Half-Wits Holiday (1947)

Posted on August 4, 2025 by Phil Hall

The Three Stooges’ “Half-Wits Holiday” is one of the saddest comedies ever made, not so much because of its content – which tries but mostly fails at being amusing – but because of its troubled production history. On May 6, 1946, the final day of the four-day shoot, Curly Howard suffered a massive stroke during the production that effectively ended his career. Curly’s health had been in decline since mid-1944 and it is believed that he endured several mini-strokes prior to making this short.
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The Shining (1980)

Posted on May 26, 2025 by Phil Hall

My problem with “The Shining” is that it was made at the wrong time by the wrong people. It should have been made by the Columbia Pictures short subjects department in the mid-1940s with Shemp Howard as Jack Torrance, Vera Vague as Wendy Torrance, Dudley Dickerson as Dick Halloran, and (in a loan-out from Hal Roach) Billy “Froggy” Laughlin as Danny Torrance. And behind the camera, Jules White would direct the film by filling the Overlook Hotel with a gorilla throwing pies and skeletons operating on clearly visible wires.
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Scheming Schemers (1956)

Posted on November 18, 2024 by Phil Hall

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.
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The Bootleg Files: Innocently Guilty

Posted on May 31, 2024 by Phil Hall

BOOTLEG FILES 868: “Innocently Guilty” (1950 comedy short starring Bert Wheeler).

LAST SEEN: On YouTube.

AMERICAN HOME VIDEO: None.

REASON FOR BOOTLEG STATUS: It fell through the proverbial cracks.

CHANCES OF SEEING A COMMERCIAL DVD RELEASE: Unlikely, unless it is part of an anthology of miscellaneous Columbia Pictures shorts.

Bert Wheeler is remembered today as one-half of the Wheeler and Woolsey comedy team that starred in a series of comedy films beginning in 1929 with “Rio Rita” and ending with “High Flyers” in 1937. After the death of his on-screen partner Robert Woolsey in 1938, Wheeler struggled to maintain a solo career – he starred in the forgettable films “The Cowboy Quarterback” (1938) and “Las Vegas Nights” (1941) and then disappeared from the big screen to find work in nightclubs, on radio and on stage. Wheeler found a larger audience in 1950 when Jackie Gleason invited him to appear on his “Cavalcade of Stars” television show on the Dumont Television Network.
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The Bootleg Files: Hiss and Yell

Posted on October 6, 2023 by Phil Hall

BOOTLEG FILES 844: “Hiss and Yell” (1946 Oscar-nominated comedy short starring Vera Vague and Emil Sitka).

LAST SEEN: On YouTube.

AMERICAN HOME VIDEO: None.

REASON FOR BOOTLEG STATUS: The rights holder will not make it available.

CHANCES OF SEEING A COMMERCIAL DVD RELEASE: Not likely.

In the late 1930s, comic actress Barbara Jo Allen invented the character Vera Vague for a radio show. This character was a chatterbox, featherbrained spinster who was always in pursuit of a man. Audiences quickly embraced the character, and her appeal was so strong that Allen adopted Vera Vague as her professional name.
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