Half-Wit's Holiday

Well, I finished off the three pirates episode by the Three Stooges and "Half-Wit's Holiday." It's bittersweet to watch this one because we all know Curly had a stroke during the filming and so missed the last few scenes.

I've had this episode for a while. I have a VHS tape, one of the Columbia videos they made when they weren't really going for the sequential, collected works approach. So it's just "Half-Wit's Holiday and Other Nyuks," or something like that.

It's a good one, though, a remake (of sorts, in concept anyway) of an earlier film. Moe's wife had something to do with the concept, two guys arguing over Heredity vs. Environment, as for refining people and having them have some class. The Stooges are their guinea pigs and of course they're bound to fail in the refinement category every time, at least given enough time.

I like some of the stuff in this film, including their whole pretend meal, with the great sound effects, such as Curly supposedly eating olives, and they're going down, "glug glug glug." Everything else is cool in that scene.

As far as everything degenerating into another pie fight, that's not my favorite way to go out, but the Stooges must have thought it was riotous, since it seems they have numerous pie fights along the way. The weird thing about their pie fights is that there are still people (guests) standing around apparently oblivious to the fact that a pie fight is in progress. Then they turn, pull down their glasses, only to (surprise) get a pie in the face. It's funny, but it makes you wonder, how did these people not notice what was going on in the room they were in for the last five minutes?

I'm not such a Stooge-a-phile that I know all the ins and outs of Stooge lore. But I have read a little about Emil Sitka. He's in this film, and there's a touching thing (I think it's touching) in the Three Stooges Scrapbook about him shaking Curly's hand and saying he was playing the butler in this picture. Curly stands and says something nice to him, like, "Yes, sir, I see." And Sitka never really knew exactly what he meant by that, why he called him sir. I guess you needed to have been there!

There's another guy in the earlier films, and I thought HE was Emil Sitka. But he's definitely a different guy from this, and this is definitely Emil Sitka. The book says this was his first film with the Stooges. There's a cool picture, I believe it's in this Scrapbook, where Sitka was going to be the replacement for Larry in the very latest years. But it didn't happen beyond the picture.

OK, I've exhausted the Curly episodes and now (except for "Hold That Lion") he's all gone. Very sad to see him exit in his last scene from "Half-Wit's Holiday."