USA. 1959.
Crew
Director – David Lowell Rich, Screenplay – Raphael Hayes, Producer – Harry Romm, Photography (b&w) – Ray Cory, Music – Mischa Bakaleinikoff, Art Direction – John T. McCormack. Production Company – Columbia.
Cast
Moe Howard (Moe), Larry Fine (Larry), Joe deRita (Curly Joe), Jerome Cowan (J.P. Morse), Anna Lisa (Dr Ingrid Naarveg), Bob Colbert (Dr Ted Benson), Don Lamond (Narrator/Voice of the Venusian Robot)
Plot
Three idiots are employed as janitors at the National Space Foundation. There scientist Dr Ingrid Naarveg is trying to perfect a fuel formula to launch a rocket into space but all the launches keep crashing. When the three idiots overhear pompous foundation head J.P. Morse threatening to cut Ingrid’s program, they decide to step in and help. After hours, they use the laboratory to create their own rocket fuel, although this had the frequent habit of blowing up and creating chaos. Fleeing after Morse finds what they have been up to, they hide in the rocket only to accidentally launch themselves into space. With no clue what they are doing, they set themselves on a course for a landing on Venus.
The Three Stooges can be considered one of the great classic comedy acts. Moe Howard (born Moses Horowitz) first appeared in vaudeville as support to comedian Joe Healy in 1922. He was joined a couple of months later by his brother Shemp (Samuel Horowitz) and in 1925 by Larry Fine, (Moe was the only Stooge to stay with the act through their entire run). The Stooges and Ted Healy appeared in the film Soup to Nuts (1930) and several short films. In 1934, Healy and the Stooges parted ways and they were signed on by Columbia to appear in a series of short films, beginning with Woman Haters (1934). In 1937, Shemp departed for a solo career and was replaced by the younger Howard/Horowitz brother Jerry aka Curly. Curly stayed with the group until 1946 when he suffered a stroke and Shemp made a return to the group. Both Shemp and Curly died in the 1950s and the other two brought Joe Besser in as a replacement for a time.
Columbia closed its short film division down in 1957 and The Three Stooges found themselves unemployed after having made 190 shorts, the last being released in 1959. However, by this time, the Stooges had discovered an unexpected resurgence in popularity via television. With the new medium of the day eager for content, Columbia had dumped the assorted Stooges shorts there and children lapped them up. Joined by a new recruit to the team, Curly Joe DeRita, The Stooges then made a return in a series of feature films beginning with Have Rocket — Will Travel. This would be followed by Snow White and the Three Stooges (1961), The Three Stooges Meet Hercules (1961), The Three Stooges in Orbit (1962), The Three Stooges Go Around the World in a Daze (1963) and The Outlaws is Coming (1965), as well as a short-lived tv series The New Three Stooges (1965-6), The act finally came to an end in 1969 after Larry suffered a stroke during rehearsals for a new show. After several fitful attempts at a revival, Moe, then in his seventies, went into retirement, passing away in 1975.
The 1950s was the era when the Space Race took off. Most of the comedians of the era jumped aboard and made space launch films – Abbott and Costello led the way with Abbott and Costello Go to Mars (1953) and subsequent to this we saw Bob Hope and Bing Crosby in The Road to Hong Kong (1962), Frankie Avalon in Sergeant Deadhead (1965), Jerry Lewis in Way … Way Out (1966), Don Knotts in The Reluctant Astronaut (1967) and the British The Bulldog Breed (1960) with Norman Wisdom. The Three Stooges did so the most of all – they had made several short films Outer Space Jitters (1957) and Space Ship Savvy (1957), which also took them to Venus, along with the later feature-length The Three Stooges in Orbit. The title here is intended as a parody of the popular tv series Have Gun — Will Travel (1959-63), which featured Richard Boone as roving gunfighter/do-gooder.
I am not a fan of The Three Stooges form of physical comedy, which is slapstick based and centred around incredibly stupid characters and with quite a degree of violence. Here we get numerous scenes usually with Moe slapping one or the others (sometimes two at a time), while at various points we get characters hitting and whanging each other on the head with pick-axes and shovels (something that could have seriously damaging effect in actuality). In the film’s most surreal scene, Moe is holding Curly Joe upside down trying to jam his head down the plughole of a sink.
On the other hand, Have Rocket — Will Travel is more polished that the other Three Stooges films I have watched. The inanity even rises to a certain watchability with various scenes of them brewing rocket fuel concoctions in the laboratory; engaged in plumbing mishaps; and the scenes with Curly Joe floating around in zero gravity once the rocket lifts off.
Once the rocket lands on a surprisingly earth-like Venus, The Stooges pass through a series of fairly random encounters – with a giant fire-breathing spider; with a unicorn; to a city where all that is left of the inhabitants is a robot like a large bulky box that waggles its arms and proceeds to shrink the Stooges to miniature size and put them in a bird cage before creating robot doubles of them. The Stooges and robot doubles end in a piece of mad slapstick running in and out of doors on a hallway before they return to Earth where they are hailed as scientific geniuses.
Director David Lowell Rich made a number of other films, including the psycho-thriller Eye of the Cat (1969) and the disaster movie Airport ’79 – The Concorde (1979). He was mostly a tv director and made a couple of genre tv movies with The Horror at 37,000 Feet (1973) and Satan’s School for Girls (1976).
Trailer here