Topic: Plane Nuts (1933) - Ted Healy and His Stooges

[Paul Pain]

https://threestooges.net/filmography/episode/202
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0024454/



Here's the next short featuring Ted Healy and His Stooges for y'all to review.  I am still playing catch-up.

[Freddie Sanborn]

This one is a treasure because of the snippets of Healy and his Stooges vaudeville act. Played with incredibly high energy, it’s the only MGM short to demonstrate why Healy and the Stooges were Vaude and Broadway headliners.

[metaldams]

This one is a treasure because of the snippets of Healy and his Stooges vaudeville act. Played with incredibly high energy, it’s the only MGM short to demonstrate why Healy and the Stooges were Vaude and Broadway headliners.

      You are correct.  My favorite of the MGM Healy shorts for sure and the one that seems most Vaudeville like - where the boys with Ted were in their natural element.  What is most interesting about PLANE NUTS is while the boys are definitely underlings to Healy, it’s not so much so that they don’t have an identity of their own.  It’s as if The Three Stooges are their own act within an act - Moe is even their leader.  We get multiple times Moe tells Larry and Curly to, “spread out,” for example. 

      The bottom line is MGM never found a film identity for Ted Healy and the Stooges to work together.  This is not surprising since comedy was never MGM’s specialty.  That said, when you plop down a still camera and let these four gentleman do schtick, magic happens.  No rhyme or reason, just one routine after another being fired out of a machine gun.  Love the number guessing bit, the boys being from the South, the hand on hip/head tilted/woo bit - some of this stuff shows up in Columbia shorts where the boys, without Healy, actually became proper film comedians.  But here, pure schtick, high energy, very entertaining. All four men are in a competition to see who can chew the most scenery.   I also love the way Healy tries to get that song number in to be interrupted in multiple ways, a fun running gag.

      So yeah, PLANE NUTS definitely captures the essence of The Three Stooges with Ted Healy.  As for the musical numbers, a bunch of highly choreographed pretty girls as usual, but I’m sure their stage shows had acts like that as well surrounding them.  All in good fun.

[Umbrella Sam]

I agree, the whole setup for this short is actually one that’s really fitting. Even the musical numbers, which I’m still not fond of, at least feel like they have a place here given the whole idea of it being a stage show.

Is it just me, or does this one seem more chaotic than usual? That’s by no means a criticism; in fact, I think it helps it to stand out even more. Just seeing everything going on at the end with Ted trying to sing Dinah is surprisingly very funny. I’m not exactly sure what Curly and Moe were doing at the end, but it was just so bizarre that I had to laugh at it. Larry got some moments to shine too, which was also nice. My favorite part was when Ted tried the “take a number” bit on Curly. Ted actually does do pretty well in that and the “pay the mortgage” routine, although there are a few moments where he does feel like he’s trying to force himself into a routine specifically meant for the Stooges, such as when he makes fun of Curly’s name.

Overall, a pretty good effort, and easily the best of the shorts they made with Healy.

8 out of 10