Directed by: James Frawley
Starring: Paul Ben-Victor, Michael Chiklis, Evan Handler
I rarely look at TV movies, much less review them. But I saw this one on Friday night on American Movie Classics and I watched. Why not? I love the Stooges and I thought this movie would provide me with insight into their lives and careers. Well, I still love the Stooges. And I can't help but notice that American Movie Classics has really stretched its definiton of "classic". When you start showing Halloween 5 along with The Godfather, well, something odd is going on at that network.
This was a made-for-TV movie first shown in 2000 and I heard about it, but I didn't go out of my way to see it. Now I know why. This movie tries to cram everything about the Stooges into a two-hour running time. As a result, important things get short shrift, if any shrift at all. This movie finds a way to cram Curly's death and Shemp's death into one funeral scene. Would it have killed the TV network (which I believe was ABC) to give the filmmakers one more hour of running time? By the way, Curly and Shemp died three years apart, in case any Wisenheimer wants to dispute why I didn't like the idea of one funeral scene for two guys.
The movie is also strange in its depiction of Moe, Larry, Curly, Shemp, et al. They behave like they were making a Stooge movie. Moe says, "Why I oughta..." a lot. Larry is Larry. Curly actually finds way to throw "Nyuk, Nyuk" and "Soitainly" into his normal, everyday conversations. Also strange is that the stage and screen performances of the Stooges do not display why they were funny and why everyone was offering them movie deals left and right.
As if there weren't enough goofy things about this movie, there is one more. After Shemp's death, Joe Besser and Joe DeRita are in a total of one scene each! In fact, I didn't see Joe DeRita until the final shot, but there was plenty of conversation about him. Perhaps more of his scenes were edited out because the inevitable two-hour running time was in jeopardy.
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