Gents Without Cents

Gents Without Cents (1944)

Step by step, inch by inch and wow, what comedy follows!

The stooges are three small time actors looking for a job. They meet three girl dancers in the situation and get a small part in a big producers show at the shipyard. When the rest of the cast doesn't show up, the stooges and the girls must put on the whole show themselves. The show is a hit and the stooges marry the girls and head to Niagara Falls for their honeymoon.

Date of release
1944-09-22
TMDB
6.5 / 10 (8)
Runtime
19m
Genres
Comedy
Director
Jules White

Casting

Interesting facts

Gents Without Cents is a 1944 short subject directed by Jules White and starring American slapstick comedy team The Three Stooges. It is the 81st of 190 Stooge shorts released by Columbia Pictures.

Production notes

"Slowly I Turned" is an old burlesque sketch introduced by veteran comic Joey Faye and used by many comedians including Abbott and Costello: a derelict goes crazy every time he hears a certain word or phrase, and assaults the innocent bystander who said the word. The Stooges' version, in which the trigger phrase is "Niagara Falls", was filmed in 1943 for the feature film Good Luck, Mr. Yates, but the scene was cut at the last minute.

Gents Without Cents is the first Stooge film to employ a syncopated, jazzy version of "Three Blind Mice" as the Stooges' theme song. The new version is in the key of F, while the key of G was previously utilized. This syncopated version would be used briefly after the next film, No Dough Boys. This version was revamped during the Shemp Howard and Joe Besser era.

The theatrical agent's sign lists business locations as "New York, Chicago, London ... Berlin soon". This film was released just a few months after D-Day, at a time when Allied forces were making steady advances. The scat-singing part of the Stooges' audition includes parodies of Hideki Tōjō (Larry), Benito Mussolini (Curly), and Adolf Hitler (Moe).

An obvious flub was left in the short at approximately 12:27 (the end of the "Niagara Falls" routine) as Larry misses the line "step-by-step", going directly to "inch by inch" while Moe says the line correctly. It is unclear why director Ray Enright left the mistake in; using an alternate, correct take would have taken only a few minutes, unless he felt such a mistake would be consistent with the amateur entertainment Howard, Fine, and Howard wer…

Read on Wikipedia · Text from Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0. Data from Wikidata.

Recommended