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The Three Stooges boast a legacy as one of the most influential comedy acts ever, but the changes to their lineup breed some confusion. Its hard to overstate the importance of the Three Stooges to American comedy. Over the years, the trio put out hundreds of comedy shorts in which they occupy a variety of jobs, before causing the situation to descend into chaos with their trademark slapstick violence. The groups legacy is decades worth of some of the best comedy movies, short films, TV appearances, and even a controversial remake from the Farrelly brothers.

The funniest Three Stooges shorts mostly featured the main lineup that comes from the trios years of peak popularity from 1934 to 1946. This period, in which the lineup consisted of Moe, Curly, and Larry, came to be known as the Curly years, in order to differentiate it from...

The Stooges' constant cast turnover reveals personal issues and health problems that affected many of the performers. Moe Howard was the leader of the Stooges both on and off screen, and was committed to the group until his passing in 1975. Curly's shaven head and distinctive comedy style made him a fan favorite, but his declining health led to a shortened career and untimely death at the age of 48.

The Three Stooges are one of the most influential comedy groups in history, but their confusing membership calls for some clarification. The trio existed, in one form or another, for nearly 50 years. The need to keep earning money was partly influenced by the treacherous business practices of Columbia Pictures, who kept the performers on a fixed salary, keeping the massive profits from the shorts and never telling the Stooges just how popular they had become throughout their 24-year tenure at the studio.

What a Halloween treat! Karl Freund stopped directing after this classic, which is a shame — it’s German expressionism’s most exciting foray into classic Hollywood horror of the ’30s. Peter Lorre is incredible as Dr. Gogol, making himself as creepy and repulsive as possible while retaining a giddy audience sympathy. It’s Grand Guignol all the way — macabre, funny and irresistible. The screenplay toys with uncomfortable Body Horror and psychological weirdness; Colin Clive must contend with becoming the recipient of murderous hands. Frances Drake is the beauty that drives Dr. Gogol mad, and comedian Edward Brophy is a highlight in a non-comedic scene. “I have conquered science. Why can I not conquer love?!”

Mad Love

Blu-ray

Warner Archive Collection

1935 / B&w / 1:37 Academy / 68 (86) min. / Available at Amazon.com / Street Date October 19, 2021 / 21.99

Starring: Peter Lorre, Frances Drake, Colin Clive, Ted Healy, Sara Haden, Edward Brophy, Henry Kolker, Keye Luke, May Beatty, Billy Gilbert,...

MGM’s glamour factory hit heights of grandeur with this nostalgic disaster spectacle, which retains its power even as its pious sentimentality runs amuck. We don’t believe the characters but we believe the Stars: Clark Gable, Jeanette MacDonald and Spencer Tracy succeed with sheer personality. Best of all are the sensational special effects featuring the highly cinematic earthquake montage by Slavko Vorkapich and John Hoffman.

San Francisco

Blu-ray

Warner Archive Collection

1936 / B&w / 1:37 Academy / 115 min. / Street Date February 16, 2021 / available through the WBshop / 21.99

Starring: Clark Gable, Jeanette MacDonald, Spencer Tracy, Jack Holt, Jessie Ralph, Ted Healy, Shirley Ross, Edgar Kennedy, Warren Hymer, Gertrude Astor, Vince Barnett, Tom Dugan, D.W. Griffith, James Murray, Robert J. Wilke.

Montages: Slavko Vorkapich, John Hoffman

Special Effects: James Basevi, Russell A. Cully, A. Arnold Gillespie, Loyal Griggs

Film Editor: Tom Held

Songs: Bronislau Kaper & Walter Jurmann (music), Gus Kahn (lyrics), Nacio Herb Brown

Written...

