In the days leading up to the Academy Awards, there are inevitably news articles about the many vintage stars who were never nominated. John Barrymore, Errol Flynn, Jean Harlow, Myrna Loy, Maureen O’Hara, Tyrone Power, and Edward G. Robinson are among the legendary names Oscar somehow overlooked.
The situation is pretty much the same when it comes to classic comedy teams. Popular as they were, neither Abbott and Costello nor Martin and Lewis ever received Academy Award nominations. What’s more, the Marx Brothers’ only one wasn’t for Best Screenplay. It came in the now-obsolete Best Dance Direction category for their somewhat problematic “All God’s Chillun Got Rhythm” number from A Day at the Races. One group who managed to escape this curse was none other than Moe, Larry and Curly. That’s right; in 1934 the Three Stooges earned their first and only Oscar nomination for Men in Black.
I know what you young whippersnappers out there are thinking. No, the Stooges do not hunt down extraterrestrials in this, their third short for Columbia Pictures. The title is a take-off on MGM’s Men in White, a Clark Gable–Myrna Loy medical drama which came out earlier that year. Here the boys are less-than-distinguished medical school graduates (“Why, we graduated with the highest temperatures in our class!”) working as interns at Los Arms Hospital.
Eager to prove themselves to a girl named Nellie (who sends a telegram saying she’ll marry the one “who does the greatest thing for Duty and Humanity”), the trio are off and running whenever “Dr. Howard, Dr. Fine, Dr. Howard” blares over the omnipresent hospital loudspeaker. Ducking into a TARDIS-like utility closet and coming out on a tandem bicycle, a horse, and in go-karts, the manic medicos treat an array of cases, from a comatose midget in drag (The Wizard of Oz Munchkin “Little Billy” Rhodes) to a mental patient (Shemp Howard’s good friend Billy Gilbert) who has rats coming out of his buttonholes and sees “giant green canaries.”
They even get to operate on the hospital’s superintendent (Dell Henderson), whose glass office door they keep breaking. It seems he accidentally swallowed a piece of paper with a vital safe combination on it. This impromptu surgery offers Larry a chance to gleefully wield a humongous knife while cackling “Let’s plug him and see if he’s ripe!” Helping them on their rounds are a squeaky-voiced, hiccupping nurse (Jeannie Roberts), a whispering nurse (Ruth Hiatt) who lost her voice asking for a raise, and a perplexed fellow doctor (Stooges regular Bud Jamison).
As mentioned earlier, Men in Black was just the third of the Stooges’ 190 Columbia two-reelers. Coming after the frankly mediocre Woman Haters and the boxing gem Punch Drunks, it helped set the tone for the trio’s next quarter-century of cinematic slapstick. It also offered them the chance to introduce some soon-to-be familiar routines. There’s Larry crooning à la Bing Crosby “Ba-ba-ba-boo, ba-ba-ba-boo”). There’s the fellas mixing a concoction of made-up ingredients (“Adapontash, Citascram, Forsia, Annaconnahon, Enot”). And there’s the operation scene, where anyone calling for “COTTON!” gets a wad of it in the punim, to name a few.
Most importantly, this film brought the Stooges to the attention of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, who in 1935 nominated it for Best Short Film–Comedy. Also in the running were two early Technicolor entries: Warner Bros.’ What, No Men!, with Swedish dialect clown El Brendel, and the eventual winner, RKO’s Mexico-set musical La Cucaracha. Men in Black may not have been Moe, Larry, and Curly’s funniest effort. To me, that’s still a toss-up between Punch Drunks and Three Little Pirates. Even so, the boys definitely give it their all “for Duty and Humanity!”