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Three Stooges Go Around the World in a Daze, The
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| Year: |
1963
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Director: |
Norman Maurer
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| Stars: |
Moe Howard, Larry Fine, Joe DeRita, Jay Sheffield, Joan Freeman, Walter Burke, Peter Forster, Maurice Dallimore, Richard Devon, Anthony Eustrel, Curtis Iaukea, Robert Kino, Phil Arnold, Murray Alper, Don Lamond, Jack Greening
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| Genre: |
Comedy |
| Rating: |
  6 (from 1 vote) |
| Review: |
Some decades ago, the British adventurer Phileas Fogg travelled around the world in eighty days for a wager, but what if his great-grandson Phileas Fogg III (Jay Sheffield) was to do the same? That's the idea playing on the mind of the English rogue Vickers Cavendish (Peter Forster) who thinks if he can persuade him to follow in his ancestor's footsteps then he will be on to a winner, especially when he adds the conditions that Phileas not spend any money on his journey, making such a bet very difficult indeed. But Vickers has a plan to frame him for a bank robbery he will unwittingly assist him in - there are some people who can help Phileas, however, a certain trio of manservants...
For The Three Stooges' penultimate starring roles, unless you count the uncompleted Kook's Tour of 1970, they set off globetrotting, except of course they never got anywhere outside of California, quite unlike the Academy Award-winning motion picture this operates as an unlikely and unofficial sequel to. This was strictly travelling on a budget, with functional sets standing in for various locations, but no matter, you didn't watch these latter day Stooges efforts for their production values, you wanted to see the gags. The films the now-ageing Moe Howard and Larry Fine made with Curly Joe DeRita are generally thought of as inferior, but then there's this.
It's not as if the team were doing anything particularly radical in a departure from their previous features never mind the shorts of their heyday, but somehow things just clicked better with Around the World in a Daze, and there were some genuine laughs to be had even if you weren't six years old. The sight of Moe and Larry piling a huge amount of luggage onto Curly Joe's back is memorably ludicrous, and the sort of over the top visual gag that they should have done more of in this twilight second wind of their careers, because it did raise a giggle. There was more of that to come in the rest of the movie, too, as Moe's son-in-law Norman Maurer made his debut as director after looking after the team for a while by that point.
Maurer was also concocting the storylines of these films, which at the very least displayed a level of invention in placing the boys into distinctive situations for them to play out their accustomed shtick in. All those knocks on the head (with "clonk" noises) and punches in the belly (with "boom" noises) were present and correct, although on DeRita's advice the eye pokes had been dropped for fear of their younger fans imitating them. This did lead to a bizarre scene where the Stooges meet their Chinese counterparts and Moe sagely informs them they don't do the eye poke anymore, though those Asians had everything else about right. It was this anything goes tone which was a benefit to the production, and happily they managed to avoid going down the tired stereotype route.
Well, aside for the odd "Flied Liceburgers" sign on a fast food stand, for example, but for the most part this was Hollywood's idea of the rest of the world The Stooges were sending up, just as well when it looked so artificial. Once they have set off, if nothing else the caveat about not spending money on the trip offered the chance for the screenwriters to be inventive, and soon Phileas and company were stowing away in a ship to Turkey with Scotland Yard seeking them for the robbery, putting out an alert to foreign law officers to watch out for this lot. As if that were not complication enough, Vickers and his henchman Filch (Walter Burke) are hot on their heels hoping to bump them off to cover their crimes - Michael Palin never had to suffer that kind of impediment. Throw in adventures at an Indian sultan's palace (with the scrawniest belly dancer ever), not one but two sumo wrestling matches Curly Joe participates in, and love interest in the shape of Joan Freeman for Phileas, and you had a daft but winning effort for a team who never knew how to give up. Music by Paul Dunlap.
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| Reviewer: |
Graeme Clark
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