Edward Bernds

It may be difficult to take Edward Bernds' directorial career -- highlighted as it is by the short films of the Three Stooges and the features of the Bowery Boys, as well as such camp classics as Queen of Outer Space -- entirely seriously. As a pop-culture influence, however, Bernds had few peers, even if he was seldom ranked even near the top of B-movie directors -- it's a safe bet, however, that virtually every baby boomer viewer saw his work at some point growing up, and that most of them enjoyed a lot of it. Edward Bernds started out at Columbia Pictures in the sound department at the end of the '20s, and was responsible for mixing the sound on such early talkies as Roy William Neill's 1929 Wall Street and Earl C. Kenton's The Song of Love, released that same year. His studio assignments involved him in such high-profile features as Dirigible, Platinum Blonde, The Bitter Tea of General Yen, Lady for a Day, It Happened One Night, all directed by Frank Capra, and Howard Hawks' Twentieth Century, up through 1934. Although he continued to work on major features, including The Awful Truth and Mr. Deeds Goes to Town, until the end of the '30s, his career was never quite the same after 1934 -- that was the year he was assigned as the soundman on Woman Haters, the first Columbia short starring Moe Howard, Larry Fine, and Jerome "Curly" Howard, a newly signed trio of comedians who later came to be called the Three Stooges. An odd mix of musical, verse dialogue, and mayhem, Woman Haters was a success, mostly because the mayhem was executed as theatrically and artfully as the music; and for the next decade, Bernds was largely responsible for supporting the trio with an array of brilliantly edited, split-second-timed sound effects that gave their brand of roughhouse humor the surreal, cartoonish edge that came to identify their work. To judge the importance of Bernds' contribution as a soundman to the Stooges' movies, compare the eye-pokes -- and it's a sign of the unusual nature of Bernds' career that one would have a serious analytical discussion about eye-pokes -- in their Columbia shorts, usually accompanied by a loud, plucked violin string, to the more "realistic" unaccompanied eye-pokes in their MGM and Fox films. It's clear the Columbia mayhem is funnier all the way around, because of the sound effects that Bernds created and utilized in their movies -- similar accolades may be given to the noises he used to accompany their face-slaps, hammer-hits (anvil clanging), punches-in-the-stomach (kettle drum), and other examples of slapstick activity. In 1945, Bernds moved up to the director's chair on theThree Stooges' short Micro-Phonies, a film that, appropriately enough, had the trio using their own sound "dubbing" technique to help a lady friend land a singing job -- the film was one of the most successful and satisfying of their releases in what was otherwise something of a declining period for the trio. Bernds directed most of the Stooges' shorts that followed, and he was a major help in keeping the quality of the trio's work (with Shemp Howard replaced his ailing brother in 1947) high for the next seven years. In between Stooges shorts, he also directed entries in the later part of the Blondie series, starring Arthur Lake and Penny Singleton, and comedies starring Joan Davis. In 1953, Bernds left Columbia to go to work at Allied Artists, the successor company to Monogram Pictures, principally directing the Bowery Boys movies starring Leo Gorcey and Huntz Hall. With all of those Stooges and Bowery Boys movies to his credit, Bernds was responsible for furnishing and shaping a lot of the staples of entertainment for postwar baby boom audiences, especially once those movies made it to television -- he had a good light touch to go with his flair for slapstick comedy, and he knew how to move a story along in a hurry. Following the retirement of Leo Gorcey from the Bowery Boys films, Bernds moved on to other types of pictures, including Westerns such as Escape From Red Rock, historical dramas like Quantrill's Raiders, teen-exploitation melodramas such as Reform School Girl, and even science fiction -- Bernds distinguished himself in the latter genre with the earnest World Without End and the campy Queen of Outer Space, the latter starring Zsa Zsa Gabor; both were not only popular in theaters but became perennial favorites on television, and Queen of Outer Space was still being shown (in restored prints, no less) in repertory film theaters into the '90s, delighting new generations of viewers. In 1958, as the film business went into full retrenchment, Bernds began directing for television on a regular basis and moving between film studios, including American International (where he madeHigh School Hellcats), before returning to Columbia to helm (and write the script for) Return of the Fly, the sequel to the hit 1958 sci-fi/horror film. He also prepared a re-edited feature length compendium of the Three Stooges' work (Stop! Look! and Laugh!), made the Jules Verne-style fantasy Valley of the Dragon, and directed the latter-day incarnation of the Stooges in two full-length features, The Three Stooges Meet Hercules and The Three Stooges in Orbit. Bernds retired from filmmaking in the mid-'60s, after directing Elvis Presley in Tickle Me. He chose to bow out, ironically, just at the point where his Stooges and Bowery Boys movies (and, to a lesser degree, the Blondie films), not to mention World Without End and Queen of Outer Space, all started to gather their most enduring fans, through constant showing on television, and turned Bernds himself into something of a low-level pop-culture icon.

~ Bruce Eder, All Movie Guide