A Pain in the Pullman Review: Curly vs. A Sleeping Berth

If you love old-school physical comedy that actually looks like it hurt to film, yes, you should watch this right now. It is twenty minutes of loud, chaotic train car misery that still works.

But if you cannot stand screaming, eye-poking, or grown men behaving like toddlers, you will absolutely hate it. There is no middle ground here. 🚂

The Setup

The plot is basically nothing. Moe, Larry, and Curly are cheap stage actors who need to get to their next gig, so they board a train with their pet monkey, Joe.

They immediately start ruining everyone else's night, starting with a fancy actor who just wants to sleep. The train setting is perfect because there is nowhere for anyone to run away from them.

The Best Bits

There is this incredibly claustrophobic scene in the sleeping berths that always makes me laugh. Curly tries to sleep in the upper berth but keeps getting his head stuck or falling out entirely.

It has that classic early Stooges energy where everything feels slightly dangerous and very dirty. You can practically smell the soot on the train seats.

• The monkey, Joe, is honestly the best actor in the whole thing.
• He has this look of pure, cynical exhaustion every time he is on screen. 🐒
• I swear the monkey was actually annoyed by them.

Later, they try to eat dinner in the dining car and end up mistaking a fancy toupee for a soft-shell crab. It is incredibly stupid, but the way Curly chews on it with absolute determination is brilliant.

Odd Little Details

I noticed a weird thing in the background during the dining car scene. There is a woman in the back who looks genuinely terrified of the Stooges, like she was not told what was going to happen during the take.

It reminds me of other early slapstick shorts like A Pair of Kings, where the chaos feels a bit unscripted and dangerous. Modern comedies just do not have this weird, cheap edge to them anymore.

The ending is very abrupt, they just get thrown off the train into the middle of nowhere. But that is how these things should end. No lessons learned, just three idiots walking down a dusty track.