The Three Stooges: Curly Classics

Curly Howard

Overview

"A sextet of Three Stooges shorts bracketing the ""Curly era"" -- from 1934 and their very first Columbia Pictures short, Woman Haters, to one of the last with the legendary third Stooge, Micro-Phonies. Three of the six use music as a device -- Woman Haters was the group's only film done in rhyme, a kind of versified comedy about marriage and its pitfalls, done with full musical accompaniment to every line; Micro-Phonies has Curly impersonating a female opera singer (while the other Stooges have some merciless fun with fruit projectiles, distant cousins to Monty Python's ""edible missiles"") after a very funny sequence showing them creating havoc at a recording studio; and Punch Drunks (based on a story by the trio) shows off Larry's ability on the violin in the course of telling a story of a boxer (Curly) who can only fight when he hears ""Pop Goes the Weasel."" Men in Black, not to be confused with the recent Tommy Lee Jones/Will Smith comedy, was the only Stooges short to be nominated for an Academy award -- at the time, it was also a pungent parody of a much better known movie (and play) called Men in White, telling of the trials and tribulations in the lives of young doctors; the loud-speaker cries of ""Calling Dr. Howard, Dr. Fine, Dr. Howard"" was a take-off of the original play's stage ambience, as were the Stooges' periodic pronouncements of their work ""for duty and humanity."" Three Little Pigskins, which features a young Lucille Ball, has the Stooges mistaken for college football players; a take-off on the University of Notre Dame's ""Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse,"" the boys are instead the ""Three Horsemen"" from Boulder Dam College. All of the transfers are of good quality, though there is a small edit -- evidently in the existing negative -- in Micro-Phonies. The menu is fairly straightforward but a little awkward; perhaps someone can explain why it was necessary to list the six shorts on two separate frames of three each, which have to be reaccessed each time one returns to select another short. Still, the quality of the actual material is very sharp and crisp, including the sound."

Product Details

Release Date:	02/02/1999
UPC:	0043396028562
Original Release:	1999
Rating:	NR
Source:	SONY PICTURES HOME ENTERTAINMT
Region Code:	1
Presentation:	[B&W]
Sound:	[Dolby Digital, stereo]
Language:	English
Time:	1:48:00
Sales rank:	27,575

Special Features

Interactive menus; Languages: English, Spanish, Portuguese; Subtitles: English, French, Spanish, Portuguese