Beer and Pretzels

Larry Fine, Moe Howard, Curly Howard, and Ted Healy are Heely-Heely-Heely & Heely. They are a bottom rung vaudevillian act getting thrown out of the theater. They are reduced to working as restaurant waiters. Of course, it goes horribly wrong.

Ted Healy and the Stooges are working out the premise. The Three Stooges are really the backup performers for Healy. This is a must for any Three Stooges fans. It's part of their origins story. The best is when the Stooges go crazy and Healy tries to direct the chaos. One can also see why Healy isn't necessary to the act. Without him, the chaos can be fully unleashed.

Primarily of historical interest, "Beer and Pretzels" is one of a handful of shorts made by Ted Healy and His Stooges for 20th Century Fox in the early '30s. Most of these shorts are difficult to find, but they are sometimes screened at oddball times on cable stations, like AMC, for instance. Of the ones I've seen, this is not one of the best, but it is by no means bad. Basically, the formula was this: take some musical numbers from Busby Berkeley films that got left on the cutting room floor and pad them out with comedy from Healy and His Stooges. His Stooges, of course, are comprised of Larry Fine, Moe Howard, and Curly Howard, who would later gain immortality and fame as the Three Stooges. But, though, they have plenty of screen time, the show belongs to Ted Healy. At the time, Healy was a huge vaudeville star but is virtually forgotten today (except as a footnote on the careers of the Three Stooges). He can best be described as a '30s Richard Belzer or Dennis Miller - acerbic and abusive, a domineering know-it-all who happens to have some charm and a nice tenor voice. Basically, his "boss" role was overtaken by Moe when the Stooges went solo. In the film, Healy & his Stooges play vaudevillians who are fired as the film opens. They soon find work as waiters in a posh nightclub and chaos ensues. Though their characters are by no means as defined as they would become, it's fascinating to see glimpses of Moe's pugnaciousness, Larry's wishy-washiness, and Curly's overgrown kid act.

The Three Stooges got their name because in fact they were 3 stooges to comedian Ted Healy. The way Moe slapped the other two around was about the way Healy treated all three. A perfect example is this short Beer And Pretzels.

The guys can't keep jobs because Healy can't keep his hands off the women. But they do get a job after the Stooges obey an offhand comment. But the usual chaos ensues.

The guys are a lot younger looking in these Healy shorts from MGM..

This is the second Three Stooges short and it's obvious that MGM Studios had no idea what to do with the boys. Part of this confusion may have been because the Stooges still were not the same lovable team we have all come to know. Instead, they were essentially the vaudeville team of Ted Healy and His Stooges--with the obnoxious and totally untalented and unlikable Healy as the front man. In real life, Healy was an alcoholic and bitter man and his 'Stooges' resented his taking the lion's share of the money and headlining the act--they also resented his treatment of them. Incidentally, shortly after the three left this team, Healy was beaten to death in a bar fight.

As for this short, it has some lovely Stooge moments but unfortunately there is also LOTS and LOTS of singing and dancing--little of which was done by the Stooges. Because of this, the short is very frustrating to most Stooge fans, though die-hard fans and film historians would no doubt find this interesting.

What I'm reviewing here is the second of the M-G-M shorts that starred Ted Healy and His Stooges (Moe, Larry, and Curly, natch), not to mention their female foil, Bonnie Bonnell-once again credited as "Bonny". About the latter, she was inconsistently uneven-performance wise-in the previous short Nertsery Rhymes but here is quite funny doing some of the trips and falls with the boys and later nicely begins a number that segues into three bartenders finishing it. Anyway, Healy, Howard, Fine, and Howard are fired from a vaudeville bill and manage to get hired as waiters at a nearby restaurant. If you know the Stooges, you can guess what happens but not before they do a little entertaining singing of their own. So on that note, Beer and Pretzels is very good as an early Stooge short and is thought of so highly that Moe considered it his favorite of his M-G-M efforts and Leonard Maltin made this the only of those shorts to be shown complete on his "The Lost Stooges" VHS tape from the early '90s. P.S. The theater manager who throws out the boys in the beginning is Edward Brophy who would later play the Stooges' restaurant boss in Swing Parade of 1946.