3 Stooges: Dopey Dicks [VHS]
by Edward Bernds

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VHS Movie Reviews of 3 Stooges: Dopey Dicks [VHS]

Movie Review: Some of the best of the Three Stooges shorts with Shemp
Summary: 5 Stars

"Dopey Dicks" is a 1949 short where the boys are cleaning out the office of Sam Shovel Private Investigator, when in works a beautiful woman (Christine McIntyre), who is being followed. She is promptly taken and the Stooges are off to save the day. Behind it all is a scientist who is trying to make a mechanical man but is having problems finding a brain small enough to fit in his creation. That means once the Stooges arrive, and Moe announces he is the brains of the outfit, the chase is on until the end of this above-average two-reeler.

"Scrambled Brains" was made two years later has Shemp suffering from hallucinations and worrying Moe to Larry when he because engaged to Nurse Nora (Babe London), who is the exact opposite of the beautiful Venus he describes. So they drag him to Dr. Gezundheir (Emil Sitka) who recommends piano lessons: the session is nothing, but Shemp playing piano (with four hands) is pretty good. The Stooges then insist on making a call from a phone booth that already has someone (Vernon Dent) in it with a bag of groceries. Then we get to the fateful wedding. Another above-average effort, mainly from Shemp.

The Stooges are incompetent dentists in 1951's "The Tooth Will Out," thanks to a one week dentistry course (only $4). This comes after being fired from a couple of jobs involving dishes and the breaking thereof, at which point they head to Coyote Pass in the west. The climax of this one is Shemp, again wearing glasses with massive coke-bottle lenses, performing on a couple of patients and discovering there are some significant differences between handbooks on dentistry and carpentry.

A lot of the Three Stooges shorts with Shemp involved recycled bits from the glory days with Curly, and while there are a few examples of that in this trio of comedies, most of the best moments are Shemp being Shemp.

Summary of 3 Stooges: Dopey Dicks [VHS]

"Scrambled Brains" (1951, number 132) is said to have been among Shemp's favorites, and certainly what plot there is centers around his need to recover from a bout of hallucinations, all the while planning to marry an extremely ugly nurse he met while under treatment. The gem of this film is a new use of the old "third hand" routine that was a clich? even when Stan Laurel used it in A Chump at Oxford many years earlier. Emil Sitka gets to play a nearsighted doctor who, while inspecting Shemp, leans forward on his rocking chair to make a doll say "Mama" with the usual double takes from one and all.

Shemp himself uses what looks like Sitka's glasses as an utterly incompetent dentist in "The Tooth Will Out (1951, number 134). Having barely passed a one-week course in dentistry, the boys go West to set up practice, and one almost feels the pain as half-blind Shemp stabs wildly at his first patient with a whirring drill. Possibly the idea--not very original to begin with--was influenced by Shemp's nearsighted explorer in the Abbott and Costello Africa Screams only a year or two before this short. --Frank Behrens

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