WEEKEND STOOGEFEST

‘Three Smart Saps’ (1942) is the 64th short comedy made by The Three Stooges for Columbia Pictures. It was photographed from Tuesday, April 7th through Friday, April 10th 1942 and was released on Thursday, July 30th of that year (the 211th day of the Gregorian Calendar). This is peak Curly, with the extended rhumba dancing party set-piece at the films center providing the best views of his singular and oddly athletic dancing abilities. Curly is, in fact, at his most energized and playful in this brisk little entry–I love the final shot of him barking into the camera lens–and this brings me to a little problem that I fear I need to address.

Two or so years ago, when I started posting Stooge movies every (or almost every) weekend, I looked forward to revisiting the team in its various incarnations–Young Curly, ill Curly, middle-aged Shemp, lackluster Larry, vile Moe, irritating Joe Besser etc. But I must confess–I’m finding the twenty-five year long career of the Stooges at Columbia awfully spotty, with only six of those years being truly prime, and another four of those years only reasonably amusing at best. Part of the reason for this is my no longer finding the Shemp Howard’s entries really all that good–he can be reasonably amusing but the level of filmmaking is on the descent and after the departure of writer-director Edward Bernds in 1951 the films make a steep dive into incoherent plotting and increasingly violent and mechanical gags. Since the handful of Joe Besser shorts in the final two years of the team’s contract at Columbia can be safely swept to the aside as utterly worthless and thus not worthy of consideration, that takes us down another few years. Now let’s go back to the beginning. The first three years of Stooge shorts (1934-36) are for the most part curios–the pacing is slow, not to say leaden, the gags often uncertain. Those shorts do have a certain antique charm but it’s not until late ’36 that a fire is somehow lit and the Stooges find a confidence (and pace) that changes everything. Curly is now in his prime, Del Lord is directing with increasing assuredness and the richest part of their career is on track. This lasts more or less through 1943, at which time Curly has the stroke that changes everything. The shorts made from ’44 through ’47–the last of the Curly’s–are for me almost impossible to watch. He is the opposite of the Curly you see in the above movie–he’s lost confidence, seems not to know where he is, slurs words and is only somewhat physically capable of comedic movement. Shemp comes along and I’ll give him those first four years (47-51) but alas, I’m not finding any of the work after that period even remotely entertaining. Often the heavy use of stock footage simply brands the films as lazy non-efforts. So what have we got? Six years with Curly, four with Shemp. That’s ten out of twenty-five years where the work is still solid and funny enough for us to engage with it. And four of those ten–the first Shemp years–are B minus on average. Nonetheless, we are left with some glorious years of Curly Howard’s comedic genius and ‘Three Smart Saps’ is a wonderful example of him in his prime. Perhaps that’s all the years we truly need. As Orson Welles once remarked, upon being told how short the ‘golden era’ of Hollywood actually was: ‘Well, even the Renaissance only lasted sixty years.’

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