I have been away from this site and out of the habit of progressing through the Stooge shorts for a while, though by coincidence ("That's a coincidence!") I was recently watching, with selective fast-forwarding, Guns a-Poppin', the late remake or scavenging of this short with the Stooge Who Shall Not Be Named. After that dismal exercise, it restored my spirits somewhat to return to the original.
To me the distinctive element of this short that does the most to make it worthwhile is the bear. It's a funny thing about bears: they are huge, powerful predators that can disembowel you with one swipe of a paw, but at the same time, viewed from safety, they are extremely cute animals; and, of course, black bears are in general not particularly aggressive toward human beings (though I would not want to have one wander into my cabin while I was in it). I love seeing the bear eat the food and the honey on the windowsill and lumber out of the cabin and, later, out of the crashed car, and I laugh at the fake bear (man in a bear costume) that swats Moe, and later Curly and Larry, on the head ("There's no bear around here!" (WHAP!) "Ow! You're right! There is a bear around here!"), and eventually drives off in the car, signalling a left turn (!), as well as at the stiff dummy bear that gets conked on the head by a rock carelessly thrown by Larry.
I have never much fancied Moe's portrayal of a man suffering a nervous breakdown; or perhaps I should say that I don't think much of the idea, since I don't know what Moe Howard could have done differently with the premise. The portrayal just doesn't seem credible to me even in comic terms, or perhaps especially in comic terms. I can accept the irritability (e.g., yelling at the cat for "stomping around" as it passes soundlessly across the carpet), but the vulnerability to noise and violence can't be squared with the noisy and violent aggression that is his character's chief mode of dealing with his fellow Stooges. He has to switch off the "nervous breakdown" every time he deals out punishments, and then switch it back on with "Oh, my nerves!" I suppose some will say that that is part of the humor of it, but to me it's not funny.
Even before I read any of the comments here, I was struck, as I watched the short, by Curly's signs of physical decline. He can't keep up the energy required for his "character" voice and slips into a normal register early in the short when he speaks of "commuting with nature" (I don't know if that malapropism was written into the script or if Jerome Howard just garbled it) and his movements in that scene are stiff and weak. Similar falterings can be observed later too.
I concur with Metaldams that the framing device of the courtroom scene with Vernon Dent, and the whole "story arc" with the use of the ax, is well done. [Edited to add:] And I agree with Big Chief Apumtagribonitz that the bandages on the heads of Larry and Curly in the final scene do not sort well with the premises of Stooge humor, which require that no amount of physical punishment can inflict actual damage.
