Good Job on The Three Stooges Stage Lives but Not Their Personal Lives
There’s only so much a movie can do in such (relatively) short time. This movie did a solid job on the show business narrative of the Three Stooges, but to me it came across as one of those sanitized biographies from Old Hollywood. I still don’t have a feel for what made each of the stooges tick--OK, Larry squandered money, and Shemp was a worry wart, etc.; but we never learned much about them beyond their life as comics. For example, while there were some nods to their Jewish heritage, I would’ve liked the movie to have explored that much further--what discrimination did they face because of this? Were they “observant” Jews or largely nominal? Also, I remember reading a good many pages of Moe’s memoirs years ago, and he had an interesting anecdote about being on the streets in the Jim Crow, segregationist South (I think Florida?); and when he turned the corner of a street, an elderly black gentleman who had been walking on the sidewalk quickly jumped to the gutter to let him pass, which provoked Moe to jump to the gutter, which prompted the other man to hop back on the sidewalk, and they sort of did a little impromptu jig with each other. I would’ve liked to have seen little episodes like that. As it is, I’m suspicious whether the eye gouge was really invented while the three played poker and whether the other gags (and Curly’s nickname, the name of the Three Stooges, etc.) were invented in the way the movie portrays.
Still, for what it is--a focus on their stage lives--it does a credible job.