Malice in the Palace (1949)

Director:

Jules White

Writers:

Felix Adler (screenplay)
Felix Adler (story)

Release Date:

1 September 1949 (USA)

Genre:

Comedy | Short

Plot:

Set in a desert land where the stooges run a restaurant, the boys set out to recover the stolen Rootin...

Plot Keywords:

Diamond | Restaurant | Public Domain | Cook | Butcher

Cast

  (Complete credited cast)

Shemp Howard	...	Shemp (as Shemp)
Larry Fine	...	Larry (as Larry)
Moe Howard	...	Moe (as Moe)
Vernon Dent	...	Hassan Ben Sober
George J. Lewis	...	Ginna Rumma (as George Lewis)
Frank Lackteen	...	Affa Dolla
rest of cast listed alphabetically:
Curly Howard	...	Chef (scenes deleted)

Also Known As:

Here We Go Shmow (USA) (working title)

Runtime:

16 min

Country:

USA

Language:

English

Color:

Black and White

Aspect Ratio:

1.37 : 1

Sound Mix:

Mono (Western Electric Recording)

Certification:

Australia:G

Company:

Columbia Pictures Corporation

Trivia:

Larry Fine's autobiography contains a photograph of Curly Howard as a chef in a deleted scene from this film. Curly had suffered a stroke a few years earlier and had left the act. He had clearly lost weight, and his face was disguised with a huge handlebar mustache.

Goofs:

Crew or equipment visible: After the table gets knocked over, a finger can briefly be seen under the leg of the table, poking at the cat to get it to leave the shot.

Quotes:

Moe: There's only one 100-carat diamond, and it comes from Rootin Tootin's Tomb.
Shemp: That's government property.
Moe: Right, and if we return it, we'll get a big reward.
Larry: Yeah! Maybe fifty-thousand bucks. Boy, with that kind of money, we could rent a one-room apartment in Hollywood... maybe.

Movie Connections:

Referenced in Army of Darkness (1992)

They forgot to put laughs on the menu...

The Three Stooges are in the desert restaurant business in this cheap short that struggles to raise many laughs. The big routine in this one is the cat and dog sequence described by others and it seems to go on forever. It's mildly amusing, but there's no correlation between the length of the skit and the laughs it produces. In fact the best thing about this flick is the character and location names, which appear to have been dreamed up late one night in a dimly lit booth of a bar after a few too many sherbets: Ginna Rumma, Affa Dollar, Hassan Ben Soba – it's a shame as much imagination wasn't put into the every other aspect of the film.