White, Jules

Buster Keaton - 65th Anniversary Collection (General Nuisance / His Ex Marks the Spot / Mooching Through Georgia / Nothing but Pleasure / Pardon My Berth Marks / Pest From the West / So You Won't Squawk / The Spook Speaks / The Taming of the Snood / She's Oil Mine)

An entire missing segment of Buster Keaton's career is filled in with the release of this collection, which comprises the 10 shorts Keaton made at Columbia Pictures in 1939-41. If you're a Keaton fan (and why on earth wouldn't you be?) this section of the great man's work has always been in dispute--and above all, hard to see. After his career collapsed at the beginning of the 1930s, Buster Keaton struggled to find a niche in Hollywood, and the Columbia contract was essentially his last sustained opportunity to headline in films on a regular basis. It was a difficult fit from the start: Keaton did not have the artistic control he enjoyed over his 1920s classics, and director Jules White (who helmed most of the Columbia shorts) had a radically different view of comedy from his star. White guided the hijinks of Columbia's busiest comedy stars, the Three Stooges, and his leadpipe-to-the-noggin style did not mesh well with Keaton's measured, logical approach.

If one dials down expectations, some of the Columbia shorts (around 16-17 minutes long) are enjoyable in the baggy-pants style of the Three Stooges. And when it comes to searching for signs of the old Keaton, there are usually one or two blossoms poking out of the overall bluntness. Mooching through Georgia, a Civil War spoof, has moments of silent hilarity and a Keatonesque note of fatalism as Buster is marched to his own execution. Nothing but Pleasure has a terrific sequence involving a drunk woman who wanders into Buster's motel room, and Buster's efforts to get her into a Murphy bed. She's Oil Mine features a breathtaking gag in which Keaton is spun around like a tire iron in order to get a pipe unstuck from his finger. Keaton, in his mid-40s, is still in athletic form, although thanks to alcohol and disappointment he looks older than his years.

Commentaries adorn the shorts, and there's a useful 25-minute documentary giving the general outline of Keaton's life and details on the Columbia arrangement. It's refreshingly honest about the mixed quality of these films, and contains excerpts from his silent shorts that suggest how far the genius had slipped. In that sense, while this DVD package honorably presents a moment from film history (and with fine technical specs all around), the actual watching of these shorts is tinged with sadness. The casual moviegoer curious about Keaton should go elsewhere; the completist will want it; the amateur historian will want to give a look to see what the "missing years" were all about. --Robert Horton

Studio: Sony Pictures Home Ent Release Date: 04/22/2008 Run time: 176 minutes

The Three Stooges DVD Collection (Curly Classics / Spook Louder / All the World's a Stooge)

Studio: Sony Pictures Home Ent Release Date: 09/25/2007

Shemp Cocktail: A Toast To The Original Stooge

Studio: Koch International Release Date: 03/18/2008 Run time: 299 minutes

The Three Stooges DVD Collection 2 (Three Smart Saps / Cops and Robbers / G.I. Stooge)

Studio: Sony Pictures Home Ent Release Date: 09/25/2007

Three Stooges DVD 12-Pack

There are nyuks galore in this Three Stooges giftset featuring 12 classic Curly, Larry, and Moe DVDs. Over 600 minutes of side-splitting laughs.

Three Stooges- Nutty But Nice

Back when the "Blondie" comic strip was very young, Dagwood wanted to marry a flapper against the wishes of his rich family and staged a hunger strike for her sake. This is the basic premise of "The Sitter Downers" (1937, short number 27 in the Columbia series) in which the boys want to marry against a father's wishes and camp out in his living room. The second half is concerned with the now married Stooges trying to build a home for their brides with predictable disastrous results. Very funny at the start, stale material in the second section.

"Nutty but Nice" (1940, number 47) has the boys trying to help a melancholic girl by finding her kidnapped father. It starts interestingly with the boys as a team running a musical restaurant, but it turns to more familiar material as they try to escape from an apartment using the dumbwaiter. (They will never learn not to send Curly down first.) What makes this entry more interesting is that Vernon Dent gets to play a straight, sympathetic part that calls upon him actually to laugh at the Stooges' routines.

"Slippery Silks" (1936, number 19) starts with the boys as "fine" woodworkers--destroying a precious Chinese box brought in by Vernon Dent for reproduction--and then finding they have inherited a gown shop. After they reason that designing furniture and gowns is all the same, the results are truly funny as Larry's cabinet-like creations are displayed by attractive models who play it straight. However, the director (Preston Black) decided that the script needed a good pie throw (or cake throw in this instance) ending, and the last sequence offers nothing new along those lines. --Frank Behrens

A thanksgiving bounty of slaps pokes and bops. Includes a ducking they did go hot polloi half-wits holiday higher than a kite false alarms special features: subtitles in english spanish: french: portuguese: languages in english spanish and portuguese & more. Studio: Sony Pictures Home Ent Release Date: 09/25/2007 Run time: 105 minutes Rating: Nr

Three Stooges - Dizzy Doctors

The trio turns medicine into auto polish in dizzy doctors takes on cattle rustlers in goofs and saddles and join the navy and catch a spy in three little sew and sews. Studio: Sony Pictures Home Ent Release Date: 09/25/2007 Run time: 93 minutes Rating: Nr

The Three Stooges - Stooges and the Law

Studio: Sony Pictures Home Ent Release Date: 09/25/2007 Run time: 86 minutes Rating: Nr

Three Stooges - Three Smart Saps

Studio: Sony Pictures Home Ent Release Date: 09/25/2007 Run time: 82 minutes Rating: Nr

The Three Stooges - Stooged & Confoosed (Colorized / Black & White)

Studio: Sony Pictures Home Ent Release Date: 08/10/2004 Run time: 70 minutes Rating: Nr

A quartet of Three Stooges shorts (three new to DVD) make up this solid disc, all with mid-period Curly in woo-woo-woo form. "Violent is the Word for Curly" somehow morphs the boys from gas-station attendants to European college professors. Not only does it feature Curly roasting on a spit, but the Stooges instruct the students of Mildew College for Women in the intricacies of "Swinging the Alphabet," a memorable nonsense song. "You Nazty Spy" is the Stooges' answer to Duck Soup and The Great Dictator, as a cabal of businessmen install Moe as the dictator of Moronika. With an accidental mustache and jibbering German, Moe does a convincing Hitler. (But didn't he always?)

"No Census, No Feeling" is a rangy, so-so bit that begins with a lame premise about the Stooges as census takers (it was 1940, after all) and ends up at a football game. But the best gag has Curly mixing up a noxious fruit punch. You know "An Ache in Every Stake" will be a goodie from the moment Moe and Larry attempt to remove a block of ice from around Curly's head by using a chisel and mallet. Its centerpiece is a variation on the flight of stairs from Laurel and Hardy's "The Music Box," but Curly does nicely stuffing a turkey, too.

Stooged & Confoosed is presented with Columbia's "ChromaChoice" device, which allows for easy toggling between the original black-and-white shorts (which appear in great shape) and a colorized version. The colorized images are sensibly rendered, but they still have that washed-out paleness they've always had--eggshell greens and light browns abound. Stooges purists will stick to black-and-white, the better to appreciate the subtleties of a cheese grater being scraped across Curly's face. --Robert Horton