Husbands Beware

The Three Stooges has always been some of the many actors that I have loved. I love just about every one of the shorts that they have made. I love all six of the Stooges (Curly, Shemp, Moe, Larry, Joe, and Curly Joe)! All of the shorts are hilarious and also star many other great actors and actresses which a lot of them was in many of the shorts! In My opinion The Three Stooges is some of the greatest actors ever and is the all time funniest comedy team!

One of My favorite Stooges shorts with Shemp is none other than Husbands Beware! All appearing in this short are the beautiful Christine McIntyre, Dee Green, Doris Houck, Alyn Lockwood, Johnny Kascier, Nancy Saunders, Lu Leonard, Maxine Gates, and Emil Sitka. Green and McIntyre provide great performances here! There are so many funny parts here. This is a very hilarious short. There is another similar Three Stooges short like this one called Brideless Groom and I recommend both!

Moe and Larry are newly henpecked husbands, having married Shemp's demanding sisters. At his music studio, Shemp learns he will inherit a fortune if he marries someone himself!

"Husbands Beware" is a remake of 1947's "Brideless Groom," widely considered by many to be one of the best Stooge films with Shemp. The remake contains most of the footage from that film. The new scenes, shot May 17, 1955, include the storyline of Moe and Larry marrying Shemp's sisters, along with their cooking of a turkey laced with turpentine! A few new scenes are tacked onto the end of the film as well(a double for Dee Green was used; if you blink, you will miss the double's appearance.)

"Husbands Beware" would have made for a good film with just the plot line of marrying the sisters. Budget considerations, coupled with fewer bookings for two-reel comedies, influenced the decision to use older footage.

Although completely new films were still being made by the Stooges, most of their releases by 1955-56 were made up of older films with a few new scenes tossed in. "Husbands Beware," while one of these hybrids, is watchable and entertaining; we get to see most of "Brideless Groom" again, and the new scenes are funny enough to get the viewer through the film. This film is one of the last Stooge comedies to feature new footage of Shemp, and it was released six weeks after his death.

7 out of 10.

HUSBANDS BEWARE is a remake of the Shemp classic BRIDELESS GROOM. The film's new cooking scene at the beginning of the film is great. The stooges are always funny when they cook. However after the first few minutes of cooking footage, we cut to original footage of BRIDELESS GROOM. One thing I noticed about these 1953 to 1956 remakes are that they do fit with the new story. They do an insert shot if the old story line doesn't match.

HUSBANDS BEWARE does have a new ending, but I won't give it away to those who want to be surprised.

**** out of 4 stars.

Larry and Moe marry Shemp's two full-bodied sisters. The sisters/wives turn out to be real bullies. They command the boys to cook but they don't know how. Shemp tries to help and you know how that goes. Shemp is a voice teacher to a terrible singer. His uncle recently died and left him $500k. Only thing is that he needs to get married in seven hours to qualify for the inheritance.

This has a bit of recycling which often happens with the Stooges. This was released after Shemp's death. The connectivity between the first half and the second half is a bit jarring. Nevertheless, it is still good Stooges fun.

Having low expectations going in, the opening new footage (clocked at over five minutes) of 'Husbands' came as a pleasant surprise. I won't say the new footage was grade A material, but it provided a very solid foundation for what "could have been" a good all-original film.

Unfortunately, this was put together in 1955, during a time of one day shooting schedules. After the new footage, Jules White decided to just thumbtack stock footage from 'Brideless Groom' into this short, making for a not-so-smooth story transition, which Jules and Felix Adler try to remedy with a quickie bit of new footage at the end, giving us the old, worn-out ending of the boys (Moe & Larry in this case) getting shot in the butt.

3/10