1949 Three Stooges TV Pilot

Courtesy archive.org. One question: what the holy hell is up with Moe's sarcastic mugging in the opening? Utterly bizarre...

The Gazeeka Box!

Perhaps you've already noticed the obtrusive white widget midway down the sidebar but, if not, let me introduce the Third Banana's "Gazeeka Box", a new feature that will allow us to more easily share music and OTR with you. All of the files listed therein can be downloaded to your desktop (click the blue arrow on each file listing) or can be played through the widget itself. As a Yuletide gift to you, the box is currently full of holiday-themed goodies from Jerry Lewis, Abbott and Costello, Ed and Keenan Wynn (and many others on the Blue Network Christmas special), Phil Harris and Alice Faye, Jack Benny, Kukla, Fran, and Ollie, Eddie Cantor, The Three Stooges, as well as a few ancient 78s. Enjoy!

Stooge Friday!!!

First, a bit of horn-blowing: this month's Three Stooges Journal features my article on Healy "stoogette" Marion "Bonnie" Bonnell accompanied by a couple of photos of Ted and Bonnie that I don't recall ever having seen before. Used to seeing my work online where page-count is an abstraction, I was shocked to discover how long the Bonnell article really is on paper. Very strange. This issue of TSJ also contains an insightful article by Bobby Winslow entitled Lady Godiva, Eh?: Curly and Gendered Laughter that covers some of the same ground as the previously mentioned Boxwell piece about Wheeler and Woolsey, but is written by someone who has an appreciation for the material and understands context. TSJ's narrow focus demonstrates that, no matter how well-known the subjects may be, there is a near inexhaustible wealth of information yet to be revealed about classic comedy. And I must admit that I'm very predisposed towards any magazine that devotes its cover to a big photo of Vernon Dent (and publishes my work). At $9 a year, it's a steal. Contact editor Gary Lassin at garystooge@aol.com for more info.

And the classic comedy vinyl just keeps on coming. Courtesy of Way Out Junk comes 1959's The Three Stooges: Madcap Musical Nonsense at Your House. Riding the crest of their big TV comeback, the Stooges released a number of kiddie albums, and this is a pretty decent one. The first (seemingly improvised) track, "We're Coming to Your House", interestingly turns the notion that adults don't like the Stooges into a selling point for their act:

All: Though Mommy won't like us
and neither will Dad,
We're coming to your house..
Larry: To break up the joint!

I don't think I've seen the generation gap angle used elsewhere in regards to the Three Stooges, but it has long since become the cynical standard practice for advertising to kids. This track gave me the false hope that they'd follow it with a dramatized skit in which the Stooges visit one of their youthful fans and devastate his/her house in an hilarious orgy of whimsical violence. Track six, the final track on side A, ends with a nice bit of conceptual humor as the Stooges cope with the problems inherent in being "in" a record being played. Curly Joe ends up trapped in a groove and tells the kids that they can release him by flipping the record over. Larry closes out the bit with a nice bit of deadpan delivery.

Larry: Careful! That's it.. Don't hurt him with the needle...

The Mystery of Bonnie Bonnell

Just recently, Geoff asked me for my opinion of Bonnie Bonnell: "Was she the least talented woman of all time, or is there some sly in-joke going on?"

If I had been asked this a few years ago, I probably would have leaned towards the former. Bonnie Bonnell, as any fool could plainly see ("Ah kin plainly see that!"), was Ted Healy's talentless showgirl inamorata, a secondary component of his stage act that had found herself out of her depths once the act had gone Hollywood. How else to explain her flailing dance number in Beer and Pretzels or her stilted non-performance in Nertsery Rhymes? But now, having given the matter some thought, I just don't know..

