SATURDAY MORNING STOOGE-FEST

‘Hoi Polloi’ (1935) is the Stooge version of ‘Pygmalion’ (and thus could be musicalized as ‘My Fair Stooges’ I suppose). Having now explained enough about the plot I’ll move onto the fact that while ‘Hoi Polloi’ (translation from Greek: ‘the many’ i.e. ‘the common people’) was fairly early in the Stooges Columbia two-reel cannon–it was their tenth film and was released on August 29th 1935–they were already developing the pace and assurance that is somewhat lacking in the first handful of shorts. The dance lesson routine that starts at around five minutes in was later lifted and inserted into a remake of this called ‘Half-Wits Holiday’ (1947) which was the last Stooge film to feature Curly Howard. He suffered a stroke while filming the pie fight sequence and disappears from the end of the film, leaving Moe and Larry to handle the melee on their own. Perhaps they still had a new version of the dance scene to shoot and thus the egregioius re-use of this older footage featuring a much younger bunch of Stooges? I don’t know. But dig the colorization of this print–I know it’s not considered film-geek etiquette to like colorizing black and white films but there really is something fresh and invigorating about seeing old L.A. and young Stooges in semi-realistic colorized settings. Don’t you agree? Or are you just one of the Hoi Polloi?

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