The Three Stooges brought laughter during bleak times, but their final movies reveal
the challenges they faced before departing.
Discover their struggles in a closer look at their last films.
Curly Howard's last on-screen appearance was technically in a short called Hold That Lion!
But he didn’t play a major role.
He played a cameo as a sleeping passenger on a train.
By that time, health issues had forced his retirement from the Stooges.
His last sizable role was in 1947's Half-Wits Holiday.
But his poor health made things difficult.
He was forgetting his lines, missing his cues, and suffering from chronic fatigue.
A doctor's appointment in 1945 revealed a laundry list of problems, including high blood
pressure and retinal hemorrhages.
And that was just the beginning: Health, safety, and stunt work were vastly different during
the Stooges' heyday, and the blows to the head that Curly regularly took were very real.
They'd caused his brain hemorrhages, leaving Curly in a bad way.
"Delighted."
"Devastated."
"Dee-lapidated."
In The Three Stooges: Amalgamated Morons to American Icons, Curly's niece – Moe's daughter
– explained that the thought of seeing a doctor never occurred to him, saying,
"He was the kind of man that if my dad didn't tell him to do something, he didn't do it…
He was like a big kid.
Do kids take themselves to a doctor?...
But I know my dad loved him and treated him the way a dad would a son."
The legendary but notorious Harry Cohn was the Three Stooges' producer who’s best summed
up by a quote attributed to Red Skelton.
According to the tale, there was a massive turnout at Cohn's funeral, which led Skelton
to observe,
"It only proves what they always say — give the public something they want to see, and
they'll come out for it."
Curly Howard's first stroke came not long after his high-profile and incredibly nasty
divorce.
HIs brother, Moe, stepped up to speak on his behalf, but Cohn was having none of it.
The Stooges — including Curly — were going to be held to their contract come hell or
high water.
So Curly was back on set just a month after having what would ultimately be one of several
major strokes.
Fortunately, he wasn't alone.
Moe and the third Stooge, Larry Fine, took on extra lines, roles, and duties to take
as much pressure as they could off their ailing friend.
The Stooges' directors opted to re-use old footage when and where they could, but the
resulting shorts leading up to Curly's final performance show a sad, exhausted, and struggling
comedian at work.
In his memoir, I Stooged to Conquer, Moe Howard recalls the day his brother's career ended.
Half-Wits Holiday was a remake of an earlier Stooges' film.
Moe says they were getting ready to film the very last scene when Curly didn't respond
to calls to come to set.
Moe went to find him and wrote that, as soon as he saw him, he knew.
"Curly looked up at me and tried to speak; his mouth was distorted and speech would not
come.
Tears rolled down his cheeks, and soon there were tears running down mine.
I thought my heart would break…
He squeezed my hand but couldn't say a word."
After getting help for his brother, Moe filled in for the last scene.
Curly would be replaced by his brother, Shemp Howard.
His truly final scene — in Hold That Lion!
— was the only time all three brothers appeared together on-screen.
"Don't you dare hit me in the head.
You know I'm not normal."
Curly Howard died in 1952.
Longtime Stooge director Jules White recalled some of Curly's final words:
"Gee, Jules, I guess I'll never be able to make the children laugh again."
Shemp Howard's final appearance was in 1956's Commotion on the Ocean, but that's just a
small part of the story.
To cover the whole thing, it's necessary to start a few years earlier.
Around the time Shemp stepped in to replace his brother Curly, the two-reel shorts the
Three Stooges were so famous for were beginning to disappear.
People would rather go to theaters for feature-length films now that they could stay home and watch
shorts on television.
So, after the Stooges failed to make the jump to TV, they found that their year-to-year
contracts were on shaky footing and the budgets for their films were getting tighter.
The Stooges were forced to film on the sets of other productions, with just three or four
days to shoot.
And they were increasingly reusing old stock footage of themselves.
"Say, what's a good word for 'scrutiny'?"
"Scrutiny."
"Thanks."
Meanwhile, Shemp clashed with director Jules White, who reportedly had a very Charlie Chaplin-like
style of directing, which meant he demonstrated exactly what he wanted to see.
Shemp — who'd been a Stooge before Curly — didn't appreciate it, but with more and
more work getting recycled from earlier days, the writing was on the wall.
It was 1955, and Shemp had spent the day at the racetrack followed by a boxing match.
"There goes Shemp with a right uppercut.
There goes Shemp with a haymaker.
There goes Shemp."
He was known for being just as fun to watch as the action in the ring.
Moe remembered that day in his memoir, I Stooged to Conquer, writing,
"Shemp got into the car of one of his friends and was telling jokes when he suddenly dropped
his head, leaned against one of the men, closed his eyes, and, with a smile on his face, died."
But Shemp continued to appear in Stooges shorts until 1956's Commotion on the Ocean.
That was roughly a year after his fatal heart attack, so what gives?
"Never felt better in my life.
Let's go."
This is where a little Hollywood heartlessness, camera trickery, and movie lore collide.
At the time of Shemp's death, the Stooges were under contract to produce four more shorts.
Shemp appeared via old footage or was portrayed by a double who was never quite as visible
as he might have been.
"Hey, Shemp!
We're in here.
We got a lotta work to do so shake a leg."
"Hold your horses, will ya?"
It wasn't until much later that Sam Raimi coined the term "fake Shemp" to refer to the
not-at-all-uncommon practice of carefully shooting scenes to hide the fact that an actor
was replaced by a double.
