Jules White was not, by any stretch of the imagination, the greatest comedy director \u2013 but he might have been the resourceful. With the 1956 Three Stooges short \u201cScheming Schemers,\u201d 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.
\n<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
\u201cScheming Schemers\u201d borrows heavily from the 1949 \u201cVagabond Loafers,\u201d which itself borrowed gags and footage from the 1940 \u201cA Plumbing We Will Go.\u201d The climactic pie fight was culled from the 1947 \u201cHalf Wits Holiday.\u201d The only new footage involved Moe and Larry\u2019s incompetent attempts to retrieve the ring from the wash basin, the pair\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n
\u201cScheming Schemers\u201d was one of four Three Stooges shorts produced after Shemp Howard\u2019s 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\u2019s face would be obscured from view while a line from Shemp\u2019s earlier films was dubbed in to give the impression he was on the screen. In \u201cScheming Schemers,\u201d Palma is only on screen for a few seconds while carrying a heaving bag and pipes that hide his face \u2013 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. <\/p>\n
Despite the rickety concept of the production, \u201cScheming Schemers\u201d 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 \u2013 most notably a body double who perfectly fills in for leading lady Christine McIntyre, who was part of \u201cVagabond Loafers\u201d but was absent from this update. And all the new footage was shot in a single day \u2013 January 16, 1956, to be precise, an impressive speed feat. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Jules White was not, by any stretch of the imagination, the greatest comedy director \u2013 but he might have been the resourceful. With the 1956 Three Stooges short \u201cScheming Schemers,\u201d 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 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":19,"featured_media":45528,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1369],"tags":[219,3528,3291,3433,2187,1742],"class_list":["post-45527","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-retro-cinema","tag-comedy","tag-fake-shemp","tag-jules-white","tag-short-fikm","tag-slapstick","tag-three-stooges"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.cinema-crazed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/45527","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.cinema-crazed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.cinema-crazed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cinema-crazed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/19"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cinema-crazed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=45527"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/www.cinema-crazed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/45527\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":45533,"href":"https:\/\/www.cinema-crazed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/45527\/revisions\/45533"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cinema-crazed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/45528"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.cinema-crazed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=45527"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cinema-crazed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=45527"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cinema-crazed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=45527"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}