Judging from the e-mail, many of you "enjoyed" (in some odd sense of that word), Don't Worry, We'll Think of a Title, which ran last week on Turner Classic Movies. If so, you're the kind of person who needs to know about Stop! Look! And Laugh!, which runs this coming Tuesday on TCM…at 5:30 AM Pacific Time.
Interesting story about this film. 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.
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. (You can hear June Foray's voice dubbed in during the apes' segment in Stop! Look! And Laugh!)
The new footage was combined awkwardly with segments pulled out of ten 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.
You might want to set the ol' TiVo for Stop! Look! And Laugh! because individual segments are fun, especially the ones showing Winchell in his prime. The Stooge clips are well-selected and edited down to the essentials, too. The pieces just don't all connect into a real movie.
While we're here, let's see what else is interesting on TCM this week. Monday night, they have an interesting line-up: Lawrence of Arabia, The Gold Rush (with Mr. Chaplin), Rashomon and Judgment at Nuremberg. The logical theme that flows through those four movies should be obvious to anyone.
Tuesday night, they have Kiss Me, Stupid, a Billy Wilder film I've never been able to make it through. Then later that evening, they have If You Could Only Cook. This is the Jean Arthur comedy made in 1935 which Frank Capra had nothing to do with but Columbia (them, again) released it overseas as "A Frank Capra Production" because his name enabled them to charge more for it. Capra sued and wound up sitting out a year of his contract during a time he was at his filmmaking peak, only to finally drop the suit and return to making movies for the studio. He claimed in his autobiography that he did this out of personal loyalty to the studio head, Harry Cohn, who was going to be fired if and when Capra prevailed in court. But so much in that book is demonstrably false that it makes you wonder. In any case, it's not that great a picture and it certainly wasn't worth Capra making no movies for a year there.
There are plenty of other treasures on TCM this week but I'll just mention two more. On Thursday, they're offering Cain and Mabel, one of Clark Gable's more obscure films. If you want to see how good Gable was, you need to stop watching him in great movies and see how he could make stuff like this viewable and pleasant. The same could be said for Jack Lemmon in Phffft!, which runs on Friday.