Following Soup To Nuts for Fox in 1930, Ted's stooge act had split and then reformed, with Curly Howard replacing both his older brother Shemp and fourth stooge "Pansy" Sanborn. There was yet another new addition to the act; Marion Wright "Bonny" Bonnell, Ted's first and only lady stooge. In 1932, a Hollywood nightclub appearance had led to a one-year contract with MGM, the most prestigious studio in town, and one with a tin ear when it came to comedy. Ted and co. were quickly put to work in shorts (40% new material, 60% unused MGM musical and specialty numbers) and, separately, all over the studio. Strike that.. Separately, except for Bonnie, who was relegated solely to the Healy shorts. At first glance, the reasons would appear obvious. Nertsery Rhymes presents Bonnie as MGM "eye candy", trying her damnedest to shimmy, shake, and belt out tunes as a bizarre "fairy godmother". She also plays straightwoman to Ted's stooges, delivering feed lines in a dull, lifeless monotone. Poor Bonnie is absolutely dreadful on all counts and even seems vaguely resentful. She fares little better in her next film, Beer and Pretzels, in which she receives a showy song and dance number that is so strange and inept that one has to wonder what contemporary audiences were supposed to make of it.

The third MGM Ted Healy short, Hello Pop!, is sadly missing, but the fourth, Plane Nuts, provides us with an extremely rare look at Healy's stage act.. or, at least, the final incarnation of it. Moe Howard introduces Ted, "Ladies and gentlemen. Ted Heel... Phew!", and receives the first of many, many slaps. Shortly after, as Ted sings, Bonnie dashes out onto the stage to cram a load of flowers into Ted's outstretched hand. Later, she rejoins Ted and the stooges during their standard patter routine ("What's your name?" "George Washington." "You picked out a good name. You the fella who chopped down the cherry tree?" "Naw.. I ain't worked in a year and a half!"). Bonnie's costume marks her as an eccentric, but her delivery still sounds somewhat restrained. Nevertheless, she plays her part as a genuine stooge, even going into a conspiratorial huddle with Moe, Larry, and Curly during the strange "Take a number from one to ten" routine.

The fifth, and final, Healy MGM short is something of a revelation. In The Big Idea, Ted stars as the owner and sole employee of The Big Idea Scenario Company, whose attempts at scenario writing are forever interrupted by a steady stream of intruders wandering through his office. The principal intruder is Bonnie, whose innate eccentricity has finally broken through. No longer the bland showgirl of the earlier shorts, she appears now as seemingly deranged cleaning woman, dumping basket after basket of trash into Ted's office. Ted is irate. "There's one thing I'd like to ask you. Why do you throw all of the garbage into my office every night?" Bonnie responds by laughing defiantly and poking Ted in the chest. "I knew.. I knew you were gonna ask me that question!" she says before wandering off to another corner of the office. Ted is not satisfied with her response. "Say! Why don't you answer me?" Suddenly, Bonnie seems more receptive. "Oh.. The reason is.. I like to clean the whole building into one room." she replies, illustrating her point with oddly elaborate hand gestures. "It makes it so much easier to clean up the rubbish!" Ted decides to pitch his story idea to Bonnie, who listens attentively with an intense, almost Harpo-esqe, look on her face. She even suggests a story idea of her own to Ted, growing increasingly, and inexplicably, angry as she outlines it:

"Why don't you write a story about a gentleman who makes love to a lady and they go for a walk in the woods and the lady finds out he's NO GENTLEMAN!!!"

At the end, Ted's girlfriend, Muriel Evans, catches Ted and Bonnie in an embrace and beans him over the head with a hammer. Unlike their previous shorts, The Big Idea presents Ted and Bonnie as a double act, with Howard, Fine, and Howard appearing as little more than a running gag (a brilliant one, though) with a few lines at the end. What had happened behind the scenes to bring this about? Was it perhaps a change of director? Jack Cummings had been the team's regular up to this point. The Big Idea was helmed by an uncredited William Beaudine. Whatever had happened, Bonnie has here become the precursor of Mabel Todd, Ted's loony love interest in Hollywood Hotel. It just seems more appropriate for his seedy, tough-talking screen character to hook up with deranged women ("I like you! You have such a nice swollen face!" says Mabel, complimenting Ted in HH) than, say, Muriel Evans.

