Woman Haters (1934)

Who payed the critics

Strictly average movie

The film never slows down or bores, plunging from one harrowing sequence to the next.

The tone of this movie is interesting -- the stakes are both dramatic and high, but it's balanced with a lot of fun, tongue and cheek dialogue.

Having just reviewed The Three Stooges' previous shorts they made at M-G-M with Ted Healy, I'm now commenting on their very first short they made at their new studio of Columbia. Moe, Larry, and Curley's (as the latter's name was spelled during this time) first film without Healy was unique in that there's an underscoring throughout and they and the entire cast nearly talk entirely in rhyme during the whole thing. They enter at what becomes a Women Hater's club with Bud Jamison (the first of what would become their stock company at the studio) doing the initiation. Then Larry reveals a week later that he's fallen in love with Marjorie White and that's when all hell breaks loose! I'll stop there and just say that I really enjoyed this unusual short early in their careers especially when Curley does his unique characteristics and those sound effects when they punch and poke each other. And Ms. White is quite good in participating in the slapstick with them. So much so that one wonders how further she would have gone had she not tragically died in an accident soon after filming finished. Also, eventual winner-of-more-than-one-Oscar Walter Brennan appears here as a train conductor so that should provide more than enough interest here. So on that note, Women Haters comes highly recommended.

The Three Stooges made their Columbia Pictures debut with this short involving the boys joining a Woman Haters club. Where apparently it's some kind of a rule to constantly sing in rhyme. Without apparently any reason.I'm not sure how Moe, Larry, and Curly would feel, but the short bears resemblance to Henry Wadsworth Longfellow's Hiawatha in that it's a poetical telling of a story. I doubt though the gag writers at Columbia would credit that with their inspiration. They've got mutiny in the ranks of the Woman Haters, Larry wants to get married to Marjorie White. It's a disgraceful situation that threatens to leave Curly totally at the mercy of Moe without Larry as a buffer.If you can orient yourself to the musical rhyme which could be taken as a harbinger of rap, the Stooges solve the problem in their normal manner. This salute to misogyny called Woman Haters is not a bad debut for the boys.

Woman Haters (1934) *** (out of 4) Columbia's first Three Stooges short has the boys joining a women hater's club but things turn bad when Larry marries a girl. This is a rather strange short for the Stooges even though it was their first and their typical style and brand of humor takes a back seat to some singing. The dialogue, all of it rhyming, was a little annoying at first but after a while it didn't bother me. The introduction to the Stooges was great as were the scenes where Larry tries to keep his club joining away from the new wife.

For the first time on the silver screen, it's the Three Stooges! "Woman Haters," their first two-reeler for Columbia Pictures, is a lively, fast-paced musical with most of the dialogue spoken in rhymed verse. Larry takes the lead as Jim, a member of the Woman Haters' Club who secretly gets married. It only gets worse from there, since Jim performs a constant balancing act between concealing his club affiliation from his wife Mary (Marjorie White) and convincing his partners Tommy (Moe) and Jackie (Curly) that Mary is a complete stranger.The following are a few highlights from "Woman Haters." Familiar Stooges foil Bud Jamison, playing the Woman Haters' Club chairman, performs the Stooges' eye-poking initiation into the club, thus becoming the first person to poke someone in the eyes in a Three Stooges short; Tommy later performs the same unique initiation for the train conductor, played by the one and only Walter Brennan. Jim and Jackie quarrel on the train exterior, and the Stooges later fall out of their berths, both scenes greatly enhanced by the music score. And here's another interesting thing to watch for: at one point in the film, Larry slaps Moe, who does nothing to Larry in return. (At this stage in the Stooges' career, they had not yet fully developed their comic personalities, but that problem would soon be solved with the advent of director Del Lord.) For a unique approach to Stoogedom, give "Woman Haters" a try. It is a very entertaining & enjoyable Three Stooges musical comedy. After this short, there would be no more Stooge musicals at Columbia, although music would still become an integral part of several of the boys' later shorts such as "Micro-Phonies" (1945), "Violent Is the Word for Curly" (1938), and "Rhythm and Weep" (1946).