At last, I can post what I wrote (and could only save on my computer) a week ago!
If the whole of this short were as good as its first half, it might be in the top rank of the Shemps, despite its repetition of sequences from earlier shorts. There is certainly an abundance of excellent Shemp action in it. My favorite bit of it is the testing of the doorbell. It begins with a rare instance of subtle dialogue writing when Moe, apparently irrelevantly, says to Mrs. Morton as Shemp rushes off to test the doorbell, "You know, he's known as Lightning!" Only when Shemp, with great wind-up, presses the button and gets electrified do we see the significance of Moe's line.
We get both Vernon Dent and Emil Sitka in characteristic roles. Dent is back on the bench, if showing more patience than usual, despite getting a chicken in his face in the opening scene. (The boys are lucky that officers Ryan and Casey are so incompetent in pursuing fleeing suspects.) Sitka is excellent as a temperamental French chef. "Go on, you French poodle; your father's got fleas!" mutters Moe, in a faint foreshadowing of the abuse that comes from the Frenchman of
Monty Python and the Holy Grail ("Your mother was a hamster, and your father smelt of elderberries!"). Less dangerous than his explosive Italian predecessor in
An Ache in Every Stake, who flings a knife at Curly's head, "Monsieur Buddy" merely calls Moe, with a bit of prompting from the latter, an imbecile, and then, after getting a bowl of batter catapulted on to his head by Moe's fall off the table, resigns his position.
The whole doorbell-repair sequence is top-notch. "I'll murder somebody!" yells Moe from inside the wall, when only his legs are sticking out of it, Larry and Shemp having pulled him through head-first from the other side. I still laugh every time I see those two react to Moe's forcible emergence. "Look what came through the wall!" says Larry. Instead of recognizing him, Shemp, seeing the bits of plaster sticking out of his mouth, exclaims, "A gopher!", and Larry, as if he could seriously mistake a full-sized human being for a small rodent, immediately begins banging on Moe's head with the blunt end of a hatchet.
Unfortunately, things get a lot duller once the boys are done with "fixing" the doorbell and move on to "fixing" the dinner. The exploding cake at the end is lamely done, especially by comparison with the original version. There, the cake exploded with the force of a bomb, and the sudden devastation was vividly captured: here, the explosion looks and sounds like nothing more than a magician's stage effect, the bits of cake are applied to the faces of the victims in a comparatively dainty way. An utterly disappointing execution of a potentially very funny gag.
Some good dialogue bits in this one:
Mrs. Morton: Can you fix it?
Moe: Can we fix it!
Larry: Can we fix it!
Shemp: Can we?
And, of course, the reprise after they have finished their work:
Mrs. Morton: And did you fix it?
Moe: Did we fix it!
Larry: Did we fix it!
Shemp: (opens mouth to speak; Larry and Moe stifle him)
Larry: Yes!
A little ridicule of Anglophile or at any rate non-proletarian pronunciations of words is always in order:
Mrs. Morton: This vase ["vahz"] is worth three thousand dollars!
The three: "Vahz"!
Moe: (miming a monocle in his eye) Say what, Larry, old boy?
Shemp: (to Larry) Do you have a bloater?
Larry: (to Shemp) No, but I have a sardine!
(Can anyone explain that last exchange? I think it's funny, but I have no idea what a "bloater" is or what it has to do with a sardine.)
And then there are the little things:
Shemp: (on one side of the wall) Tough, eh?
Moe: (on the other side of the wall) Mutiny, eh?
