From the E-Mailbag…

Jamie Stroud writes…

I couldn't agree more with your comments on the new Stooges movie. As a long time fan, my attitude is "it could be fun, but it won't be them." Hollywood has not learned by now and probably never will that you can't replace creativity with gimmicks. Exhibits A through D: The Little Rascals, Flintstones, Rocky and Bullwinkle, The Honeymooners and the list goes on. The people that put these shows and films together originally, whether it was voice work, animation, writing, acting, or sound, were talented and gifted artists. You can't destroy the Mona Lisa with a hundred copies. You just wind up with a hundred copies.

I plan on taking my daughter who is as crazy for The Stooges as I am (I was so proud the first time she poked me in the eyes. Then I showed her how it's done so I wouldn't go blind). I wouldn't be at all surprised if she asks me to put on a Curly or Shemp DVD when we get back home. What I hope they do in the new movie is have Shemp AND Curly in the same scene. That is something I have always wanted and only Hollywood can do.

Well, as you may know, it did happen once. Curly's last co-starring short was Half-Wits Holiday, which was made in 1947. Shemp took over with the next film…then in Shemp's third one, Hold That Lion, Curly made a cameo appearance — his last time on film and the only time that all three Howard boys appeared together. (And I guess it was the only time Curly was ever on film without his distinctive haircut. When he got sick, he let it grow in.)

Reportedly, the cameo was a spontaneous addition to the short. Curly was visiting the set and someone thought it would cheer him up — or maybe give him some hope he could still return to performing — to put him in. When he left the act, his family apparently presumed it was forever but officially, Shemp was to be a temporary replacement until Curly was well enough to return. That never happened and Shemp wound up appearing in 79 more shorts and one feature over the next ten years. But Curly still hoped to resume working at the time he appeared in Hold That Lion and since he's quite recognizable even with longer hair, it had to have baffled some audiences back then. They'd just seen Curly disappear from the films and probably assumed that guy had died or something. Now, here he was back in a bit part…huh?

Two years later, Curly filmed another cameo — for the Stooge short, Malice in the Palace — but it was not used. The above still is said to show him playing a mad chef but I don't guarantee that's him. The whole photo seems a little odd to me…like what's the deal with Shemp's proportions? Someone in Columbia's publicity department liked to take heads from one photo and paste them over heads in other photos so maybe that's what happened here. There are even stills where they took a shot of Moe, Larry and Curly and pasted Shemp's head over Curly's. Anyway, you can decide about this one. Curly apparently did shoot an unused scene for that film, which could have led to something particularly ghoulish…

After Shemp died in '55, the Stooges still had four shorts to deliver on their then-current contract. By then, most of their films were composed of old footage with some new scenes added and the last four films had been budgeted accordingly. It wasn't feasible to recruit a new Third Stooge for what could have been just four more films and they didn't have the money to film four more films without employing old footage. So they made four more films with Shemp using old scenes with him and with a gent named Joe Palma standing in for the new scenes, mainly with his back to camera. That was creepy enough but one of the films "remade" this way was Malice in the Palace. If Curly had been in it, they would have had two deceased Stooges in a new film.

Anyway, the Hold That Lion scene was reused in the later short, Booty and the Beast, which came out in 1953, a little more than a year after Jerome "Curly" Howard had died. Here it is…