Celebrating 50 years of 'James Bond', the 2012 Epix documentary "Everything or Nothing: The Untold Story of 007", produced by Metro Goldwyn Mayer Pictures, Columbia Pictures, Passion Pictures and Red Box Films, focuses on 'Bond' producer Albert 'Cubby' Broccoli, previously known as the man who killed Ted Healy, the founder of "The Three Stooges", author Ian Fleming and producer Harry Saltzman:

"...'Everything or Nothing' focuses on three men with a shared dream - 'Bond' producer Albert R. Broccoli, Harry Saltzman, and author Ian Fleming. It's the thrilling and inspiring narrative behind the durability, popularity and survival of the longest running film franchise in cinema history since Bond hit the big screen in 1962.

"From Sean Connery and Roger Moore, to Pierce Brosnan and Daniel Craig - the integrity of Bond has never changed and has never been more entertaining..."

Click the images to enlarge and Sneak Peek "Everything or Nothing: The...

The Three Stooges Collection –

Volumes 1 and 2

Blu ray

Mill Creek Entertainment

1941-1965 / 1:33, 1:85 / Street Date April 21, 2015

Starring Moe Howard, Larry Fine, Curly Howard, Joe DeRita

Cinematography by Franz Planer, Scotty Welbourne, William P. Whitley

Written by Raphael Hayes, Norman Maurer

Directed by Sidney Salkow, Edward Bernds, Norman Maurer

A frenetic mix of baggy-pants vaudeville and the Spanish Inquisition, the eye-poking exploits of The Three Stooges have appalled faint-hearted sophisticates and overprotective mothers for close to a century.

The team’s lowdown influence still lingers – not in the brutal roughhousing demonstrated by the lads in their most frantic moments but in their low class assault on upper class sensibilities – from the semen-sculpted hair-do of the Farrelly Brothers’s There’s Something About Mary to Johnny Knoxville’s Jackass to the mortifying contagion of diarrhea suffered by Paul Feig’s Bridesmaids, the Stooge abides.

And then there’s the Farrelly’s ode to brainlessness,...

The world of cinema certainly has had its share of sympathetic bumbling and stumbling characters rich in both comedic and tragic layers and anything else in between. Some of these movie misfits are misunderstood and actually more aware then they appear. The combination of being slow-witted, clumsy, awkward, inept, unstable–it all has its entertaining points in the hapless scheme of things. Importantly, these bumbling and stumbling film figureheads generate a kind of loose-minded and in some cases underlying poignancy that resonates so soundly for global moviegoers to observe with embraced enthusiasm.

So let us take a look at a selection of klutzy candidates (both in seriousness and silliness) that inspire us to chuckle and root for in the column Whoops…Did I Do That?: Top 10 Film Bumblers and Stumblers (Note: the listing of the choices below are not in any particular order of preference):

1.) Forrest Gump from...

Comedy legends' missing 1933 film restored after negative found by Australian collector

A Three Stooges short previously thought lost in a 1967 fire has just received its first screening since being rediscovered in a garden shed in Australia.

Hello, Pop!, a 17-minute short made for MGM in 1933 featuring the Stooges alongside their creator, Ted Healy, was the only Three Stooges film thought not to have survived, after MGM's negative was destroyed in a vault fire in 1967 that also consumed the only known copy of Tod Browning's silent shocker London After Midnight. However, 78-year-old film collector Malcolm Smith came across a 35mm nitrate negative of the film in his shed in a Sydney suburb while sorting through his collection for disposal. Smith then contacted the Vitaphone Project, an archive and preservation organisation in the Us, in December last year, and they took on the job of restoring it.

The Three Stooges were...

Vintage film discoveries are in the news, from the unearthing of a long-lost 1911 Mary Pickford short to the unveiling of a Three Stooges two-reeler in Technicolor that hasn’t been seen in 80 years. As icing on the cake, Warner Home Video is about to unveil an extensive restoration of the studio’s landmark 3-D feature House of Wax on Blu-ray next week. Who knows what other goodies may be on the horizon? This weekend at Manhattan’s Film Forum, the Vitaphone Project’s Ron Hutchinson will introduce the re-premiere of Hello Pop!, a 1933 MGM short starring Ted Healy and his Stooges in two-color Technicolor. This long-lost short was discovered in the hands of a private collector in ...

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Special Event!

