Violent Is the Word for Curly

Boy, have times changed, at least at gas stations in America.

In this film, we see the days in which you got a lot of personal service when you pulled up next to the pumps. It's exaggerated here.....big time! In this movie, the boys, who just got employed at the Acme Service Station, give you their version of "super service."

"Super service" with the Stooges means they not only will put gas in your automobile, but check the spark plugs, polish the car, oil and grease it, put water in the radiator, wash it, and give you a shave and haircut, press your pants and a lot more and three professors at the college find out when they pull into the station. They especially find out when the idiots put gas in the radiator and water in the gas tank!

That lunacy is just the start in this extremely wacky Stooges film. Soon, a frozen Curly is put on a spit and barbecued. Soon after that, the boys are mistaken for the professors - the ones the blew up at the gas station.

After that, well, I don't want to spoil everything. Suffice to say the boys - as professors' "Feinstein," "Frankfurter' and "von Stupid" - would be a little unorthodox in their teaching! It is a funny film and a good representation of the total craziness of Curly, Larry and Moe in the late '30s.

NOTES - Gladys Gale is a dead-ringer for Margaret Dumont, the foil in many of the Marx Brothers film. Gale plays "Mrs. Katsby," the head of a Mildew College, a women's college. In her snobbish tones, while watching gym class, she says things like, "In my day, we kept our noses in books and didn't around dressed like fan dancers!"

"Oh, mother," replies her very-hot daughter, played by Marjorie Deanne, who wears a revealing blouse. I am surprised that got by the censor.

The famous silent comedian, Charley Chase, directed this one. I think he did about a half dozen Three Stooges shorts in the late 1930s.

I'm still swinging to the alphabet with this hilarious episode of the Three Stooges. Basically Moe, Larry, and Curly screw up their job cleaning and filling up cars with gas. When they run away, the get into a very wet situation causing them to steal professor gowns to stay dry. But when the dean of students over at Mildew Academy thinks that they are the three brilliant professors that they've been looking for, the boys take the job without asking. They have fun with the academy instead of teaching knowledge. This is one of the best stooge shorts, and I would highly recommend it.

10/10

The Three Stooges has always been some of the many actors that I have loved. I love just about every one of the shorts that they have made. I love all six of the Stooges (Curly, Shemp, Moe, Larry, Joe, and Curly Joe)! All of the shorts are hilarious and also star many other great actors and actresses which a lot of them was in many of the shorts! In My opinion The Three Stooges is some of the greatest actors ever and is the all time funniest comedy team!

One of the most hilarious Three Stooges shorts is Violent is the word for Curly. In this short are Marjorie Deanne, Eddie Fetherston, Gladys Gale, Pat Gleason, Bud Jamison, and John T. Murray, and Al Thompson. The acting by these actors are all very good especially by Jamison and Deanne. There are many funny scenes here that I think most Three Stooges fans will love! In My opinion this one of the most different Three Stooges shorts. I recommend this one to all!

I saw this with another Stooges short, "The Sitter-Downers." By the late 30's they were trying all sorts of forms. "Sitter" was based on a famous Keaton gag. This is based on the Marx brothers form.

The three take the identities of professors at a girl's school. There's a Margaret Dumaont character, and what you'll see in terms of gags are half Marx and half Stooge.

At the beginning is a pretty sexy shot of one of the young women in a seethrough clingy silk athletic blouse. Postcode adventure I guess. This was Marjorie Deanne who appeared in a couple dozen movies as the designated cheesecake.

Ted's Evaluation -- 1 of 3: You can find something better to do with this part of your life.

The secret for the success of The Three Stooges was their hard work behind the scenes. The three would read the upcoming film's script and fine-tune the comedy bits until they wore out their directors from rehearsing. A good example finds the three posing as college professors in July 1938's "Violent is the Word for Curly."

While in front of a college class, the three proceed to teach the students how to remember the letters of the alphabet written on the blackboard. Comedian Charley Chase, director for "Violent is the Word for Curly," remembered as a boy his family's maid would sing the 1875 composer Septimus Winner song 'The Spelling Bee' to teach him the alphabet. He adapted her lessons to the Stooges film by renaming it 'The Alphabet Song.' Moe led off with a pointer singing each letter beginning with "B": "B-A-bay, B-E-bee, B-I-bicky-bi, B-O bo, bicky-bi bo, B-U bu, bicky bi bo bu." Curley belts out a couple of letters, intermixed with the singing students getting the hang of it by tackling a few. The sequence turned out to be one of the Stooges' more famous skits, credited because of all the rehearsing and fine-tuning The Three Stooges did to the song.

"Violence is the Word for Curly," whose title is a modification of RKO Pictures' 1936 film 'Valiant is the Word for Carrie,' follows the Stooges as they begin their first day on the job as gas station attendants. Their first customer is a car with three visiting college professors, whose luggage the Stooges throw into an ice cream truck parked next to them to clean the interior of their car. Things get so chaotic the three escape in the truck with Curly trapped in the back refrigerator. Running out of gas, Moe and Larry discover Curly frozen in the ice cream storage compartment. They put him on a rotating spit above a fire to thaw him out. During filming, future Stooge director Edward Bernds, assisting on the production, noticed Curly's weight prevented Larry and Moe from turning the crank. "The straps holding him slipped and he was hanging directly over the fire," Bernds remembered, when a sudden gust of wind kicked up the flames. "Before they could get him off, he was pretty well seared. Curly was hollering his head off, and I don't blame him. Being roasted alive belongs to the Inquisition, not making two-reel comedies." "Violent is the Word for Curly" is also known for being colorized from black-and-white much later. Trouble was the color made the female college students, dressed in athletic shear tops with nothing underneath them, transparent in the scenes they're playing basketball.

In The Three Stooges' earlier 31st entry, May 1938 "Healthy, Wealthy and Dumb," Curly won $50,000 in a radio contest. They decide to splurge in a fancy hotel stay, only to be unsuccessfully fleeced by three pretty gold diggers residing in the next room. The title was a parody on Ben Franklin's advice, "early to bed, early to rise, makes a man healthy, wealthy and wise." Actress Lucille Lund, 25, plays one of the ladies cozying up to the Stooges. She's best known for her role as the wife of the Boris Karloff character in 1934's horror classic "The Black Cat."