Here's another Three Stooges short…Hold That Lion. And there are several interesting things I have to say about it, starting with the fact that it was released on July 17, 1947. That's 78 years ago today. Also, it was the 100th short comedy that the Stooges made for Columbia…and it's a film with four Stooges in it — Larry plus the three Howard brothers.
As we all know, Curly Howard had to retire from acting — and I guess you could call what he did "acting" — due to a stroke. His brother Shemp took over his spot in the act and this was the third short with Shemp in that capacity. Curly visited the set during filming so they decided to bolster his spirits a bit or perhaps give him some hope that he might someday resume his career. For one or more of those reasons, they gave him a brief cameo as a train passenger.
I wonder what audiences of the time thought about the Three Stooges transitioning from Larry, Moe and Curly to Larry, Moe and Shemp. And then I wonder that they thought if/when they spotted Curly in this film. I'm guessing there were a lot of puzzled moviegoers.
Later on at Columbia, the studio saved money in the declining business of making two-reel comedies by making more and more of them with old footage. Increasingly, making a short comedy amounted to shooting new scenes to incorporate with reused scenes from earlier pictures and scenes from Hold That Lion turned up in many later comedies. Curly's cameo was reused in Booty and the Beast, which was released in March of 1953, around fourteen months after Curly's death.
Here's the film. If you just want to see the brief bit with Curly, clicking on this link will take you magically to YouTube and it will start the playback with that scene. Isn't modern science wonderful? If you want to watch the whole film from the start, click below…