I have a confession to make. I've skipped a film here. In 1933, between Plane Nuts and The Big Idea, MGM loaned Ted and co. to Universal where they appeared in Myrt and Marge, a backstage story based on a popular radio soap opera. I have yet to see this movie! Bonnie reportedly has a running gag as a gatecrasher. Can anyone here tell me how Bonnie plays her role? Is this the Bizarro Bonnie of The Big Idea or the Bland Bonnie of Beer and Pretzels? If the former.. well, I don't know what that means. If the latter.. I don't know what that means, either.

Bonnie's final screen appearance is in Paramount's Hollywood On Parade, episode B-9, one of those creaky (and sometimes creepy) newsreel-type shorts that show Hollywood stars at work and play.. or, in this instance, stumbling around a Paramount set that's supposed to look like a speakeasy. Silent comedian Ben Turpin is on hand in an awkward performance that reveals exactly why his career had ended with the coming of sound (before, actually). Major comedy acts of 1934 such as Ed Wynn, Jimmy Durante, and Wheeler and Woolsey make lackluster appearances as well, but the limelight belongs instead to Ted, Bonnie, and the stooges. "Please.. I beg your pardon.." says Bonnie, attracting Ted's attention by jabbing him in the shoulders. "Is your name Ted Heel?" Ted turns around and looks straight through her. "No, Ted Healy the name is, not "Heel"." "Listen.." she says. "Did you originate stogies?" "What?" "Are you the first person who ever had stogies?"

Oh.. stooges! Does Bonnie represent a deranged fan? Maybe one of those people who stopped Ted in public to ask him bizarre questions? It's likely that Ted was often asked whether or not he was the first comic to use stooges, and he probably would have replied in the affirmative. Whether he was or not, he certainly took the concept further than anyone else in the business. It's more than likely that Ted was the first comic to use a female stooge.

Ted has no time to bother with Bonnie's question. Instead, he turns to Larry Fine and says, out of nowhere, "I want you to be a nice boy. When you're a nice boy, your fairy godmother always watches over you." "Your what?" asks Larry. "Your fairy godmother always watches over you!" Bizarrely, Ted turns to Bonnie in anticipation of the punchline:

"I have an uncle I'm not sure of..."

Ted can't slap a woman, so Larry gets it in the kisser. "None of that now." Back to Bonnie. "But I wanna know.." she warbles like a brain-damaged Zasu Pitts. "You know, I know a system.. But I know how you make people laugh!" "You do, huh?" "Yes.. I certainly..." she trails off. "How?" demands Ted. Bonnie slaps Ted awkwardly and walks away. Ted is unfazed. "You're wrong, lady!" The stooges attempt to demonstrate the true Healy laugh-grabbing method by slapping each another, but to no avail. Healy has no alternative but to demonstrate himself. "This is the way, isn't it?" Ted unleashes his devastating gattling gun triple-slap, getting each of his stooges squarely in the face with a single sweep of his arm.

