All Gummed Up

This is probably the calmest, most easy-going of all the Stooge shorts. It is not consistently hilarious, but there are a handful of good laughs, and somehow this is one of the easiest and most entertaining Stooge shorts to watch. Their human kindness is shown when they let an old lady who has been thrown out of her husband's house stay in a spare room in their store. The lady's old age caused her husband to throw her out and the Stooges most kindly go to work on a vitamin to make old people young. In what is one of their few successful projects, the Stooges turn the old lady into a young, gorgeous women (the goddess Christine McIntyre) and then they get revenge on her husband. This short is light-hearted fun, and the Stooges' reaction to McIntyre as she tears off the bottom of her skirt is hilarious. And Shemp's physical reaction when he gets a spoonful of jumping beans amazes me that a 53 year old man could be so physically active. Wow!

This short subject has the boys who are druggists inventing a potion which will make you young. They're under some pressure because their skinflint of a landlord Emil Sitka wants them out. He also wants to trade in his wife Christine McIntyre on a new model.

They get spectacular results with McIntyre. With Sitka it was an overreach. But using Shemp as a guinea pig, same old Shemp.

On of their best with Shemp.

Larry, Moe, and Shemp run the Cut Throat Drug Store. They invent a youth formula for the pitiful wife of the elderly building owner Amos Flint. The guys turn her into a youthful beauty. Desperate to have the fountain of youth himself, Amos gives the guys the store. Only it goes too far.

This is a pretty good Shemp Stooges short. Most of it goes quite well. In fact, Shemp and even Mrs Flint seems to be doing a little bit of Curly impersonation. There is a bubble gum closing that isn't very connected to the main story. At first, I thought it would be a children's birthday party for Amos Flint. That would connect better. Overall, this is generally good low level fun.

This short was great, seeing the stooges having to eat their own horrible mixtures of stuff is hilarious! The only thing that prevents this short from becoming a classic is that the ending seemed tacked on and this was fixed in the remake "Bubble Trouble" which isn't nearly as good as this.

Grade: A-

Emil Sitka was always the glue to hold together a lot of middle-of-the-road Stooge comedies in the later years. The one thing that Sitka didn't like about Jules White was how he always wanted to play his characters in an exaggerated manner, but this was one of the very few times where White allowed Sitka to develop his old man character Amos Flint, the crotchety landlord of the drugstore the Stooges run. Though not given much screen time (save for the beginning and near end), he does add a lot of comedy to an otherwise plain Stooges outing.