Classic Film Comedy Short Stories #11

Moe Howard's wife Helen suggested the story line for Hoi Polloi, one of the three stooges best films. However when she was asked if she would rather have money or screen credit she took the money.

In Fredrico Fellini's The White Sheik, the director's excellent first solo directorial feature, a star of one of Fellini's great coming classics showed up in a small cameo. This was the character Cabiria (played by the director's wife Guilietta Masina) who would later become the main character of The Nights of Cabiria, one of Fellini's many master pieces. It is also with noting that some of Nino Rota's musical score for the film would later be used in Fellini's La Starda (La Starda is one of my favorite movies ever made which makes this connection all the cooler for me).

Buster Keaton's first feature Three Ages was made so that it could be cut up into three shorts if it did not do well, to help make back some money. However the film was a hit and Buster would make more ambitious features in the future.

Lost in Alaska with Abbott and Costello was the first film in which composer Henri Mancini worked. He would later go on to immortality for composing the Pink Panther theme.

Though Charlie Chaplin's The Circus was released in 1928, ideas for the film had been going around Charlie's head since 1920.

Edna Purviance one of Charlie Chaplin's earliest leading ladies stayed on Chaplin's payroll well after she retired. Charlie had great respect for Edna and even directed the drama film A Woman of Paris, her first staring role and produced her A Woman of the Sea, her only other staring role. Unfortunately A Woman of the Sea is now a lost film, and A Woman of Paris is an underrated classic.

A 1921 silent film called Humor Risk was the film debut of The Marx Brothers, unfortunately this is a lost film today.

-Michael J. Ruhland