Half-Wits Holiday

Half Wits Holiday ended the career of Curly Howard, easily one of the most remarkable individuals in Entertainment History. That may sound a little strong to some people, but I don't think it is.

I was working on a television special in Los Angeles just after the Northridge Earthquake in 1994 when we got a phone call saying that Curley's gravestone had suffered some damage from the quake, as had others around it. We took a camera crew over to a small Jewish Cemetery in East L.A. The area is Latino but 80 years ago was home to Jewish families from Brooklyn. I asked the manager of the place what all these people were doing there. She said :"Well we have the second most visited grave in Los Angeles.....people are here to help out..." The cemetery holds movie mogul Louis B. Mayer, Singer Fanny Bryce, Samuel "Shemp" Howard, and the second most visited grave---Jerome "Curly" Howard.

Marilyn Monroe gets the most regular visitors at Forest Lawn, then comes Curly in East L.A.

The grave is marked Horowitz not the later "Howard", and people were putting small stones and coins back on top that had fallen off. There were lines of old, young, middle aged, children, everybody. I could not believe the number of people who were there.

That afternoon we interviewed Joan Howard Maurer, Moe's daughter, who remembered vividly her Uncle Curly's strokes and last performances. And she knew plenty about the years when her father, Uncle Shemp, and Uncle Curly were Vaudeville superstars along with Larry Fineberg. She said Moe scripted the act, but Curly was the trigger that made it work. She remembered hilarious family dinners with her Dad, Uncle Shemp and Uncle Curly. Even the Marx Bros. have a hard time topping that !

And she remembered that it all ended too soon.

Excluding a cameo appearance he has in "Hold That Lion", this is really the last 3 Stooges film ever to feature Curly. It is a satisfying swan song... if Curly had to end his acting career with a film, I'm glad it was this one. The premise is basically re-used from an earlier Stooges short "Hoi Polloi" (i.e. two professors bet whether environment or heredity determines social behavior and use the Stooges to settle their wager) but this film is, in my opinion at least, superior to "Hoi Polloi" thanks largely to Moe's acting contributions (he seems to be at his most vicious here; among other things, he dumps his cigar ashes down Curly's throat) and some new gags (the memorable dining table scene). Curly does not appear in the film's final moments (he suffered a stroke before those scenes were filmed) and the film suffers a little from that but this is still one of my very favorite Stooge flicks... historical aspects aside. RECOMMENDED

Many people like to view Half-Wits Holiday as Curly's last performance and talk about how ill he was. I prefer to take a longer look and mention how funny it is. It has plenty of classic stooge mayhem and lines. The boys being regarded as three missing links; feeling ashamed at the prospect of being turned into gentlemen; Symona Boniface telling Moe, "You act as though the sword of Damocles is hanging over your head!"; and of course, a tidy pie fight.

I've always thought that Moe seemed to get meaner as he got older, and my personal suspicion was that he didn't like the fact that his brother Curly was forced to act and not rest in his last few years as a stooge. (And after Curly's death, Moe really took it out on Shemp.) I was also thinking it must have been difficult for him on a certain level to be hitting Curly when his kid brother was obviously not well.

Anyway, I think this short has one of the most classic stooge lines ever. It's when the boys are seated around the dinner table and being coached on proper dining etiquette but only pretending to use utensils and eat food. Curly turns to Professor Quackenbush and asks, "Pardon me, what are we eating now?"

Taken at face value, without knowledge of the history behind it, this is a lot of fun. The dining table & reading scenes are among the funniest Stooge bits I've ever seen, and the latter includes what has to be the strangest Stooge quote ever: "Tar yetridy eeth say. Glug zap snorglotz ramitz. Ronissance kibbaertz..."

The problem is, this is hard to take at face value. Even if one didn't know about Curly's career-ending stroke while filming this, one has to wonder why his character never comes back after walking off to go sit down -- his absence from the rest of the film is obvious and makes no sense.

This was just the beginning of what was clearly a hard period for Larry & Moe. It's hard to imagine them having to be funny on film for the next several years while seeing Curly waste away, or during 1956 having to pretend the late Shemp was still filming with them. Knowing these parts of their history can really overshadow the humor of some of their films.

This short is most memorable for two reasons, one is that this is Curly's last official stooge short (despite his cameo in Hold That Lion) due to a major stroke while filming and it's also the debut of long-time stooge foil Emil Sitka who plays Sappington the butler, Curly was obviously very sick throughout the short although at the scenes when the stooges were pretending to eat Curly shows little signs of his oldself which is a big plus and the reading scenes were funny, but at the party is the sad point of the short although when I watched this short the first couple times, I was wondering what happened to Curly (that was before I knew that he suffered a stroke) and when we get to the pie fight is when Curly suffers a stroke and Moe and Larry had to finish the scene without Curly.

Overall, at least that this short was Curly's last stooge short instead of Three Loan Wolves which was recorded a few months earlier and Curly's health was so bad that he and Larry had to switch roles although unfortunately they had to do a remake of this short with Joe Besser in 1958 called Pies and Guys which was filmed almost exactly 11 years later.