Soup to Nuts (Fox Film Corporation, 1930)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2023 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Monday, October 23) I ran my husband Charles a DVD of a quite interesting and very funny movie from 1930: Soup to Nuts, based on a story by cartoonist Rube Goldberg – whose name has enshrined itself into cultural history as synonymous with particularly elaborate machines designed to accomplish mundane tasks. Goldberg said the inspiration for his cartoons was a story he was sent to cover as a journalist about a scientist who had invented a complicated machine to determine the weight of the earth. That got him to thinking about doing cartoons featuring people inventing machines equally complex but aimed at doing simple things like raising Venetian blinds or reminding them to mail letters. Goldberg was actually prominent enough that the Fox Film Corporation, which produced this movie, billed him above the title – the only person involved with the film who got that honor. Goldberg also makes a cameo appearance as himself, opening his mail in a restaurant. But what has kept Soup to Nuts more or less in circulation is that it represents the film debut of the Three Stooges. At the time they were literally the “stooges” of Ted Healy, a rather overbearing comic actor who almost literally kept them on a tight leash. The Stooges in this film are Shemp Howard – a first-rate comic actor who appeared in films alongside W. C. Fields, Olsen and Johnson and Abbott and Costello – his brother Moe (billed here under his original name, Harry) and Larry Fine, along with a mute comedian named Fred Sanborn. (Charles, no doubt thinking of Harpo Marx, asked if it was obligatory for every brother-based comedy team to have a mute member.) Later Shemp would leave the act and his and Moe’s brother Curly would replace him, though Shemp resumed the Stooge mantle in 1947 after Curly suffered a stroke and was no longer able to work (Curly died in 1952 and Shemp in 1955).

I first encountered Soup to Nuts in the late 1980’s, when American Movie Classics showed it as part of one of their film preservation festivals – but I missed half an hour of it due to a phone call I got while the movie was on (probably from my mother; I can’t imagine having let anyone else distract me that long from a movie I wanted to watch!) and, though I’d had my VHS recorder on, I subsequently lost the tape so I never had a chance to see the whole movie until last night. The ads for the film promised 176 laughs, and though I don’t think there were that many I was too busy laughing at the film to keep count. Though there were some of the usual crudities of an early talkie – Charles noted that even as late as 1930 actors in this film were still taking long pauses between their cue lines and their own dialogue, though I thought that might have been because so many of the actors were vaudevillians used to pacing themselves so a live audience would hear and understand what they were saying – overall Soup to Nuts is a quite entertaining and very funny film. It’s also a surprisingly Jewish one: it’s set in the Jewish district of a major city and features a lot of actors playing the Jewish schtick whether they themselves were Jewish or not. Otto Schmidt (Charles Winninger) is the owner of a costume shop whose principal creditor, Mr. Carlson (whom we never see), has thrown it into involuntary bankruptcy and sent his son Richard (a personable young man named Stanley Smith) to run the business in his place. Only Richard forms an immediate crush on Otto’s niece Louise (Lucile Browne), who’s attracted to him at first but her love turns to hate when she realizes who he is and why he’s there. Richard has a plan, however, not only to bail out Schmidt’s costume shop but put Schmidt back in charge of it. It involves getting his father’s attorney to pose as a theatrical producer and put in a huge order of costumes for his latest (alleged) show. He insists the order be channeled through Schmidt’s top salesperson, Teddy (Ted Healy), so Teddy will get a commission on it and have the money to marry his girlfriend, Queenie (Frances McCoy).

Only Teddy doesn’t like waiting around Schmidt’s and much prefers to hang out at the fire station where the Three Stooges and Fred Sanborn work as firefighters. In fact, whenever he has to get to Schmidt’s or anywhere else in a hurry, Teddy just commandeers the fire truck so it tears through the streets (the real L.A. streets, by the way, not a process background), sirens and bells going off big-time. My amusement was tempered by wondering what would happen if there were a real fire in the neighborhood and the alarm went unanswered because Ted Healy was playing tricks with the engine. In one quite effective scene, Teddy is having an argument on the phone with his girlfriend Queenie, and he breaks off in the middle of it, takes the fire truck to Schmidt’s, and shows up while she’s still chewing him out on the phone and hasn’t noticed that he walked out on the conversation and is now there in person confronting her. The Three Stooges are first shown in the opening sequence, singing surprisingly good barbershop-trio harmonies on a song of their own called “Tears,” which they’re rehearsing for the upcoming Firemen’s Ball at the restaurant owned by Gustav “Gus” Klein (George Bickel). Klein’s restaurant is next door to Schmidt’s costume shop and the two men are old friends – Klein even offers Otto a job as a waiter even though from the looks of things, Klein’s restaurant isn’t doing much better business than Otto’s costume shop. In one delightful scene, an alleged customer (Mack Swain, former Keystone comedy star and Charlie Chaplin’s nemesis in The Gold Rush) comes in, brings his own sandwich and tea bag, then demands a cup of hot water to brew his own tea. The night of the Firemen’s Ball, which is a costume party, arrives, and Richard Carlson and Ted Healy hatch a plot by which the two will wear identical costumes and during the evening Carlson will cut in while Healy and Louise are dancing – only Louise notices the difference and “outs” Carlson.

Just then a real fire, set by a man bringing in a birthday cake with pre-lit candles tripping on the building’s stairs, starts and the Three Stooges leave the party to go fight the fire, at which they’re predictably inept. There’s a great sequence in which Fred Sanborn is playing a xylophone solo at the Firemen’s Ball – and he keeps on playing, oblivious to the fact that the building is burning down around him and his entire audience has fled. Ultimately Carlson rescues Louise from the burning building, then announces to her that though the fire has totally consumed Schmidt’s shop, fortunately Carlson took out fire insurance on it so Schmidt will be made whole. Soup to Nuts did well enough at the box office that Winfield Sheehan, then production chief at Fox, tried to hire the Stooges away from Healy and sign them to a contract, but Healy wouldn’t let them go. Eventually he took them to MGM, where they made a few shorts and guest appearances in features like Dancing Lady (1933), a musical with Clark Gable, Joan Crawford, Franchot Tone and, making their film debuts, Fred Astaire and Nelson Eddy. Then the production chiefs at MGM, Louis B. Mayer and Irving Thalberg, decided they wanted Ted Healy as a character actor but could do without the Stooges. So the Stooges decamped to Columbia and made the long (23 years!) series of two-reel shorts on which their reputation rests, while Healy went on to a number of small parts in movies like the horror classic Mad Love (1935) until he died of injuries sustained in a barroom brawl in 1937. What makes Soup to Nuts surprisingly good is its overall irreverence – aside from the Marx Brothers’ Paramount films, it’s hard to imagine any movie comedies from this period that come so close to total plotlessness – and the Stooges themselves are quite amusing and considerably less annoying than they’d become later. At one point Shemp and Moe got into a slapping routine at the Firemen’s Ball and I joked, “Now it looks like a Three Stooges movie!” Even Larry looks relatively normal – this was before he frizzed out his hair and he’s surprisingly attractive – and Soup to Nuts is more than just an historical curiosity; it’s a genuinely entertaining and quite funny movie, well worth seeing even if you’re not that big a Three Stooges fan.