Many Three Stooges fans have taken to various online forums to declare “Sweet and Hot” as the team’s worst film. It isn’t – not by a long shot – but, admittedly, it is an experiment that didn’t quite work.
The problem is that “Sweet and Hot” deviates wildly from the usual Three Stooges structure, with the trio split up as independent characters supporting Muriel Landers, an amply proportioned singer and comic actress. Columbia Pictures recruited Landers for a short subject series where she would be teamed with starlet Bek Nelson. However, only one film – the 1957 “Tricky Chicks” – was produced in that series and Landers was shuttled over to the Stooges’ series, which had undergone a personnel change with Joe Besser replacing the late Shemp Howard.
With “Sweet and Hot,” Larry is a successful New York City producer who wants to bring the singing Landers (playing a farm girl named Tiny) to the Big Apple for a nightclub engagement – Joe is Tiny’s brother, but he is unable to convince Tiny to leave the farm and overcome her phobia of singing in front of people. Larry and Joe take Tiny to the psychiatrist Dr. Hugo Gansamacher, who is played by Moe with an outlandishly bogus German accent. The Teutonic shrink uncovers the core of Tiny’s phobia – her abusive father (also played by Moe) punished her when she complained that she was uncomfortable performing for an audience. (The flashback has Landers pretending to be a child – it is silly but not funny.) With her phobia immediately erased, Tiny becomes a nightclub sensation with Larry and Joe joining her act.
Landers was a very talented performer – she was paired with Ray Bolger in his nightclub act and appeared on television with Frank Sinatra and Jack Benny – but a lot of the humor in “Sweet and Hot” consists of puerile jokes regarding her girth. Even her character’s name is a childish slur against her heaviness. Her nightclub rendition of “The Heat is On” was borrowed from “Tricky Chicks” and she displays a sassy sense of humor in belting out a torch song. It’s a shame that her teaming with the Stooges wasn’t fully concentrated in a nightclub setting where Landers could have been seen at a better advantage.
If there is a saving grace to “Sweet and Hot,” it would be Moe Howard’s zany German psychiatrist. With his hair slick back and his eyes lost behind bottlecap-thick glasses, he offers a grand burlesque of the stereotypical German medical professional. And even funnier is when he declares that he can do rock-n-roll dancing, only to break into bizarre hopping movements that neither rock nor roll.
As for Larry Fine (whose hair is also combed back) and Joe Besser (who reportedly encouraged his teammates to forgo their trademark haircuts for the film), they are doing a double act in “Sweet and Hot” with Larry as the aggressor. But splitting up the Stooges from their usual protocol never clicked and Besser didn’t fit it in well with the knockabout aspects of the act.
Columbia dropped Landers after “Sweet and Low” was released and she mostly confined her later work to television, most notably in a jolting performance on the “Twilight Zone” episode “A Piano in the House” and in an early episode of “Rowan & Martin’s Laugh-In” – it’s a shame that she didn’t gain tenure as part of that show’s ensemble, because she was a gifted performer who always brightened up a show.