In this brief clip, as in The Big Idea, Bonnie Bonnell displays a peculiar sense of comedy that works well within the framework of Healy's highly peculiar act. You may not find her funny here (I do) but she's certainly anything but a cypher. Let's keep in mind, also, that she was no novice, having been appearing on Broadway since at least 1925. In 1926, Bonnie was in the ensemble of Clark and McCullough's biggest Broadway hit, The Ramblers, and was apparently discovered by that show's director, Phillip Goodman, for she next appeared in Goodman's Five O' Clock Girl as "Molly the Maid". There then followed an association with Ted Healy's good friend producer/director Billy Rose, first in a 1930-31 revue entitled Sweet and Low, and finally, later that year, in Billy Rose's Crazy Quilt with Ted and his replacement stooges, Garner, Wolf, and Hakins. According to Bill Cappello, Mousie Garner recalled Bonnie as "a very good dancer", but little else. While Ted and Bonnie definitely did strike up a relationship, her role in Ted's act was anything but payback for services rendered. Not even Ted Healy was impulsive enough to sabotage his own act with a non-talent. But here's the mystery: what was Bonnie to Ted's act? Even with her performance in Plane Nuts as a record, she remains obscure. Ted and his stooges display an easy chemistry built up over years of joint vaudeville experience, but Bonnie's relationship with the team, even her very personality, shifts dramatically from one film to the next. Sometimes she's a comic eccentric, sometimes a vamp, sometimes a stooge.. In some shorts she appears to be a budding comic talent; in others, terminally incompetent. Was this the result of studio interference? Was her original role in Healy's act as a legitimate stooge vetoed by MGM execs who, feeling that audiences wouldn't accept her as an eccentric, attempted to recast her as something more traditional? Or was her nebulous characterization in films merely a reflection of her nebulous function in the act; a trial and error process intended to figure out exactly what to do with Bonnie in movies until her contract ran out?

Ultimately, the only performer under that unifying one-year contract that MGM knew what to do with was Ted Healy. Ted had range as an actor that the others lacked; by the time of his death in 1937, he appeared poised to emerge as a major comedy star.. for Warner Brothers. MGM was simply not a studio for comedy, and it's just as well that they let Howard, Fine, and Howard slip through their fingers because the stooges would have been left to rot on the vine. Instead, Columbia beckoned.

Which leaves Bonnie Bonnell.

Bonnie had not made enough of an impression during her year at MGM to count for anything once the contract expired. Her once promising career with Healy had turned into a dead end. Despite the dissolution of the act and a lack of offers to continue in film, Bonnie remained in LA. Her bills were probably paid by Ted for a time, but this wouldn't have lasted long. In 1935, Ted, an affirmed firebug who reportedly carried a flask of kerosene in his garter, landed in jail for breaking into her apartment and using her stove to set fire to some chairs and some of her clothes. She refused to press charges, claiming it had all been a "misunderstanding". Who knows? The following year, Bonnie married a auto parts salesman named Jack Hayes. She spent the rest of her life in LA, dying in 1964 of liver failure at the age of 58.

What made pistachio nuts?

"If any team deserves to be obscured in the annals of film history, it is they.." Thus spake Leonard "**1/2" Maltin in his 1970 book Movie Comedy Teams. We here at The Third Banana shun such talk, especially in regards to acts as fascinating and peculiar as that of Mitchell and Durant.

The Stage, 8/8/29. Mitchell and Durant and Burns and
Allen on the same bill at the Palladium. Courtesy Geoff Collins.

Frank Mitchell (1905-1991) and Jack Durant (1905-1984) were mainstays of the waning years of vaudeville, a pair of loud and extremely violent slapstick comics whose act consisted of non-sequiturs and beating the crap out of one another. Creatively, of course. Squinty-eyed Frank Mitchell was the diminutive fall guy; tall and handsome Jack Durant was the guy who came up with excuses to toss him into the orchestra pit. Like Clark and McCullough before them, Frank and Jack developed their acrobatic act from childhood and gradually climbed the vaudeville ladder. Unlike Clark and McCullough, however, Mitchell and Durant's repertoire remained forever limited to knockabout antics. Their highly-polished act was spectacular enough to assure the team prime spots in glossy revues like the Scandals and Vanities but their one-dimensional nature would forever prevent them from becoming headliners in their own right.

