Jules White was not, by any stretch of the imagination, the greatest comedy director – but he might have been the resourceful. With the 1956 Three Stooges short “Scheming Schemers,” he created a new film by using stock footage from three different movies while putting forth a work where one of the stars had passed away six weeks earlier.
Moe, Larry and Shemp are plumbers who are called to the Northfleet mansion to retrieve a diamond ring that fell down a bathroom wash basin. The mansion is hosting a party where its hostess is eager to display a new addition to her art collection. In typical Three Stooges fashion, they wind up creating more problems that solutions, enacting violence on both the property and themselves. Somehow, they manage to stop a pair of art thieves from stealing a valuable painting while accidentally launching a pie fight that splatters the posh guests of the party.
“Scheming Schemers” borrows heavily from the 1949 “Vagabond Loafers,” which itself borrowed gags and footage from the 1940 “A Plumbing We Will Go.” The climactic pie fight was culled from the 1947 “Half Wits Holiday.” The only new footage involved Moe and Larry’s incompetent attempts to retrieve the ring from the wash basin, the pair’s subduing art thief Kenneth MacDonald with pies and lead pipe to the head, and a few seconds of Columbia contract player Joe Palma pretending to be Shemp.
“Scheming Schemers” was one of four Three Stooges shorts produced after Shemp Howard’s death in November 1955. The act was contracted to fulfill a quota of shorts for their studio, so producer-director White opted to use Palma as a stand-in for the late funnyman. In these shorts, Palma’s face would be obscured from view while a line from Shemp’s earlier films was dubbed in to give the impression he was on the screen. In “Scheming Schemers,” Palma is only on screen for a few seconds while carrying a heaving bag and pipes that hide his face – the photo above shows that scene. Moe and Larry covered for the missing Shemp in their new footage by making several references wondering what their partner was doing in the mansion.
Despite the rickety concept of the production, “Scheming Schemers” is very funny. The new slapstick involving the retrieval of the ring is wild to the point of surrealism while the old footage is integrated wonderfully, with potential continuity problems expertly covered – most notably a body double who perfectly fills in for leading lady Christine McIntyre, who was part of “Vagabond Loafers” but was absent from this update. And all the new footage was shot in a single day – January 16, 1956, to be precise, an impressive speed feat.