Three Smart Guys

Three Smart Guys (1942)

* 1/2 (out of 4)

Extremely poor Our Gang short from MGM has Froggy, Mickey and Buckwheat skipping school so that they can go fishing but they meet an older man who convinces them that school isn't too bad. I'm really not sure how many, if any, of these MGM/Our Gang shorts I've seen but I really hope this is the worst of the bunch. The biggest issue is that there isn't a single laugh to be found but the strange thing is that it appears no laughs were even attempted to be gained. There's really nothing here that was meant to be funny and just turned out dull. Everything is pretty much straight-forward and I personally can't see any attempt at being funny. Another problem is that the message of not skipping school is so over-dramatic that you can't help but just role your eyes.

I don't know, I guess some jokes which sound good just don't end up looking all that funny on-screen.

Take the scene where Mickey, Froggy, and Buckwheat try to get kicked out of class by disrupting the teacher's lesson with a spontaneous Dynamo Dick comic book recitation. Sounds amusing, but....

When they're punished by having to write "I will be a good pupil" 100 times on the board, Froggy gets an idea: he wedges 5 chalks in an eraser to expedite the process. Again, funny on paper, but rather obvious in the viewing stage.

During the fishing scene, the writers of this film try their darnedest to be funny. Buckwheat asks Froggy why he included a toy mouse in his bait. "To catch catfish," Froggy replies. As Froggy shows his pals how an "expert" casts, he catches the backseat of his pants (Ouch!) That was one of the few fairly funny gags.

Other gags would have been funny if they made a little more sense. When Mickey catches a pail during an overhead cast, it sends him flying to the edge of the pier (gee, what a light kid Mickey must be!). He yells for help at that point (he's still on the pier, and not even close to falling in the water...what is he yelling "help" for??) At one point Buckwheat falls into the water, as do the rest of the gang at some point. It turns out the water is very shallow, yet they all yell "help!" (huh?)

The best joke is where Buckwheat and Froggy are fishing on either side of the pier, and their hooks get caught on each other in the water. This causes Froggy and Buckwheat to literally pull each other back and forth while commenting on how strong their fish must be. Now, THAT was well-done!

And then, of course, there just HAS to be an adult (the "wise old fisherman") to teach the kids a lesson about truancy from school, studying hard, bla bla bla. This had been done before in previous Our Gang shorts (such as "Robot Wrecks" and "Good Bad Boys").

Ah, for the good OL' days of Hal Roach!

Oh, well.

Three Smart Guys has all the elements that ruined the Our Gang series at the hands of MGM, which had taken over production from Hal Roach in 1938 for the final 52 shorts. This stinkeroo boasts the inept acting "talents" of Billy "Froggy" Laughlin, Bobby "Mickey" Blake and the ever-annoying Janet Burston, an impossibly dull script from the poisoned pens of Hal Law and Robert A. McGowan and the nail-in-the-series' coffin: the dreaded lesson ("don't play hooky!"). Zzzzzzzzzz. Three Smart Guys is the antithesis of the earlier Hal Roach shorts, whose primary objective was laughs. Unfortunately for us, these bottom-of-the-barrel MGM shorts are what most people remember today when they think of Our Gang. There are perhaps 5 MGM incarnations really worth seeing, which judged against the likes of Three Smart Guys, appears to be pure dumb luck.

Boys who play hooky and go fishing are going to be sorry when they "don't catch all the big fish" later on in life. So they're told by a wise old fisherman when they take time off to go down to the local pier to fish.

BOBBY BLAKE is so young, he's barely recognizable as the boy who turned into ROBERT BLAKE as an adult. "Buckwheat" is supposed to provide some laughs and a boy with a foghorn voice is barely understandable. It's supposed to be hilariously funny, but misses the mark in a big way.

At least the Hal Roach comedies had talented little actors doing their thing. Blake doesn't do badly, but all the other players are enough to make you cringe.