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.

This short is indeed, like all the shorts, a classic. I couldn't help but see at the end, after watching, Moe was noticeably not himself. I've read many times about the stroke that poor Curly suffered during the making of this, and you can see in Moe's delivery of his lines that this event's eating away at his heart. I can't imagine how he must have felt when just minutes earlier his brother was being rushed away to the nearby emergency room. Moe did say in an interview,despite his inner heartbreak and not knowing if Curly was alive or dead, that "The show still must go on". And being the professionals they were, Larry and Moe finished the short without Curly. The Three Stooges were without a doubt the most amazing and groundbreaking actor/comedians of all time. And just like the old saying goes, "People like this come once every thousand years". God Bless Them, and may They Rest in Peace.

Pretty much a carbon copy of the classic short HOI POLLOI (1935). I don't like it when they re-do classics, although this is okay. But as we all probably know, Curly (who was already ill at the time from a previous stroke) suffered a second, more powerful stroke during the filming and had to be hospitalized and retired afterwards. While Curly was in the hopsital, the heartless Columbia-head bastard, Harry Cohn, forced Moe and Larry to finish filming the short without him. That must've been really hard for them to do, and it wasn't worth it anyway. The pie-fight may be pretty funny, but Curly's absense from it is too obvious, and the ending was pretty weak and out-of-place.

As a big Curly fan, it's not easy for me to see this comic genius struggling in his last few years, and watching this film knowing he had another stroke during the filming is hard. This short should have never been released, and they should've left THREE LITTLE PIRATES as Curly's last short, since he does a remarkable job there, even despite his ill health.

Also, a few more things: to the person who said they used a double for Curly for the rest of the short after he was sent to the hospital, that didn't happen. Maybe you're thinking of Shemp's death, where they used a double for him in 4 shorts after he died. And also, to the person who said that Shemp wasn't that great - you have to give Shemp another chance. Although Curly's my personal favorite Stooge, Shemp was very talented and funny in his own right, and he and Curly are both equally great. Plus, he was the original third Stooge anyway, so he already had experience, even before he re-joined in 1947. Now, Joe Besser, on the other hand, he was a pathetic Stooge from start to finish.

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?"

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.