Some movies' titles need no explanation

One of the movies that recently started showing up in the FXM rotation again is Snow White and the Three Stooges. It's going to be on again tomorrow at 6:00 AM, so I watched it to do a post on it today.

As you can probably guess, the movie is about Snow White (played by champion figure skater Carol Heiss), as well as the Three Stooges (Larry, Moe, and Curly-Joe, ie. Joe DeRita). Snow White lives in the land of Fortuna, with her father the King, and the King's second wife, the Queen (Patricia Medina), who is not Snow White's mother but her wicked stepmother. The King eventually dies, and the Queen and Snow White are technically supposed to go into mourning. So the Queen uses this to imprison Snow White while she comes up with a way to get rid of Snow White.

Meanwhile, there are the Three Stooges, elsewhere in the kingdom. They have a traveling medicine show together with Quatro (bodybuilder Edson Stroll), an orphan whose real identity should be obvious, but who only learns it from the Stooges halfway through the movie. The borrow the Seven Dwarves' house while the dwarves are away mining, which is eventually how they're going to meet Snow White. The Queen has one of her bodyguards dispatch Snow White, but he just can't do it, so he lets Snow White free in the middle of nowhere, which just happens to be near the dwarves' house.

Of course it's going to be dangerous for the Stooges and Quattro. When they get invited to the palace to perform at a celebration, the Queen's adviser, Count Oga (Guy Rolfe), recognizes Quattro as Prince Charming, who was supposed to be betrothed to Snow White. The Queen and Oga plot to have Prince Charming killed, and he gets hit by an arrow during a fight, leading everybody to think that he's dead, although he isn't. The magic mirror, meanwhile, tells the Queen that Snow White is still alive, so she has Count Oga come up with that poisoned apple.

Snow White and the Three Stooges is an odd movie, for a whole bunch of reasons having to do with the fact that nobody would think to pair Snow White with Larry, Moe, and Curly-Joe. There's also the fact of Heiss' previous career as a figure skater. (Well, she was an amateur, so it was retiring from competitive skating that allowed her to make money.) As with Sonja Henie, having a skater star in a movie means that we're going to get several extended skating scenes, along with musical numbers.

Stooges fans will probably be disappointed to see that they're in many ways supporting characters here. Young girls will probably like the fairy tale but not so much the Stooges, while young boys will more likely enjoy the Stooges but not the fairy tale. So in many ways there's no one good audience to market a movie like this too. It's not exactly bad, despite the fact that Heiss and Stroll weren't actors, but it's defnitely a mess. An interesting one, to be sure, but a mess nonetheless.