First Screenings In 80 Years Of “Hello, Pop!,”

1933 Color Stooges Short Discovered In Australia, Plus Other Amazing Archival Discoveries

At Film Forum, September 29 & 30

“Lost… Now Found,” a program of archival discoveries highlighted by Hello Pop! (1933), a Technicolor musical short starring the Three Stooges that was long thought lost, will screen at Film Forum on Sunday, September 29 at 3:00 and Monday, September 30 at 3:00 and 6:30.

Following an MGM vault fire in 1967, in which its negative and all existing prints were thought to have been destroyed, the two-reel backstage musical Hello, Pop!, starring Ted Healy “and his Stooges” Moe, Larry and Curly, was long considered the sole lost Three Stooges short.

But in December 2012, The Vitaphone Project, a group devoted to restoring early sound vaudeville and music shorts, was contacted by an Australian film collector in possession of a two-strip Technicolor nitrate print rescued from a landfill. The Project’s...

Without superheroes or aliens, the F&F franchise has made speed, laced with rage, one of film's most beloved intoxicants

The reason for the burgeoning success of the Fast & Furious films eludes some people. This apparently humdrum franchise manages without superheroes, intergalactic conflict, aliens, zombies, vampires or 3D. What has it got? Perhaps the clue's in the title. Speed and rage have come to form an alluring combination.

Speed, said Aldous Huxley, "provides the one genuinely modern pleasure." Until the 1820s, no one had travelled faster than a galloping horse; by the 1840s, trains were zipping along at 70mph. Speed began to redefine human life, as the acceleration of output yielded previously unimaginable benefits. The Gpo documentary Night Mail, with its pulsing pistons, captured the exaltation this engendered. But if the hastening tempo of the railway age brought collective liberation, it imposed a new tyranny on the individual.

As Marxists put it,...

By now you may have read about the exciting discovery of a long-lost two-reel short subject, Hello Pop (1933) starring Ted Healy and his Stooges. A 35mm nitrate print, in two-color Technicolor, turned up in a private collection in Australia and is now being restored at a Los Angeles laboratory by Warner Bros. Understandably, this kind of “find” fuels hopes that other cinematic rarities will yet be unearthed…but for now, Stooge aficionados are thrilled that a gap in their filmography will soon be filled. (This was the third of five two-reelers that Healy and his Stooges made for MGM, incorporating musical numbers from the 1929 feature It’s a Great Life and the never-released revue...

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Reviewed by Colleen Wanglund, MoreHorror.com

Mad Love (U.S.A 1935) Movie Review

Director: Karl Freund

Based on the novel The Hands of Orlac by Maurice Renard and a remake of the original 1924 silent film (with the same title as the novel), Mad Love stars Peter Lorre as Doctor Gogol, a surgeon who is obsessed with stage actress Yvonne Orlac (Frances Drake). Yvonne is listening to her husband’s piano concert on the radio after her last show when Gogol comes to see her. Gogol is distressed to learn that Yvonne is leaving the stage to be with her husband Stephen (Colin Clive). Dr. Gogol is so obsessed with Yvonne that he pays the moving men a large sum of money to have her wax statue delivered to his home.

Yvonne goes to the train station to meet Stephen, who is coming home after a tour, but there has been a terrible train accident.

Every decade or so, one or two film makers become a major force in cinema comedies. The 1980′s saw the influence of Zaz (Aka Jerry Zucker, Jim Abrahams, and David Zucker) starting with Airplane! and Ruthless People . For the last ten years or so Judd Apatow (40-year Old Virgin) and Todd Phillips (Old School) have ruled the comedy roost. In between there’s the Farrelly brothers (Peter and Bobby), former sitcom writers who invaded the multiplexes with the big box office laugh fests Dumb And Dumber and There’S Something About Mary (which opened the gates for the return of the R-rated movie comedy). When interviewed during their salad days, the guys related their affection for a decades old comedy team and vowed to bring them back to the big screen (they even appeared on a tribute NBC-tv special hosted by their Kingpin star Woody Harrelson). After some recent under...