Hello and welcome to Fairy Tale Friday. Are you sitting comfortably? Good. Then I’ll begin.
This week we look at the 1961 Snow White and the Three Stooges. I will be honest I was slightly dreading this one, but I was pleasantly surprised. It stars Larry, Moe and Curly and was their first colour film. There is very little of the “Nyuk, nyuk, nyuk” and slapstick eye poking and head cracking that you would expect with the Three Stooges. This is perhaps why it was a such a commercial failure. Moe Howard referred to it as the “technicolour mistake.”
To my great surprise this is Snow White…on ICE! This
film was a showcase for gold medal winner Olympic ice skater Carol Heiss and it shows. She
was clearly not hired for her acting with her thin voice and bland expression.
But man, can she skate. There are several skating sequences including a great
one where some baddies come out and there is a sort of skate-off fight with
lots of urgent music and flashes of red light and fog. But the skating seems
shoehorned in there, which let’s be honest, it was.
The casting is interesting. First you have Carol Heiss
with her pretty face and seemingly inability to feel the cold. There are
several scenes on a snowy mountain or in front of a roaring fire where other
characters are shivering and she is sitting around in short sleeves with her cleavage
exposed and not reacting to the temperature. I guess it is all that ice skating
that has made her impervious to the cold.
Then there is the handsome Prince played by Edson
Stroll. He is hugely tall, with the broadest of shoulders and the narrowest of
waists (like an inverted triangle) and a jaw a lantern would be jealous of. He
wears a tunic so short you can almost see his bits which shows off his tree trunk
legs.
Interestingly, the Three Stooges rescue him as a child
when a henchman is trying to assassinate him and he loses his memory. They
adopt him and he grows up with the three clowns and grows up to be…wait for it…a
ventriloquist with the jester dummy using a voice suspiciously reminiscent of
Bugs Bunny. There is a reason for this. The dummy is voiced by none other than
Mel Blanc. Sadly, he regains his memory stops being a ventriloquist and starts
wearing a fancier tunic that still seems to short for him and goes all bland and boring. But
then again, so is she, so they probably are made for each other. I personally preferred
him in more rustic clothes with a puppet on his arm.
As an added bonus the wonderful Paul Frees(whom you
will know as Burgermeister Meisterburger) is the voice of the narrator and the
magic mirror.
Thanks to Wikipedia for a summary:
Once upon a time, in the kingdom of
Fortunia, a noble king and his lovely young queen lack but one blessing to make
their joy complete. The queen gives birth to a daughter named Snow White,
but dies soon after. The king mourns her, but in time, he remarries because of
the pleading of his people. His new queen is a beautiful but evil woman who
soon becomes jealous of Snow White's beauty.
On her 17th birthday, Snow White's father
dies and the wicked queen immediately imprisons her. Eventually, the queen's
jealousy of her stepdaughter becomes so great that she orders her killed. Snow
White escapes her hired assassin and finds refuge in the empty cottage of the
seven dwarfs, soon to be joined by the Three Stooges, who are traveling to the
castle with their ward Quatro. But the boy they have raised since childhood
(also narrowly escaping an assassination attempt by the queen) is in
reality Prince Charming, who though he has lost his memory,
is betrothed to Snow White.
Snow White and the Prince fall in love,
but the queen has him kidnapped when she suspects his true identity. The
Stooges, disguised as cooks, attempt to rescue him, but he falls from a
staircase in the palace and is presumed dead. Meanwhile, the queen learns from
her magic mirror that Snow White is still alive. With the help of her magician,
Count Oga, she transforms herself into a witch and succeeds in getting Snow
White to take a bite from a poisoned apple.
Note: He transforms her into the archetypal witch—black dress
and cloak, crazy hair, witchy laugh and a flying broom. In this disguise she
flies around cackling to the cottage in the forest where Snow White lives in
what seems to be a huge effort to draw
attention to herself. Then she lands outside the cottage and hides behind a
large bush where she quickly changes into her peasant clothes. While inside
complaining about the cold she offers Snow White and apple so shiny it looks
like it was varnished. Snow White takes it and we don’t actually see her take a
bite (how could she? She could never get her teeth through all that shellac)
but we do see her fallen down as if she ate some. Interestingly what the camera
decides to focus on instead is the peasant’s hands. As Snow White coughs and
struggles we see that the peasant disguise only extends to the face as the
hands are clearly the smooth, young, long nailed with coloured polish hands of
her stepmother. I wonder if she sees that as she chokes on the apple and
thinks, “Aw shoot. I should have looked more carefully.”
As she rides back to the palace, she
encounters the Stooges, and thanks to an inadvertent wish they make on a magic
sword (stolen from Count Oga), she crashes her broom into a mountainside and
falls to her death. The Stooges then find the poisoned Snow White, but they do
not bury her. Instead, they place her on a bed, and pray to her each day.
Meanwhile, the Prince (Quatro) has not
died from his fall. Instead, he is saved by a group of men who want to revolt
against the Evil Queen's rule over Fortunia. As the prince recovers, he
realizes that his memory has returned, and so he knows that he is indeed a
Prince, and that Snow White is the princess he was destined to marry. Note:
Here is where he becomes really boring and gives up being rugged and his
love for puppetry and looks a bit like Christopher Reeve.
After leading a successful revolt which
places him on the throne of Fortunia, the prince sends out searchers to find
Snow White and the Stooges, unaware that, thanks to yet another inadvertent wish
on Count Oga's sword, they are no longer in the country of Fortunia. All
searches are fruitless, and Prince Charming is close to giving up hope when he
learns of the Evil Queen's magic mirror. The mirror responds truthfully to the
desperate Prince's pleas, and the Prince sets off on his journey. He arrives at
the Stooges' cabin just in time to dispel the effects of the poisoned apple.
Snow White and Prince Charming are married and live happily ever after.
Note: Basically he lifts her up and she gives a gentle cough
like *ahem* and supposedly dispels the apple but she never spits it out so
where did it go? I have always wanted to see Snow White sit up and do a cough
with a bit of sick in it and have it run down her chin and onto her clothes
because that would be more realistic.
If you would like you can watch it here:
That’s all for this week. Stay tuned next week for
Snow White starring Diana Rigg as the evil Queen.
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