Pardon My Clutch

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 My favorite Stooges shorts with Shemp none other than Parden My Clutch! All appearing in this short are Emil Sitka, Stanley Blystone, George Lloyd, Alyn Lockwood, Wanda Perry, Doris Revier! There are so many funny parts here. This is a very hilarious short. There is another similar Three Stooges short like this one called Wam Bam Slam and I recommend both!

This is not the most memorable of the Stooges' shorts, but it's still a Stooges' short, and therefore worthy of consideration (and certainly worth watching too). There are some lags, such as when the Stooges set up camp in their living room as a "dry run" for their impending camping trip. Of course, once again Shemp is ailing, so good old Cousin Claud is called onto the scene (the guy's a certified quack, but what the hell?, he works cheap). I have to wonder at the inordinate number of times Shemp had to play an ailing character in these shorts; could it be all the negative karma so generated that caused Shemp's early death in real life? If you believe in stuff like that, you most certainly would have to wonder. By the way, there is one good bit during the "living room camping" scene; it involves Larry shouting to Moe, "Foither! Foither!," and getting a crossbeam shoved into his face for his effort. Claud is annoying as hell, so when he gets stuck at the end of the film (with the Columbus), good feelings ensue. There's also the tiresome "You idiot, I meant skip taking the pills, not skip rope!" gag thrown in, but the service station scene (with the confusion over the ownership of a certain tire) more than makes up for it. The very best of the film occurs at the very end: first you have Shemp saying, "Wait, I'm hungry too!", and then you have Larry saying, "Well, what's wrong with that?". I'm telling you, those precious seconds at the very end are more than worth sitting through the first twenty minutes! And, all seriousness aside, those twenty minutes aren't really all that bad, really they're not! Watch this flick!

It's not often I find a Three Stooges short really awful, but this one qualifies.

Basically, much of it is just tormenting Shemp, stupid or mean-spirited stuff more than slapstick. The main guest actor, Matt McHugh as "Claude" was annoying, too, pretending to be a doctor which just added more sadism against poor Shemp.

The only intriguing part was near the end when they kept showing some guy peeping in back of bushes while the boys were packing this old 1930s car, and at the end we find out what he was about, giving the short at least a decent ending.

After getting Shemp well from a toothache where Matt McHugh lends the boys a helping hand, McHugh decides to sell them one old wreck of a car. It's to go camping in the woods and the guys need a vacation, especially Shemp.

The warranty on these vehicle went out with Herbert Hoover in the White House but a lucky break from an insane asylum wouldn't you know it helps them turn the tables on McHugh.

I think they miss the camping trip though.

As a regular scriptwriter for The Three Stooges, Clyde Bruckman had directed four Laurel and Hardy movies. He incorporated the pair's plots into the Stooges' films, most notably in February 1948's "Pardon My Clutch," where Bruckman used two of their stories.

"Pardon My Clutch" opens with Shemp sick in bed, whose slumber is disturbed by Moe and Larry waking him up to give him a prescribed pill. They then make the sick man jump-rope for an hour because the bottle's instructions read "skip an hour" before taking the next pill. Their friend, amateur doctor Claude Quacker (Matt McHugh), recommends the three take a camping vacation, just as Laurel and Hardy did in their hilarious short film, 1935's "Them Thar Hills." Bruckman followed that plot device with another storyline from the L & H short, 1929's silent "Perfect Day," centered around an old unreliable Model T Ford. In "Pardon My Clutch," Quacker sells them a 1912 Winston Six, which turns out to be a complete lemon. Actor Emil Sitka approaches the three offering to buy the car for his collection. Quacker steps in and pays back the $900 the Stooges paid for the car, only to be surprised by the collector's mental capacity. Actor Matt McHugh, 53, looks just like his younger brother Frank McHugh, who as kids appeared on the stage together with their sister. Frank was a popular Warner Brothers contract actor who was in a number of classic films. Matt was in over 200 movies, mostly in small roles. This was his only appearance in a Three Stooges short.