"Stop, Look and Laugh" is a ragged comedy with a sorry history. The Three Stooges discovered the film was made only after it was finished, since the producer assembled it out of clips of Moe, Larry, and Curly that were taken from their earlier movies. The film's ostensible star is ventriloquist Paul Winchell, who appears as a kind of father to his boyish dummy, Jerry Mahoney.

But he's only there to introduce the clips from 11 different Three Stooges comedies - and a strange segment with some monkeys.

It's hard for Winchell to tie together the disparate sequences, but he tries. In the film's finale, there's one of the Stooges' famous pie-fight sequence, and the movie includes footage of Winchell entering to complain about the noise - only to get smacked with a pie himself. It would be hard to do a good segue for the Stooges' bullfighting movie, "What's the Matador." But to pad out the film still further, the producers included a ten-minute sequence in which live monkeys re-enact "Cinderella."

It's especially unfortunate, because Paul Winchell was a multi-talented performer who went on to do some great vocal performances. He provided the voice of Fleegle in "The Banana Splits," and Gargamel on the Smurfs, as well as the voice for Hanna-Barbera's arch villain, Dick Dastardly. Winchell is best-known as the voice of Tigger for Disney's "Winnie the Pooh" movies. But ironically, in 1978 Hanna-Barbera created a cartoon in which the Three Stooges were robots - and Paul Winchell provided one of the voices.

Unfortunately, Winchell never got the appreciation he deserved. He created a popular children's show called "Winchell Mahoney Time," but the studio later destroyed all their tapes of it in a bitter dispute over syndication rights. Because of this, "Stop, Look, and Laugh" offers one of the few chances to see Winchell and his dummy in action (and Jerry Mahoney is later visited by Winchell's other dummy, Knucklehead Smith). But his storyline in the film is a little creepy, with Mahoney pretending to be sick so he can stay home from school.

"Stop, Look and Listen," is really only entertaining for very young kids. Fans of the Three Stooges will object to the way their short films have been reduced into even smaller pieces. The interruptions by Mahoney just don't mesh with the Stooges' slapstick style. Ultimately this film does deliver a lot of stops - but not lots of laughs.

Learn more about this author, Moe Zilla.
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