Things might have been different had Mitchell and Durant made their film debut as a team in shorts. Their simple characters, acrobatic abilities, and brisk timing would have made them right at home at Educational or Columbia (Frank Mitchell did work briefly at Columbia for Jules White in the early 50s). Instead, the team debuted in a film equivalent of the stage revues they had been appearing in since the late 20s, Fox's Stand Up and Cheer! (1934). Beloved by some, I find Stand Up and Cheer! a bizarre yet somehow un-entertaining mess made palpable only by the presence of Mitchell and Durant. The President of the United States appoints theatrical producer Warner Baxter "Secretary of Amusement" to shake the nation out of its Depression-induced depression, the logic being that only general good cheer and novelty acts will put the country back on track. In lieu of "amusement" we get Stepin Fetchit, the terrifying Aunt Jemima (Tess Gardella in blackface), Nigel Bruce playing his usual idiot character, a penguin with the voice of Jimmy Durante (impersonated by lyricist Lew Brown?? What the-), and the wuvable Shirley Temple in her feature film debut. Yeah, that lot may be someone's idea of entertainment, but that person is not me. Mitchell and Durant appear mid-way through the picture as Senators Danforth and Small, sent to investigate the whole Department of Amusement matter as a possible waste of money. Their debut is actually a clever surprise; they begin by playing their parts as Senators straight.. and then suddenly and unexpectedly launch directly into their act, which must have caught contemporary audiences pleasantly off-guard. Their routine is a combination of acrobatic display and slapstick gags, cut through with peculiar pseudo-political speechmaking and strange one-liners ("What made pistachio nuts?" asks Mitchell).

Mitchell and Durant were memorable and entertaining enough for Fox to keep them under contract, but the studio apparently wasn't too sure what to do with them. The team found themselves quickly cast as comic relief in a series of four musicals, three starring Alice Faye and one, Spring Tonic (1935), starring Lew Ayres and Claire Trevor. I've heard good things about them in Spring Tonic and She Learned About Sailors (1934), but their gag sequences in 365 Nights In Hollywood are poorly-written and a waste of their talent. Their contract must have run out in 1935 for they were at Warner Bros. the following year turning in excellent and rather uncharacteristic performances in Al Jolson's last hurrah The Singing Kid. Mitchell and Durant appear as Babe and Dope, two of Jolie's radio gag writers, and in place of the usual acrobatics (aside from a brief backflip for Frank) are nicely written and beautifully performed running gags. "Hold out your hand!" demands Jack after Frank pops off a lousy pun or makes a silly suggestion, and then ignores the hand completely, instead dumping a vase over Frank's head or slapping his face. At the end, Frank has finally had enough. "Hold out your hand!" he growls at Jack, and then slugs him squarely in the face.

Mitchell and Durant's violent wise-guy comedy fit neatly into Warner's house style, so it's strange that they weren't kept under contract. Instead, The Singing Kid was their swansong as a team in movies. They split in 1938, so presumably they spent a few final years on the West Coast nightclub circuit. Frank Mitchell quickly bounced back into movies in 1939, staring with small uncredited roles, and then hitting his stride in 1941 as "Cannonball", a comic sidekick in Bill Elliott and Tex Ritter westerns at Republic (3rd Banana contributor Nick Santa Maria met Frank Mitchell briefly in the 1980s and claims that Mitchell was positive he was going to be remembered solely as Cannonball). Durant left Hollywood and returned to Broadway in the original production of Rodgers and Hart's Pal Joey.

The Great One and Florence Rice are wearing about the same amount of
eyeliner in this odd, odd publicity photo. And, hell.. Borrah Minevitch
and his Harmonica Rascals, too?? I must see this movie!

With Abbott and Costello's smash hit Buck Privates in 1941, comedy teams were once more hot stuff in Hollywood. Jack Durant, who had resumed his film career in 1942 with the Ray Bolger service comedy Four Jacks and a Jill, played Abbott to a young Jackie Gleason's Costello in Tramp, Tramp, Tramp for Columbia that same year (anyone seen this?). Two years later, Frank Mitchell turned up in the Republic musical That's My Baby! with a new partner, Lyle Latell, who would become best known as Pat Patton in RKO's Dick Tracy features. Again, I haven't seen this and can't imagine who played the straightman. While Durant and Gleason were undoubtedly Columbia's artificial brainchild, Mitchell and Latell must have been a legitimate stage team because they returned the following year in George White's Scandals for a different studio, RKO. Any information would be greatly appreciated.

