Soup to Nuts

"Soup to Nuts" is far from a brilliant comedy and I only scored it a mediocre 6. So why do I STILL recommend you see it? Well, it's because it is important historically, as it's the first Three Stooges film...of sorts. I say 'of sorts' because it's not exactly the Stooges you might expect. While many will remember Curly as one of the original Stooges, this really isn't the case. His older brother, Shemp, was originally one of the Four Stooges. Four? Well, I'll get to that in a second. As for Curly, he replaced Shemp as Shemp had film offers on his own and only returned to the Stooges after Curly had a stroke in 1946. Now about the four....for a brief time, Fred Sanborn played a mute Stooge...sort of like a Harpo Marx character. But after making "From Soup to Nuts" he, like Shemp, went out on his own...in this case to pursue his musical career. Additionally, through their stage act to about 1933, the Stooges were billed as Ted Healy and His Stooges. After completing this film for Fox, the group went to MGM, briefly, and Moe, Larry and Curly soon left to go to Columbia and their careers took off. As for Healy, he stayed with MGM and was beaten to death outside a nightclub only a few years later.

So, if you want to see the earliest incarnation of the Stooges on film, "Soup to Nuts" is it....though the style sure isn't what you'd expect from the boys. Ted Healy is THE act and Moe, Larry and Shemp really have little to do and Moe isn't the boss...so they all slap each other or get slapped by Healy. As for Sanborn, despite soon leaving the group, he received much more screen time than Moe, Larry and Shemp...much more. He was occasionally funny.

The plot seems only ancillary to all the weirdness and high energy. Otto owns a costume shop and it's a financial mess...so much so that the company is being taken over by creditors. The man's daughter is angry and hates the man who has come to run things....though he's actually a nice guy and helps the family tremendously...though it took the entire film for her to realize it. In the interim, there's a lot of silliness, some Rube Goldberg style inventions and a bit of music. All in all, reasonably pleasant but a bit incoherent when it comes to plot.

By the way, if you do watch, note a couple other actors in the film. In the restaurant scene, note the rotund guy. He's Mack Swain, the foil for Chaplin in many of his films, including "The Gold Rush". Also, the 'baby' doing summersaults is actually 6 year-old Billy Barty.

This curio represents the nuttiness of famed cartoonist of a century ago Rube Goldberg, who co-wrote the movie and has some of his zany inventions featured. Its early talkie era technique is static and dated, but there are so many gags included that some are bound to amuse.

Ted Healy is featured with his Three Stooges, numbering Shemp, Moe (his stage name is Harry at this point) and Larry, no Curly in the group. A fourth stooge is played silent (a la Harpo in the Marx clan) by Fred Sanborn, who has memorably bushy eyebrows, is very short and throw in effeminate moves in his pantomime routine Sanborn even has a featured shtick playing the xylophone while he dances.

. The other three stooges do physical shtick and also provide a harmonized (barbershop quartet style) singing that is well-done and I don't recall being exploited in their later films.

It's clearly not up to the standard of the Marx Brothers classics, or even those popular RKO vehicles for the team of Wheeler & Woolsey, but it's still fun to watch and intentionally makes very little sense.

Everybody commenting here seems to forget about the fine character actor Charles Winninger, who unfortunately is one of the best things about this mediocre picture. Yeah, we Stooges fans only watched this to see our favorite slapstick guys in their very first exposure to film, and most of us already knew that Healy's semi-popularity as a comedian was a mystery. But there are indeed other things going on here, most notably the aforementioned Winninger, who's the funniest person in this film, most assuredly. Watch out for that gigantic boot!

The only appeal of this film is to see the Stooges in their earliest film appearance--and to get a glimpse of the now-reviled Ted Healey. I can see why the Boys parted ways with Healey. His treatment of them comes off as brutal and mean-spirited (even by Stooge standards!) A curiosity piece.

Well, folks, I dunno' . . . maybe I'm just a little nutty myself, but I really like this film. For the record, I also like the movie "Meet the Baron" and a couple of the Fox Laurel & Hardy movies; on the other hand I think "Dancing Lady" is very BORING, and I think "Swing Parade" is BEYOND boring and a terrible waste of talent, especially in the finale. So that's where I stand...

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The story moves along briskly with one colorful character popping up after another, with the jokes doggedly marching along. If you don't like one gag, you'll laugh at the next—well, smile anyway... Happily enough, there are indeed a number of Rube Goldberg's "inventions" on display throughout the film.

The Three Stooges appear suddenly in the first instant of the first live-action shot of the movie, and the whole scene is very funny. They sing and do the sand-bag routine (later reprised in the 1950s on the Ed Wynn Show. Here it is more logically framed and much better timed with a stronger ending). I find Ted Healey very charming and funny, too. His girlfriend Queenie (Frances McCoy) is perfect: darling and hilarious, and remains one of the great mysteries of film--absolutely nobody seems to know whatever happened to her!

There is actually quite a lot of Stooges, and they have as merry madcap a fire department you could please. If you think of the movie being in 3 parts, they are in two-thirds of the film.

The quality of the Fox 2005 reprinting is GREAT, both image and sound. Imagine: a 1930 movie that no one cared about, saved at the last minute and looking so good. OK, it's just not a "great" film, so 7 stars out of 10; but the restoration is 9.99 stars. (One curiosity is that the end music is quite long, but there is no picture!)

We should be so lucky to see the Laurel & Hardy movies again in such pristine condition. Hallmark should be shot.