The slapstick and stunts are well done by all concerned, but yes, the sit-com aspect is bad from the writing ( my ex can come and live with us? ) onward. I continue to be impressed with Dorothy Appleby in this series, she not only pitches in with gusto on the rough stuff but she and Buster work well together, at times seeming like an actual ( if dysfunctional ) married couple. And in this dysfunctional unit, Buster, being an idiot, is at fault. This is, as someone said, the Columbia Way, but Dorothy remains human in these idiotic circumstances.
Having now seen, in the last couple of years, the Columbia solos by Shemp, El Brendel, Buster, DeRita, Andy Clyde, a couple by Charley Chase, and for some reason remembering even the Glove Slingers, I take this as rock-solid proof that the Stooges were at this point Columbia's cream of the crop, and that this was known at the time. Their shorts were generally made with more care (including, specifically, better and more imaginative writing at least until, say, 1949 ) and the Stooges themselves were, in 1940, in a great groove and the funniest guys on the lot.
I'm sure I mentioned, many moons ago and somewhere on this site that I am old enough to remember the earliest ( say, '59 ) smash that the Curly stooges made on TV. I have read that the original release of ( I believe ) 90 was so successful that they released all the other Curlys and Shemps, which were also very successful. Well, as I remember it, in Boston, anyway, where I lived as a kid, they also released all these solo Shemps and Busters and Langdons and Glove Slingers, etc. That's where I saw all these, maybe in '60 or '61. My point being that these other guys' films didn't stay on TV for very long, the Stooges smothered them, even though they were not in competition, they were all on the same channel. Buster and them just faded away. I am sure that the Stooges had a lot more product than the other guys, so the others would have started rerunning a lot earlier, but what the hell, we watched the Stooges in reruns for ten or twelve years. So, here's acknowledgement of the historic achievements of Keaton, Langdon and Chase, but, from the filmed evidence at Columbia circa 1940, the Stooges were kicking everybody's ass. Now here I am watching these same Columbias sixty years later, and coming to the same conclusion: for whatever reasons you yourself or I myself would care to invent, the Stooges, in 1940, are just funnier.
Oh, yes, and BTW, I remember to this day that The Glove Slinger series was utterly wretched. They were not comedies: the plot ( and there was only one ) concerned two tween boys arguing about something stupid like splitting a bag of candy evenly, and some adult lummox who ran a gym or was involved in boxing somehow, telling them that the only way to settle this is to "put on the gloves". The finale was always a pee-wee boxing match. The adult lummox under any normal circumstances should have been arrested. I don't remember Shemp's role in these - I may have seen these even before I saw Shemp as a stooge. I'm doing the best I can, it was 58 years ago, and I was too young to be taking notes.
