Call us “victims of coicumstance” for missing it, but last Spring marked the 90th anniversary of the premiere of The Three Stooges’ debut short for Columbia Pictures. Released on May 5, 1934, Woman Haters was the first of 190 two-reelers the slapstick trio–in three different iterations–made for the studio over the next 25 years. And while it rarely turns up on most fans’ Top 10 lists, the question I’m going to attempt to answer today is…well, you saw the headline already.
Now, technically speaking, this wasn’t an honest-to-goodness “Stooges short” as moviegoers would soon come to know them. Woman Haters was produced as the sixth entry in a series of what Columbia called “Musical Novelties,” two-reel films that showcased the company’s up-and-coming performers and featured mostly songs, some comedy bits, and (usually) rhyming dialogue. Still, this was Moe Howard, Larry Fine, and Curly Howard in their first credited screen appearance since ditching former boss/straight man Ted Healy, and every act has to start somewhere.
Given its format as a “Musical Novelty,” the film is very different in style from the boys’ later efforts. For one thing, their names were changed in the storyline: Moe is Tom, Larry is Jim, and Curly–originally billed under his given name of Jerry–is Jackie (The opening titles were replaced with the mid-’30s Three Stooges title card when the short was re-released). For another, much of the dialogue is in the rhyming format mentioned above. And while the fellas are playing pals who know one another, Larry’s character is the main focus of the plotline, with Moe and Curly more or less along for the ride.
The picture opens on the seventh meeting of the Woman Haters club, where men gather to get away from females and reinforce the notion “that romance is a crime.” Into these misogynistic proceedings arrive prospective new members Tom, Jim, and Jackie, who are welcomed by the club’s chairman (frequent Stooges foil Bud Jamison, his first of 38 shorts with them). Their induction ceremony–complete with eye pokes courtesy of Jamison–degrades into a slapfest and gives Curly a chance to debut his “machine gun arm with derby sound effect” routine.
Just one week after the trio are inducted as full-fledged, pin-wearing Woman Haters, Larry…err, Jim tells Moe and Curly…err, Tom and Jackie that he has to leave the club. He’s met a gal named Mary (Marjorie White), you see, and is going to get married to her that very night (not exactly the closest of chums here, are they?). The boys talk Jim into heading to his fiancée’s home and calling off the wedding. Upon arriving, though, Jim meets Mary’s father, who tells him how he and his brothers took care of a guy who tried to escape getting hitched to his overweight other daughter. A sufficiently coerced Jim goes through with the nuptials, and the pair take off on their honeymoon train.
As luck and the plot would have it, this is the same train that the fellas were supposed to be leaving on for a sales trip. Along the way the boys manage to induct a new member, the train conductor (played by future three-time Oscar-winner Walter Brennan, in the first of two Stooges shorts he appeared in). When Tom and Jackie (Oh, forget it. I’m just calling the Stooges by their own names from now on) Moe and Curly find their “straying” comrade, they remind him how they each put up their bankroll that a dame would never come between them. An irate Mary overhears this, and sets out to invalidate the pact by flirting with each of them. Both Larry and Moe try to woo Mary by crooning the song “My Life, My Love, My All,” while Curly pretends to have fainted when he’s caught alone with her. Eventually Mary tells them she’s aware of their schemes and gets Larry all to herself, with Moe and Curly falling out the train’s windows.
The scene then shifts to “the 30th meeting of the Woman Haters club,” where an elderly Moe (with white hair and beard) and Curly (with muttonchop sideburns) are playing a heated game of dominoes. Who should show up at the door but a bearded, aged Larry, ready to return to the fold? What happened to Mary? We’ll never know (In real life, sadly, this picture turned out to be White’s last, as she was killed while a passenger in a Santa Monica car crash in August of 1935). A final knockabout rendition of “My Love, My Love, My All” ends with the Stooges punching, slapping, and “woo-woo-wooing” their way to the final fadeout.
Opinions of Stooge aficionados on Woman Haters are, to say the least, mixed. Many fans find the musical format and rhyming dialogue a turn-off and feel that the film gives the boys little to do as an actual trio. Others appreciate it as a stepping stone in the team’s cinematic evolution, with early glimpses of some of their signature bits. The perky White manages to hold her own against the Stooges, and Jamison is his usual burly self. I confess to not thinking much of it the first times I saw it on TV as an adolescent, but over the years I’ve even mellowed to “My Life, My Love, My All.” And besides, Moe, Larry, and Curly were able to finish out 1934 with three of their funnier works: Punch Drunks (Curly goes nuts to “Pop Goes the Weasel”), Men in Black (which got the boys their only Academy Award nomination), and Three Little Pigskins (co-starring a young, blonde Lucille Ball).
Is Woman Haters the worst of the 190 Stooges shorts? Lots of folks give that inglorious title to another Larry-centric installment, 1952’s Cuckoo on a Choo Choo (with Fine imitating Marlon Brando’s Stanley Kowalski). Also at the bottom of the roll call are any of the four 1956 films Moe and Larry made after Shemp Howard’s death the year before with stock footage and Joe Palma as “Fake Shemp.” And leave us not forget the 1958 Joe Besser entry Sweet and Hot (a lot of the Besser efforts have–somewhat unfairly–been deemed “lesser efforts”). With those in mind, my answer to the headline question is…”coitenly not.”