A Hit with a Miss

Back in 1934, the Three Stooges made "Punch Drunk"...a short where Curly was a prize fighter who only became violent when he heard the song "Pop Goes the Weasel". It's a rather stupid plot...but made for a reasonably funny Stooges short.

Now, eleven years later, Columbia Pictures has remade this Stooges film with Shemp Howard--the brother of Curly and Moe Howard and who USED to be a member of the Three Stooges. Only a couple years later, Shemp would rejoin the Stooges after Curly's stroke...but here in 1945 he's still a solo act, as he'd been since the mid-1930s.

So is it any good? Well, it's not as good as the original and this is no surprise as most Stooges fans will readily admit that Curly was funnier than Shemp. This is no attack on Shemp....but Curly was one of a kind!! The original was a much better than average short...which also makes you wonder why they'd want to remake it! Overall watchable but far from the zany original. However, I did enjoy the line in "A Hit with a Miss"....where the ref says "Can I help it the guy's crazy about me?!"....very funny.

Every time Shemp Howard hears "Pop Goes The Weasel", he goes blank and starts swinging hard. He's recruited as a prizefighter, with Charley Rogers playing the violin during the matches. During his title bout with champion Joe Palma, Rogers breaks his violin and Shemp has to delay while he finds another.

It's a pretty good Shemp Howard comedy, drawn from the early Three Stooges short, PUNCH DRUNK. That happened a lot with Columbia shorts; plots and gags were reused, whether it was from an earlier Columbia short, a Mack Sennett script, or a movie produced in the silent era by unit producer Jules White's brother Jack -- who was credited as "Preston Black" to avoid charges of nepotism. By the end of the Columbia shorts era, the same script might have been used five or six times.

The difference, if any, lay in the lead comic, and with Shemp Howard shorts, the new gags tended to cluster nearer the start. They do here, and the result is a pretty good short comedy.