Now that Disney’s live-action Snow White is playing in theaters (It is still playing in theaters, isn’t it?), the publicity surrounding the film made me think back to the first time I saw the fairy tale princess on the movie screen. I can’t say my memories are all that clear (I was only about three at the time), but I still recall being smitten with her beauty, her grace, her singing, her ice skating…
“Ice skating?,” you ask. Why, yes. You see, my first cinematic exposure wasn’t with her as the animated heroine of Disney’s Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. No, the year was 1961, and my grandmother (At least, I think it was my grandmother. It could have been my mother or father) took me to a matinee showing of the just-released Snow White and the Three Stooges. Alongside the slapstick trio, the live-action comedy/fantasy mash-up featured Olympic skater Carol Heiss in the title role.
At the start of the 1960s, the Three Stooges were enjoying a newfound burst of popularity. Dumped by Columbia Pictures in 1957 after 23 years of making short films for the studio, the fellas were suddenly in demand when those same shorts played on TV a year later and displayed their antics to a new generation of fans. Getting on in years but eager to return to performing, Moe Howard and Larry Fine were joined by new “Third Stooge” Curly Joe DeRita for stage tours and TV appearances. Even Columbia came around and signed them for a feature-length comedy, 1959’s Have Rocket–Will Travel. But when Columbia’s next Stooges film, 1960’s Stop! Look! and Laugh!, proved to be a compilation film with no new footage, the boys decided to explore other options.
Enter 20th Century-Fox. Also happy to cash in on “Stoogemania,” Fox tapped the threesome to star in a lavish, color retelling of the Snow White story that would leave room for their face-slapping shenanigans. Warner Bros. animator-turned-comedy director Frank Tashlin (The Paleface) was slated to helm the feature, and his penchant for sight gags would have livened things up. Tashlin, however, was replaced by Walter Lang, best known for such straight musical fare as There’s No Business Like Show Business and The King and I.
Perhaps looking to repeat the success they had in the 1930s and ’40s with turning Olympic skater Sonja Henie into a screen star, Fox signed reigning ice princess Carol Heiss, who had just taken the gold medal at the 1960 Winter Games in Squaw Valley, for their Snow White. This would turn out to be her first and last film role. The Evil Queen was played by English-born actress Patricia Medina, with Guy Rolfe–known to horror fans for Mr. Sardonicus and the Puppet Master films–as her scheming advisor, Count Oga. Bodybuilder-turned-leading man Edson Stroll rounded out the cast as Prince Charming (Stroll and the Stooges would team up again in 1962’s The Three Stooges in Orbit).
Except for the obvious substitution of the Stooges for a certain septet of miners, the film’s story stays relatively close to the familiar fable. Jealous of her stepdaughter’s beauty, Medina’s Queen charges her huntsman with taking Snow White into the woods and killing her. He allows her to escape, and she eventually makes her way to the cottage of the Seven Dwarfs…who, conveniently, are away. Their home is being borrowed by medicine show peddlers Moe, Larry, and Curly Joe, along with their handsome ward Quarto, who they took in as a boy. What the Stooges don’t know is that Quarto is really the amnesiac Prince Charming, and they must rescue him when he’s imprisoned in the Queen’s castle. When these events help the Queen learn that Snow White lives, she transforms herself into a hideous witch and sets out to eliminate the princess with–you guessed it–a poison apple.
Oh, and there is ice skating (after all, you sign an Olympic medalist, you expect them to perform their specialty on-screen. Isn’t that why Kurt Thomas got the lead in Gymkata?). The skating sequences are nicely shot, and kids will tolerate them the way they do the more boring songs in Disney cartoon features, but they do slow down the proceedings. Speaking of songs, the four featured in the film are all right, but there’s not a “Whistle While You Work” or “Heigh-Ho” in the lot.
What there’s not a lot of, sadly, is the sort of knockabout antics that Stooges fans expect from watching their ’30s and ’40s Columbia shorts. As mentioned earlier, the fellas were getting on in years by this point, and DeRita was never up for taking the physical punishment that Moe bestowed on his real-life siblings Curly and Shemp. Too often they’re reduced to the role of bystanders as events unfold around them. Interestingly, the film’s script was co-written by Stooges veteran Elwood Ullman and Noel Langley, who also helped pen the screenplay for 1939’s The Wizard of Oz.
Generally considered by Stooges fans to be the weakest of the team’s six 1960s features (Moe Howard himself once called the film “a Technicolor mistake.” The joke’s on him–it was shot in DeLuxe Color.), Snow White and the Three Stooges failed to stick the landing at the box office, making back only half of its estimated $3.5 million budget. Still, that may yet turn out to be not as bad as a certain recent Snow White movie I could mention.