In 1943, Jack Durant appeared as Gogo Martel in Orson Welles' Journey Into Fear which, despite Durant's solid performance, clearly counted for little as he then vanished from the screen (apart from tiny cameos in No Orchids for Miss Blandish (1948) and The Bellboy (1960)). Frank Mitchell, however, kept plugging away in Hollywood with ever diminishing returns, eventually turning up in small roles on TV. There are two odd codas to Mitchell's career. In 1976, he directed Blood Voyage, his only feature. Again, I'd love to know how that came about. Three years prior, he joined Curly Joe DeRita and former Ted Healy stooge Mousie Garner as one third of "The New Stooges", a Three Stooges spin-off act that was booked at amusement parks for a couple of months. Were you lucky enough to have caught their act? If you were, please clue me and our readers in. The idea of Joe DeRita, Mousie Garner, and Frank Mitchell slapping each other around on-stage at some theme park is the stuff my dreams are made of.

Observations on Ted Healy

One of the nicest compliments I'd received for my now-dead Ted Healy page was that Ted, were he alive, would likely have slapped my back hard enough to sting, bought me a stiff drink, and then done something absolutely horrible and emotionally scarring to me. Ted Healy, Bobby Clark, and Paul McCullough are the three comedians who really sparked my interest in comedy obscureology. It's inexplicable that they all aren't better known, but Ted's relative obscurity is the most curious and disturbing of all to me. Clark and McCullough are an acquired taste, admittedly, and I'm speaking as one of their biggest boosters. Even their best films undoubtedly pale in relation to their stage work, and Bobby, especially, is a Broadway personality confined in a celluloid prison, a personality rather too bold and alien (not to mention alienating) for the intimacies of film. But Ted Healy was simply born to be a film star, and it was apparent even in his silent 1926 "tryout", Wise Guys Prefer Brunettes, for Hal Roach. He's real, engaging, fascinating, and frequently terrifying. The two-dimensional boundary of the screen vanishes for Ted, a comedian so direct and modern.. some would say postmodern.. that it's a shock to me that he isn't better regarded today, the effects of the smear campaign notwithstanding. You can see his influence on television even now, his legacy most apparent in comic MCs such as Conan O'Brien and Jay Leno. Healy was certainly one of the first to shatter the accepted role of the performer as Performer, destroying the barrier between comedian and audience. After all, what did he do? Bert Wheeler was a song and dance man, Eddie Cantor a wisecracking singer, W. C. Fields a juggler; what was Ted Healy? Ted's right to the limelight was assured simply because he was a funny man, not a man who expertly told funny jokes or funny stories. Ted Healy scarcely cared about jokes, had no patience for them. In Soup To Nuts, you can see for yourself his impatience with the "laff lines" and his eagerness not to dwell on them. The stooges were the joke-machines of the act, near parodies of slapshoe vaudeville comedians, and Ted was just as much their audience as the actual audience was. His reactions to their calculated inanity became the vicarious reaction of the crowd; their emotional release as well. The stooges.. Sanborn, Howard, Howard, Fine, Howard, Hakins, Wolf, Garner, etc.. were living props, and Ted made sure an audience understood that they deserved every last slap. As purveyors of the oldest and/or stalest and/or lamest jokes known to mankind, or for simply attempting to upstage the headliner, it was Ted's job.. his honor.. to stand up for the audience and slap the stooges silly. If Curly or Freddy comes skittering across the stage, mugging like a maniac, in the middle of Ted's song, he's asking for trouble; so why the hell not give it to him? That's what he's there for! No one is asking for sympathy. I can't imagine a single audience member in Ted's entire stage career standing up and saying "Hey, you big bully! Leave that little guy alone!" That Howard, Fine, and Howard are famous today for being, frankly, atavistic, albeit talented, clowns while Healy, an innovator, true eccentric, and probably genius, is a footnote in their careers says something too depressing about life for me to contemplate.