Gents in a Jam

Infobox Film
name = Gents in a Jam


caption =
director = Edward Bernds
writer = Edward Bernds
starring = Moe Howard
Larry Fine
Shemp Howard
Emil Sitka
Kitty McHugh
Dani Sue Nolan
Mickey Simpson
cinematography = Fayte Browne |
editing = Edwin Bryant
producer = Hugh McCollum
distributor = Columbia Pictures
released = flagicon|US July 4, 1952
runtime = 16' 12"
country = USA
language = English
preceded_by = "He Cooked His Goose"
followed_by = "Three Dark Horses"
amg_id =
imdb_id = 0044655

"Gents in a Jam" is the 141st short subject starring American slapstick comedy team the Three Stooges. The trio made a total of 190 shorts for Columbia Pictures between 1934 and 1959.

tart of a decline

"Gents in a Jam" was the last short directed by Edward Bernds, long considered the Stooges' finest director. Producer Hugh McCollum was discharged and, as a result, Bernds resigned out of loyalty to McCollum, leaving only director/short subject head Jules White to both produce and direct the Stooges' remaining Columbia comedies.

Almost overnight, the quality of the Stooge shorts declined. Production was significantly faster, with the former four-day filming schedules now tightened to two or three days. In another cost-cutting measure, White would create a "new" Stooge short by borrowing footage from old ones, setting it in a slightly different storyline, and filming a few new scenes often with the same actors in the same costumes. White was initially very subtle when recycling older footage: he would reuse only a single sequence of old film, re-edited so cleverly that it was not easy to detect. The later shorts were cheaper and the recycling more obvious, with as much as 75% of the running time consisting of old footage. White came to rely so much on older material that he could film the "new" shorts in a single day. ['Three Stooges' entry at wikipedia.org]

References

Further reading

*"Moe Howard and the Three Stooges"; by Moe Howard [http://www.amazon.com/dp/0806507233] , (Citadel Press, 1977).
*"The Three Stooges Scrapbook"; by Jeff Lenburg, Joan Howard Maurer, Greg Lenburg [http://www.amazon.com/dp/0806509465] (Citadel Press, 1994).
*"The Three Stooges: An Illustrated History, From Amalgamated Morons to American Icons"; by Michael Fleming [http://www.amazon.com/dp/0767905563] (Broadway Publishing, 2002).
*"One Fine Stooge: A Frizzy Life in Pictures"; by Steve Cox and Jim Terry [http://www.amazon.com/dp/1581823630] , (Cumberland House Publishing, 2006).