‘Three Little Twirps’ (1943) is the 71st short comedy made by The Three Stooges for Columbia Pictures. It was photographed from Monday, August 3rd through Friday, August 7th, 1942 and was released on Friday, July 9th, 1943 (the 190th day of the Gregorian calendar). It marks the second and final time the Stooges were directed by Harry Edwards, whose early silent career included co-directing several Harry Langdon features with Frank Capra and who, by the time this film was made, was widely considered to be the worst director on the Columbia lot. The last two Stooge entries I’ve posted were films Edwards was involved in-‘Matri-Phony’ (which he directed) and ‘Some More Of Samoa’ (which he co-wrote) and this will be his final appearence in this blog; the Stooges so disliked working with him that they requested he never be hired again. While I agree that his work on ‘Matri-Phony’ is sub-par, I find ‘There Little Twirps’ a much better than average entry and I even find Edwards work to be especially good–the pacing is not as uneven as some of the Jules White directed shorts (though not as assured as the Del Lord’s) and the gags are nicely laid out and paid off–with the exception of a protracted routine in which Larry and Curly are hiding in a horse costume while Chester Conklin grusomely (and unsuccessfully) attempts to murder the horse. According to Ted Okuda’s book ‘The Columbia Comedy Shorts’ Edwards problem involved being ‘afflicted’ with alcoholism–perhaps he was simply too out of it for the Stooges to enjoy working with him. Or perhaps the Stooges were more director-proof than we may realize and didn’t really require a boozed-up has-been comedy director to get them through another shoot. They had by this time slammed through over 70 comedies in a nine year period and if they didn’t know what they were doing by now they would have been as clueless as their characters were. Which brings me to the subject of what working with the Stooges was really like. I had the privilege of knowing one of their best directors Edward Bernds a number of years ago and his general feeling was that  A) Moe was extremely professional and very much the boss, B) Larry was a flake who was always trying to leave early to go to the racetrack and C) Curly was inventive but often hard to control–Moe seemed to have been a stronger influence on his younger brother than other directors and seemed to have brought him along through the shoots–especially in the later years of Curly’s all too obvious illness. Unfortunately these were the years that Ed was directing the Stooges and he felt it particularly painful to deal with an ailing Curly–he couldn’t remember his lines or what the context of the scenes were and Moe had to explain the film to him each time they began a new scene. As far as I remember, Ed had nothing but warm words for Shemp. Somehow this all makes sense…