The Hot Scots

Larry, Moe, and Shemp are amateur detectives. They come to Scotland Yard to answer an ad for Yard work. It turns out to be real yard work as they are hired as gardeners. A paper is blown away from a detective's desk and the boys mistake it as an assignment for them.

The Scooby Doo factor is very high as the boys run from people pretending to be apparitions in a Scottish castle. The bad guys are using masks and fake paintings. Of course, this comes before the Scooby gang. One of the reasons why Scooby is successful is that it has elements of the Stooges. This is as good as a Shemp Stooges is going to get.

The great Herbert Evans, a popular character actor who appeared in four Oscar winning films, including CASABLANCA, plays the wise old Earl of a Scottish castle who needs help! Enter the Stooges, who were working as gardeners for Scotland Yard(!) there to save the Earl's family fortune from cut-throat thieves. Among the bad guys is Christine McIntire (as Lorna Doone)! Shemp steals the show, kidding with the Earl and basically mugging and acting goofy. This was Theodore Lorch's last short, long associated with the boys and usually playing creepy butlers and other stuffy gents. Best scene is the disappearing beds and the spooks jumping under the sheets. The Stooges were always at their best in haunted house and castles. Get the dvd box sets, which have come down in price over the years.

"The Hot Scots" was an excellent short from beginning to end. Shemp seems very open to abuse since he takes a lot of it in this one. The fright scenes are hilarious. Edward Bernds once again does a great job in directing. One of my favorite stooge exchanges is in this one. Also, the stooges being gardeners in the beginning was quite funny.

Grade: A+

The head of Columbia Pictures, Harry Cohn, was notoriously cheap when it came to producing his studio's movies. Always looking to save a buck, Cohn had the supervisor of short films, Jules White, reuse expensive sets left over from the studio's previous movies. In a trio of Three Stooges shorts, White ordered his writers to come up with scripts utilizing the castle sets built for Cornel Wilde's 1946 'The Bandit of Sherwood Forest.' Columbia released the three films in a row, called 'The Castle Trilogy,' with the last one, July 1948's "The Hot Scots." Unlike the Stooges previous two 'Castle' films, "Fiddlers Three" and "Squareheads of the Round Table," which took place in the Middle Ages, "The Hot Scots" was in contemporary times. It has the wanna-be detectives castle-sitting while safeguarding a Scottish Earl's valuables.

"The Hot Scots" saw actress Christine McIntyre deviate from her normal woman-in-distress roles for a more corrupt one. As the Earl's secretary, McIntyre's Lorna Doone, named after the late 17th Century character in R. D. Blackmore's novel as well as the Nabisco square-shaped shortbread cookie, is the ringleader of the Earl's staff aiming to steal all his high-priced items while he's away. Figuring the Stooges were incompetents in guarding the Earl's valuables, the thieves proceed with the caper, with hilarious results.

"The Hot Scots" was the last appearance for the Stooges' regular Theodore Lorch. Actor Lorch, 74, died of a heart attack shortly after he filmed his role as the butler McPherson. Beginning his movie acting career in 1920's "The Last of the Mohicans," Lorch is best known to Stooges fans for his role as Major "Bloodhound" Filbert in 1935's "Uncivil Warriors" and as General Muster in 1937's "Goofs and Saddles."

Oh, brother, what a great short. The Stooges are turned loose in the United Kingdom, where they talk themselves into positions as gardeners in Scotland Yard, of all places---all they had to do was to prove they weren't gentlemen! Moe delivers a great double whack to Larry's and Shemp's skulls with the handle of a garden rake. The Stooges end up in a Scottish castle, regaled in kilts. If I ever make it up to Scotland, I would like to try out Ted Lorch's great line, "The E-r-r-r-r-r-el will see ye noo!" Now tell me Shemp wasn't one of the greatest comedians of all time. Christine McIntyre delivers such an obvious set-up line (when asked her name she says "Perhaps ye've heard it, 'tis Lorna Doone!"), so that Shemp's response is utterly predictable, and yet, he absolutely slayed me with it. In fact, all three Stooges are at their best in this short. See it, and I don't care which side of the MacMason MacDixon line you have to come from to do it!