing ("Hi Lee, Hi Lo? . . . Boop-boop?"), gives them both a slap, not for doing anything wrong but just for trying to be funny—unless trying to be funny, when done by a subordinate Stooge, counts as doing something wrong in Moe's book.
My favorite part of the Stooges' attempt to "repair" the Chinese cabinet is Moe's crushing one half of it under his foot in an attempt to unstick it from his hand. That detail always makes me laugh.
I will add to
my catalogue of acts of aggression by subordinate Stooges against Moe Curly's use of a spring-loaded dummy hand to give Moe a prosthetic slap in the face.
There is also a very satisfying moment of non-violent conspiracy between Larry and Curly against Moe in retaliation for his having brained them with telephone receivers: they tell him to put his right hand on his right hip, turn his head to his left and throw it back, then together make a fey gesture and go "Woo!" in mockery of the frou-frou pose that they have put him into.
The cream-puff fight repeats several actions from the clay fight in
Wee Wee Monsieur, but has some new touches: Moe getting hit by three cream puffs thrown from different directions simultaneously, then holding Larry's head up by his hair to get him hit by them; the use of the spring-loaded dummy hand as an artillery piece.
