‘Healthy, Wealthy and Dumb’ (1938) is the 31st short comedy made by The Three Stooges for Columbia Pictures. The film was released on Friday, May 20th 1938 (the 140th day of the Gregorian Calendar). Dates of the actual shoot are for some reason missing but we can surmise it was sometime at the end of February or beginning of March of that year thanks to a prop that appears at 9 minutes, 21 seconds into the film; a monkey is sitting on a copy of Life Magazine that features Carl Sandburg on the cover. A little internetting revealed that that issue was dated February 21, 1938. I wonder if it was the director, one of the Stooges or a grip who thought it would be funny to have a monkey’s ass sit on the poets earnest face.

This is a top-notch Curly outing made right in the heart of their richest period–the 1937- 41 series which also gave us ‘Calling All Curs’ (they’re successful dog doctors), ‘Violent Is The Word For Curly’ (the “Alphabet” song), ‘An Ache In Every Steak’ (Curly shaving a block of ice) and my personal favorite of all Stooge shorts ‘A Plumbing We Will Go’. The pacing of this short is ferociously assured and all three boys are given top-notch moments–Larry in the bathtub surrounded by balloons for some reason and smoking a cigar is one of my favorite visuals. Stunts are plentiful–the collapse of the fourposter bed is brilliantly accomplished–and the script is tightly plotted and even makes sense for the most part. Actually the film feels like it could have added another reel to its running time to fully make use of the ‘wealthy widows’ who scheme to steal the fortune that the Stooges don’t actually have. I’m always struck by the pretty young women who were cast in these shorts and often wonder what they thought their career trajectory was going to be when they got off the proverbial bus. They showed up in Hollywood wanting to be Irene Dunne or Jean Arthur and found themselves on a Stooges set being doused with water. Was it fun? Humiliating? Most of these featured actresses–except for Lucille Ball who was in a very early short called ‘Three Little Pigskins’–wound up in obscurity. Did they look back fondly at their time with the Stooges? Or were they forever bitterly convinced that they’d ruined their chances of real stardom by letting themselves be doused with that water?