It’s December, 1951. Edward Bernds is directing his final Stooge short, GENTS IN A JAM. After this, he leaves Columbia’s shorts unit, making Jules White the only director left. This coincides about the same time that old scripts got reworked and then finally, the stock footage jobs that bored us to tears took over. The Three Stooges made a few really good shorts after Bernds left, but they were the exception to the rule. The glory days of The Three Stooges were over. We’ve discussed this on this board plenty of times. However, there’s a second part to this story that’s much less discussed involving what became of Edward Bernds. This week, we discuss that. Bernds went to Allied Artists and worked with The Bowery Boys, taking writer Elwood Ullman with him. Eight Bowery Boys films Bernds directed were released between 1953 - 1955 and I think it’s safe to say The Three Stooges would have been better off following Bernds.
The Bowery Boys were a veteran comedy team by this point. LOOSE IN LONDON, though Bernds’s first effort with them, was film number thirty in a forty eight film series! The feature film series with the most movies ever, beating forty seven film series Charlie Chan by a hair. If you include when they were The East Side Kids, Dead End Kids and whatever else they were billed as before being The Bowery Boys, the number of films? I simply can’t count that high. Though a lot of actors were in the team over the years, by this point is was the Leo Gorcey and Huntz Hall show. The two other Bowery Boys in this film, played Leo’s brother David and Benny Bartlett are there for decoration, having less to do in this film than Zeppo Marx ever had, and I’m not exaggerating. But Leo Gorcey as Terrence Aloysius “Slip” Mahoney and Huntz Hall as Horace Debussy “Sach” Jones take up the bulk of the comedy in LOOSE IN LONDON along with non Bowery Boy and series regular Louie Dumbriwski, played by Leo’s real life Dad, Bernard Gorcey.
Stooge fans, I say The Bowery Boys are worth checking out partially because the two principle actors are very Stooge influenced. Leo Gorcey is the boss and has the anger and need to mangle very much like Moe Howard. I always say he is the bastard child of Moe and James Cagney, if you can imagine that. In LOOSE IN LONDON, he definitely lives up to this description and of course, like in any Bowery Boys film, has a brilliant way of mispronouncing words and generally mangling the English language. Nobody does this better than Leo Gorcey.
As for Huntz Hall, picture the child like innocence of Curly, a similar delivery to Shemp and look wise, the bastard child of Marty Feldman and Cheap Trick’s Rick Nielsen. A really funny, energetic comic who was not only influenced by Shemp, but from what I hear, real life friends with him. Huntz is a pleasure to watch here, easily getting suckered by the girl, playing with swords in the dungeon like a little kid, building a nice relationship with his long lost uncle in again, childlike wonder - just a fun simpleton of a character.
Bernard Gorcey as Louie, all 4’11” of him, was the heart and soul of the series as far as I’m concerned. He gets angered by the boys antics yet check out how sad he is on the ship when they are going to leave for England. He loves them in spite of it all. Classic bit of him being shanghaied on the boat drunk and clonked on the head in a closet and equally awesome bit of him being hidden in the trunk while holding a cigar, smoke bellowing out of said trunk burning him up. Also a hoot watching him get an attitude with the much, much larger butler later in the film.
As far as the plot, totally cliched stuff and therein lies its genius. Sach is an heir (or “hair,” as Slip would say it) to a rich long lost uncle in England, has to act high society to fit in (or so they think, at first), and there are a slew of other jealous relatives in a haunted looking house that want the uncle to die to inherit the fortune and would murder to do so. Yeah, heard that plot a zillion times. The uncle takes a liking to Sach because of his innocent, funny and trusting nature, so the other relatives plot to kill. We get the boys messing up a high society party failing to act well mannered in spite their best effort, we get murder and fright stuff at night leading to some HOT SCOTS like chases, we get The Bowery Boys fighting the bad guys in the end in a slapstick sword and gun fight, very cliche and Stooge like and it works brilliantly. The comic highlight for me would be Huntz Hall’s confrontation with that biting stuffed fox head on the wall. It manages to stay perfectly still whenever Leo Gorcey is around. A very funny Abbott and Costello like bit there.
Bernds and Ullman knew what the they were doing by this point and The Bowery Boys knew who they were at this point. B comedians having b comedy plots written for them and I find that lack of pretense totally refreshing and to my taste. The irony is as much as Bud and Lou films were higher prestige and budgeted compared to The Bowery Boys, the plot in LOOSE IN LONDON is way more lucid and intelligible than the majority of those Bud and Lou films, which overreach a lot. When do I find Bud and Lou at their best? Working with monsters and on their TV show - b level stuff. There’s nothing wrong with that. Bernds and The Bowery Boys were a magical combination whose films have a definite Stooge influence and knew exactly who they were. Any Shemp era Stooge fan who has never seen the Bernds Bowery Boys films need to make them the next films they watch, pronto. The entire series is available in a four volume set, seek it out. We’ll discuss more Bowery Boys for sure, next time another Edward Bernds effort - in October.
