The Three Stooges meet Hercules is more a curiosity than funny: The Three Stooges in Orbit (also 1962) is funnier and more like the Stooge films of old; The Three Stooges Go Around the World in a Daze (1963) has a stronger story; and The Outlaws Is Coming (1965), the team's final feature, is more endearingly quirky. But as Saturday matinee fodder, The Three Stooges meet Hercules adequately delivers. And it's probably the only film in cinema history whose final line of dialogue is, "Look out! That's my ear!"

In present day Ithaca, New York, Moe, Larry, and Curly-Joe DeRita are working at Ralph Dimsal's (George N. Neise) pharmacy. They're also friends with Schuyler (Quinn Redeker), a young inventor working on a time machine. Schuyler is in love with Diane (Vicki Trickett), but she's annoyed when Schuyler lets Dimsal push him around. As expected, the Stooges foul things up and everyone save Dismal is transported to ancient Greece, where they run afoul of King Odius [sic] (also Neise) and his henchman, the mighty Hercules (Samson Burke).

The strange thing about The Three Stooges meet Hercules is how absolutely nothing about it remotely resembles or references the very genre it's spoofing. It's as if screenwriter Elwood Ullman and director Edward Bernds had never seen one of the myriad sword-and-sandal epics flooding out of Italy since Joseph E. Levine unleashed Hercules (Le Fatiche di Ercole, 1958) to huge business at drive-ins in 1959. The picture might've could've should've spoofed the instantly cliched conventions of what by 1961 was fast becoming a played out genre. Instead, The Three Stooges meet Hercules adopts the visual style of a 1940s Columbia programmer. Where the team's earlier directors (Del Lord, Charley Chase, Preston Black, Jules White) were veterans of silent comedy, director Edward Bernds had worked his way up from Columbia's sound department, where he had been a mixer/sound editor. As a director Bernds was a busy but artless hack, alternating between low-brow comedies and cheap science fiction pictures, which in Bernds' hands stylistically are indistinguishable. (This is especially obvious in his Queen of Outer Space, written as a comedy but directed by Bernds without a lick of humor, as a serious sci-fi picture.) Needless to say he makes no effort to give this film anything like an epic or Italian flavor.

The oddest aspect of the picture is that it makes Hercules a villain, and a minor one at that. Instead of teaming up with the Stooges, which might have been fun, Hercules is little more than a henchman of main heavy King Odius, and continually embarrassed by the Stooges, who smash grapes in his face, etc.

Fans of the Three Stooges, this critic included, defend the team's best work, from approximately 1933-1941, then again from about 1947-1949. But they still have some affection for later movies like The Three Stooges meet Hercules even while recognizing that they're pretty much bereft of laughs. After the deaths of Curly and Shemp Howard, and the departure of mid-fifties third stooge Joe Besser (a funny man who didn't really mesh with the Stooges' style), Joe DeRita inherited the patsy role but seems to have been chosen mainly because he was the right height (the Stooges were all tiny, about five feet tall) and width rather than his abilities as a comedian. He's singularly unfunny, and better-suited to character parts like his surprising appearance in The Bravados. Moe, who led the team onscreen and off, seems to have been aware of this, as he actually assumes more of the comedy than even DeRita. (Larry, sometimes hilarious with goofy, non sequitur reactions, is under-utilized.) But while Moe was capable of being quite funny at times, Bernds almost perversely shoots the eye-poker at angles that emphasize his advancing years: looking down upon his thinning, graying bowl-cut and with tight close-ups of the mud-flap size bags under his eyes.

The rest of the cast is adequate, with Neise coming off best playing his villain in the enjoyably broad tradition of predecessors to this sort of part: Philip Van Zandt, Gene Roth (who has a small role here), and Vernon Dent. Gregg Martell, the caveman from Dinosaurus! (1960), has a couple of good scenes as a galley ship's slave driver. Stooge veteran Emil Sitka is quite funny in an amusing bit as a shepherd trying to give directions; he turns up later in another part, a "Greek Humor Man," supplying Moe with the inevitable pies.

The film was produced by the late Norman Maurer, Moe's son-in-law, who gave the rest of the team's movies and TV projects a distinctive look and obviously handled their projects with a care that belies their low budgets. (That said, nearly all these later features overindulge in obvious stock shots -- including bits from silent pictures -- in footage that never matches the new scenes.) Prior to this, Maurer had been involved in the development of a strange production/laboratory process called Cinemagic, most famously utilized in The Angry Red Planet (1959). Something like Cinemagic is briefly used here as well, during the opening titles where the trio is shot in such a way as to suggest line drawings come to life.

Video & Audio

The Three Stooges meet Hercules approximates its original 1.85:1 theatrical aspect ratio and is 16:9 anamorphically enhanced. The image, "filmed in glorious black and white" (so say the credits) is a tad dark and dupey, but clean and sharp. The mono sound is adequate. Optional English subtitles are included, but that's it; there are no other audio or subtitle options.

Extra Features

The only extra is a promo for Sony's misbegotten color process, which claims the Stooges are even "funnier in color!" They obviously haven't seen Snow White and the Three Stooges.

Parting Thoughts

Though no classic of screen comedy, The Three Stooges meet Hercules delivers where its predecessor, Fox's lavish Snow White and the Three Stooges (1961) had failed so miserably. Kids wanted the Three Stooges engaged in Three Stooges-type antics and that's what this film offers. Recommended for Stooge fans only.

Stuart Galbraith IV is a Kyoto-based film historian whose work includes The Emperor and the Wolf - The Lives and Films of Akira Kurosawa and Toshiro Mifune and Taschen's forthcoming Cinema Nippon. Visit Stuart's Cine Blogarama here.