Whenever I am watching a disk of Stooge shorts and I get to this one, my heart sinks. There are some funny bits, as mentioned by Metaldams, but one has to sit through a lot of corny and boring stuff to get to them. Watching it again did not raise my opinion of it. The "olde English" is funny to me only when it is obviously and intentionally wrong, as when the "-eth" ending is applied all over the place ("Shutteth up!", "It was like thisseth," etc.). When it is wrong in a way that merely reflects ineptitude on the part of the writers, as when the magistrate in the first scene says to the prosecutor, "What sayest ye?", it's just annoying. (Grammatically, it's either "What sayest thou?"--which would not be used in such a situation--or "What say ye?")
The opening scene has some mildly funny business with the balls and chains (NBC chimes, etc.), but Curly's verbal jokes seem to me merely to prolong a situation that has nothing comical about it at all. When the Stooges confront a solemn and ceremonial authority, the situation is funny only if their antics have some actual disruptive effect, as in Disorder in the Court. Here, the magistrate remains enthroned high above them and wields his terrible power over them inexorably. Nothing that they say has any effect on him, other than to provoke him to give Curly an even more severe sentence. They get some pay-back against the prosecutor (Bud Jamison doing his lame version of an English accent) when they drop their iron balls on his feet at the end, but it's a feeble measure by comparison with what he and the magistrate have done to them.
I share Metaldams's sentiments about "Charity," played by Beatrice Curtis, who was also Curly's friend Maisie in False Alarms. She was one sweet-looking babe behind those big glasses (or empty rims, as they seem to be). The business of Curly getting kicked in the rear during the dance (taken up later to better effect in Three Smart Saps) is amusing, but one has to sit through a lot of rather tedious business before and after it to see it. Eminent Stooge heavy Vernon Dent appears, but unfortunately doesn't get much to do.
To me, the short only becomes worth watching once the Stooges go off into the woods and get into trouble with the Indians. Obviously, one has to set aside any scruples about the representation of native Americans in order to find humor in this part of the short, but, that done, there's some good old Stooge violence here, with the tree-limb catapult, lots of conks on the head with logs, a captured Larry getting his head pecked at by a grackle, and enough Jewish Indians for a Mel Brooks movie. At the end, I get the suspicion that this entire part of the movie was written to get the Stooges into costumes that would allow the shot of the canoe shooting across the lake from Whoops, I'm an Indian to be reused!