In fact, when the money ran out on Raimi's cult classic The Evil Dead, it was fake Shemps
to the rescue.
The lack of compensation the Three Stooges received is nothing short of heartbreaking.
At the time Shemp Howard was replaced by Joe Besser, they were restricted to one-year contracts
that Columbia usually wouldn't renew until the last minute, claiming it was a major decision
whether or not to renew.
Columbia insisted the Stooges weren't as popular as they once were, that two-reel films were
harder to sell, and that money was tight.
Which actually wasn't the case at all.
Those last years were shockingly dismal.
Even though the Stooges were with Columbia for 24 years and the studio made millions
off of their work, their salaries remained stagnant.
Moe would write that, even as they ran themselves ragged, Columbia's negotiation techniques
were designed to curtail any talk of raises — so, they never came.
And it got worse.
Producer and Columbia co-founder Harry Cohn died in 1958, the same year the Stooges' contract
ended.
At the time, Moe was working as a messenger on the Columbia lots in order to make ends
meet, and his daughter recalled,
"After Harry Cohn died, my father went to the studio one day and the guard wouldn't
even let him in.
That was a low point.
He didn't want to see his career end."
Joe Besser wasn't with the Three Stooges for long.
After joining as a replacement for Shemp Howard in 1956, his end-of-the-line came with the
termination of the Stooges' Columbia contract.
His last picture was Sappy Bull Fighters, which was a remake of an earlier short with
Besser in the role once played by Curly Howard.
While he might not top anyone's list of favorite Stooges, Besser only had good things to say
about his time with them.
Besser decided that his exit from the Stooges was going to coincide with their Columbia
contract not only for professional but also personal reasons: His wife was sick, and he
wanted to care for her.
But he always remembered his time with the Stooges fondly.
"We had more fun.
More laughter amongst ourselves."
He went on to have a long, post-Stooge career and passed away in 1988.
The wife he had left the Stooges to see through an illness outlived him, passing away 14 months
after he did.
The story of the Three Stooges very nearly ended there.
By 1958, Moe Howard and Larry Fine were about ready to call it quits.
Columbia had dropped them and they were back down to two Stooges, but when Larry saw Joe
DeRita in a Las Vegas act, he recruited him to be a third.
With ticket sales buoyed by a rerelease of old Stooges shorts, it seemed like the boys
were, as they say, back in town.
"My name is Moe."
"I'm Larry."
"And I'm Curly-Joe."
But that popularity was ultimately short-lived, and reached a peak with The Three Stooges
in Orbit.
"Hey, what are you?
Some kinda nuts?"
Yeah!
Astro-nuts!"
By that time, the Stooges had gotten a bit of an overhaul to tone down the violence that
had defined their earlier films.
They were now targeting an audience mainly made up of children, and Moe decided they
should be more family-friendly.
The problem?
Kids didn't have much money to drop on seeing movies, and Columbia once again decided that
they'd had enough of the Stooges.
Matters weren't really helped by the fact that the new Stooge wasn't actually a Stooge
fan.
He was later quoted as saying,
"I was with the Stooges for twelve years, and it was a very pleasant association, but
I just don't think they were funny."
As the Three Stooges' careers wound down, there were more and more ideas pitched for
Stooge movies, but those movies rarely came to fruition.
In 1968, they starred in a 20-minute film called Star Spangled Salesmen.
Then their last public appearance came the following year.
They were going to give television another try when tragedy struck yet again.
The idea was a made-for-television movie called Kook's Tour, which would see the aging Stooges
travel and see all the sights they hadn't been able to see when they were performing.
Moe Howard wrote in his memoir,
"It was a fresh and thrilling experience, shooting a film out in the fresh air in beautiful
virgin countryside rather than the stuffy, confined stages to which we had become accustomed."
With a Labrador retriever named Moose in tow, they were nearly done shooting when Larry
Fine suffered a massive stroke.
Moe wrote that he visited Larry in the hospital to find him entertaining other patients and
said,
"After Larry's stroke, I knew the Three Stooges had come to an end as an act."
Moe continued to visit him in the hospital, recalling how Larry would tell jokes.
Even though he slowly became impossible to understand, remembering,
"I would yock loudly to cover the tears welling in my eyes."
In 1975, Larry slipped into a coma and did not wake up.
Eventually, Moe Howard was the last remaining original Stooge.
The Three Stooges Scrapbook suggests that was a heavy weight to bear, saying that he
had trouble watching any of the old stuff.
He explained,
"How strange it is that people can laugh at comedians who are dead and never give it a
second thought.
At the same time, it's good to think that Shemp and my kid brother, Curly, are still
remembered."
After Larry Fine's stroke, Moe tried to keep going.
"Darling, I'm so glad you're here."
"Well, I'm not exactly sorry, baby."
There were plans for a movie in the Philippines, but it quickly became apparent that Stooge
replacement Emil Sitka wasn't going to work.
Old footage of the crew continued to be rereleased, and just after Larry's death, Moe, Curly-Joe,
and Sitka were slated to start filming what would be a new Stooges comedy.
It would never be finished.
Although no one would know it until later, Moe was already sick during production meetings.
The beginning of filming was postponed to give him a chance to recover his strength,
but he didn't.
Moe Howard — the last original Stooge — lived to the ripe old age of 78.
"Amalgamated Association of Morons.
Local Six and Seven-eighths."
He died on May 4, 1975, just 24 days before he, his brothers, and longtime friend Larry
Fine were inducted into The Motion Picture Hall of Fame.
This time, there would be no more movies.