Some of what follows here is recycled from a post on this blog a long, long time ago.
For several centuries, the Three Stooges made two-reel shorts for Columbia Pictures on ever-diminishing budgets. The studio’s attitude was, more or less, that a Stooge short would bring in X dollars and if they could be made for less, fine. They’d keep on making them. If they couldn’t, that was it. For a time, they could…though this was achieved by some of the most outrageous cost-cutting techniques imaginable. Many of the new shorts released in the last few years of their Columbia contract were “new” only in that they had new titles and a few new scenes, while the bulk of the footage was culled from earlier films.
By 1959, it became impossible for a short comedy to make back its cost, even shooting them the way the Stooges did. They made a feature for Columbia called Have Rocket, Will Travel and then their association with the studio ended. This was the first film with the new third stooge. “Curly Joe” (Joe DeRita) replaced Joe Besser, who had replaced Shemp Howard, who had replaced Curly Howard, who had replaced Shemp.
As it happened, Have Rocket, Will Travel was quite successful at the box office. The Stooge shorts had been released to television and were scoring big with kids who were eager to see the guys on the big screen. Columbia wanted the three knuckleheads back to make more features but Larry, Moe and Curly Joe got a better deal from Fox and began shooting Snow White and the Three Stooges there.
Undaunted, Columbia decided that they really didn’t need the Three Stooges to make a Three Stooges movie..and based on that realization, they whipped up Stop! Look! And Laugh! The popular ventriloquist Paul Winchell was engaged to film new segments and he, of course, brought along his dummies, Jerry Mahoney and another Knucklehead named Smiff.
New footage was also shot of the animal act, The Marquis Chimps, who were about to star in a Columbia TV sitcom called The Hathaways. the voices you’ll hear in it are supplied by June Foray and Alan Reed.
The new footage was combined awkwardly with segments pulled out of a whole bunch old Stooge shorts that featured Curly. As you can see from the above lobby card, star billing went to “The Original Three Stooges,” which may have been some sort of dig at Curly Joe. The patchwork film was released, primarily for matinee programming, and it did rather well, especially for the Stooges. They sued and wound up settling for some of the best money they ever got out of Columbia.
They also dumped their old manager, Harry Romm, who’d produced the Columbia paste-up film. Instead, they put their careers in the hands of Norman Maurer, a former comic book artist who’d married Moe’s daughter, Joan. Norman used some of the cash from the lawsuit to fund the Stooges’ own production company which made some of their later films.
Stop! Look! And Laugh! was not a great film but it has its moments since it pulled from some of the Stooges’ best shorts. I saw it often when I was a kid because whatever TV station in Los Angeles had it ran it often following a live sporting event. It was an easy film to cut to any length you needed to fill after the live sporting event ended. I also loved the Stooges and Paul Winchell.
What? You’ve never seen it? Well, I’m not really recommending it but if you want to at least take a look at it, I may be able to help you out. Click below and it’ll probably be there…
0 Comments