I've been watching some of the shorts that I missed during my time away from this forum, and, while I don't have something to say about every one of them, this one is special for me, as its first part, the part set in the Stooges' apartment and studio in Paris, is a pretty clear
hommage to (or knock-off of) one of the most beloved of operas, Puccini's
La bohème. (The latter was itself based on a play based on the stories of Henri Murger, collected in a book called
Scènes de la vie de bohème--Scenes of Bohemian Life.)
La bohème, for those of you who don't know opera at all (and I would wager that anyone who doesn't know
La bohème doesn't know opera at all), opens in a garret in which four young men--a painter, a poet, a musician, and a classical scholar--lead a precarious hand-to-mouth existence. After one of them has brought in some much needed food, wine, and firewood, their revels are interrupted by a knock on the door by Benoit, the landlord, who has come to collect the overdue rent. They ply him with wine until he lets slip an incautious word about his preference for plump women over skinny ones like his wife, at which point the bohemians feign outrage at his moral laxity and indignantly throw him out. (I have sung in several productions of this opera, both as one of the bohemians and as the landlord. What happens in the opera after this point has no parallel with
Wee Wee Monsieur.)
The parallel of
Wee Wee Monsieur with
La bohème is not tidy: Studio Stooge comprises only three men, of course, rather than four; and the three are a painter--Curly; a musician--Larry, of course; and, rather than a poet or a scholar (imagine a Stooge as a scholar!--wait, I suppose we saw that in
Violent Is the Word for Curly), a sculptor--Moe. It was certainly worth breaking the parallel to give Moe something to do that involved the use of a hammer, as appears in his exchange with Curly. "The lollipop, the lollipop, the lollollollollipop (woo woo!)" is a long way from Puccini, but to anyone who knows the opera the parallel is impossible to miss, especially when the antics of the boys are interrupted by the knock on the door of the landlord.
Harry Semels is in fine form: "Mas-ter-piece? Phooey!" "It'll be worth a fortune when I'm dead!" "I should kill you now and find out!" The unfortunate gendarme who gets his trousers torn off by Curly's fishhook is played, I find, by native Parisian
Jean de Briac, who also plays Homais or Omay in
Tassels in the Air. Another native of Paris,
Eugene Borden, appears as the smooth little Foreign Legion officer who cannot speak or understand English until after he has hoodwinked the boys into signing enlistment contracts, at which point he becomes unexpectedly fluent.
One odd little motif that runs through this short is the sound of a high-pitched bulb horn being honked twice. The sound accompanies the opening shot of the Eiffel Tower with the droll title: "PARIS, somewhere in France," and recurs later in the short--though I didn't write down where it does so and right now I can't recollect.
