Rube Goldberg and the Three Stooges?

Soup to Nuts (1930)

Directed by Benjamin Stoloff

William Fox Film Corporation, 70 minutes, Not-rated.

★ (as a movie)  ★★★ (as camp)

I wanted to watch this film because of an exhibit I recently saw at the Norman Rockwell Museum that featured the work of cartoonist/satirist Rube Goldberg (1883-1970). I had not known that he was ever associated with a movie, let alone one involving The Three Stooges! Soup to Nuts is that film and it’s really, really terrible, though it has high camp value. Its odd title is the movie’s prelude title card. Goldberg prefaced one of his zany contraptions with this rationale:

There can be no harmony in the home while people loudly slurp their soup. There can never be peace in matrimony while wives throw broken nutshells on the floor for their husbands to step on with their bare feet. Somewhere between the soup and the nuts… perhaps in the fish or the applesauce… there must be joy and contentment.

If you know anything about Goldberg, you will recognize that you are about to see a blueprint for a Mousetrap-like machine so improbable that it makes the inventions of Gromit’s owner Wallace seem like pragmatic. There are several of Goldberg’s antigodlin devices in the film and they might seem rather naff, but it’s important to know a few things about the world of 1930. First, Goldberg’s quirky imagination was piqued in reaction to Taylorism, the industrial “efficiency” movement that often made things worse instead of better. Charlie Chaplin’s 1936 Modern Times is the ultimate takedown of Taylorism. Second, sound movies were still very much a novelty, so much of what seems stiff and forced worked better 90 years ago.

This brings me to The Three Stooges. In 1930, they were not headliners; they were part of an ensemble called Ted Healy and His Stooges. Healy, not Moe, Curly, and Larry was the main attraction. For that matter, there was no Curly* as of yet; Shemp was the “leader” of the trio with “Harry” (Moe) and Larry his sidecars. All four came from vaudeville, with Healy probably getting top billing because Larry Fine and Shemp and Moe Howard were Jewish. (Their given surnames were Feinberg and Horwitz.) The Stooges engaged in pratfalls, but had not yet fully evolved their routine. In the film they are upstaged–if that’s the right word–by Fred Sanborn, a mute roister-doister wearing slap shoes and ludicrous pasted-on bushy eyebrows. He’s essentially a poor man’s Chaplin with a fraction of the talent.

To the degree there is a plot, it revolves around Schmidt’s Costume Shop, whose owner Otto (Charles Winniger) loves crazy gadgets but has the business sense of a flea. His niece Louise (Lucile Browne) worries for her uncle and fends off advances of Richard Carlson (Stanley Smith) who is ostensibly sent by creditors to oversee the shop, but secretly to push the old man out. Healy is “Ted,” a salesman; and George Bickel is Gus Klein, who runs a restaurant deli almost as badly as Otto runs his costume shop. You also need to know that ethic humor was a popular holdover from vaudeville. Expect some silly scenes at the shop as Ted tries to make Otto’s business solvent.

Shemp, Moe, Larry, and Sanborn are firemen whose major role is to fake fire calls so they can take out the ladder truck and pick up flappers. There is a running gag of Sanborn being left behind, and another involving Otto’s burglar alarm, a Goldberg machine. (Rube himself appears in a cameo.) The “big” scene is a costumed firemen’s ball that might just save the store and sort out a romance in the offing. In it, we see Healy whet his own comedic whistle and discover that the Stooges were actually skilled crooners. Oh, and there’s a real fire at some point. But don’t try to make too much of the story; it’s not worth it.

The main reason to dip into any of this is if you want to see the genesis of The Three Stooges. In 1934, they parted ways with Healy, an alcoholic, the act took off, and endured into 1970. A secondary reason is to see Goldberg’s gizmos on the screen though, to be honest, Wallace and Gromit is much funnier in that medium. All told, though, Soup to Nuts is best suited for Bad Movie Night. I recommend copious supplies of non-nourishing junk food and beer.

Rob Weir  

* If you’re keeping score, Shemp left the Stooges in 1932, and Jerome, another Howard brother shaved his head and became Curly. Shemp returned when Culry had a stroke in 1946. When Shemp died in 1955, two other actors played him and still another actor semi-revived Curly’s role.