Have Rocket Will Travel (1959)

HAVE ROCKET WILL TRAVEL  (1959)  ¢ ¢ 1/2
    D: David Lowell Rich
    The Three Stooges, Jerome Cowan, Anna Lisa,
    Robert Colbert, Marjorie Bennett, Nadia Sanders
Stooges in space. Moe, Larry and Curly Joe blast off to Venus after inventing a rocket fuel with ingredients like popcorn, sugar, kerosene and bicarbonate of soda. The Stooges did their best work in two-reelers, the ones with Curly and Shemp. Their m.o. was speed, and their shorts are a sort of race to see how many slapstick gags they can cram into 16 minutes. The expanded running time of features slowed them down. (Laurel and Hardy, whose comedy was more deliberate and sometimes just as violent, had better luck with longer films.) It was the two-reelers, showing on television, that brought the Stooges a new generation of fans and allowed them to make features in the first place, and "Have Rocket Will Travel" was the picture that kicked off their last few years of poking and bonking and pies in the face. It's not much of a movie - the storytelling is shoddy - but it does contain an inspired gag toward the end, a society gala that's reduced to chaos when everybody there starts to act like the Three Stooges. At least the late-career recognition came while Moe and Larry were still around to enjoy it. After all those years spent knocking each other around, it's nice that they got to cash in.