Pawnshop owners Moe, Larry and Curly share fatherhood duties for 10-year-old Egbert, who returns home from school one afternoon demanding to know the origins of his peculiar family structure. Moe begins a story that launches an extended flashback on how a gangster’s moll “borrowed” her sister’s infant to throw the police off her trail. This hard-boiled dame’s boyfriend runs a shakedown racket that tries to pressure the pawnbrokers into giving him “protection” money. When the pawnbrokers refuse, a fight breaks out in the store between the owners and the hoodlums. The moll flees and never returns for Egbert, who is adopted by the trio. But Egbert rejects this surrogate family and goes off to find his mother, leaving his would-be fathers to abuse each other in frustration.
“Three Loan Wolves” is arguably the weakest of the Three Stooges shorts featuring Curly. By this time, Curly’s health was visibly deteriorating following a series of mini-strokes, forcing screenwriter Felix Adler and director Jules White to make Larry the central focus of the action.
The problem with this short isn’t due to Larry, who manages to squeeze out some genuinely funny moments – especially when he opts to chase away the bad taste of a turpentine-laced drink he made by smoking a cigarette. Instead, the material is uncommonly weak and strangely bifurcated – the film would have worked if it was strictly about the Stooges dealing with the infant or dealing with the hoodlums. Combined, it never clicks.
And it doesn’t help when you realize the Stooges keep the kidnapped baby for 10 years. Yeah, it is just a Three Stooges comedy, but the gag leaves a bad taste.
As for poor Curly, he is given relatively little to do – he is conspicuously absent from the climactic fight – and his on-screen presence is haggard and lethargic. When he is on the receiving end of a Moe eye-poke or face slap, he responds with yelps of pain that sound too realistic to be funny.
Perhaps the one redeeming feature in “Three Loan Wolves” is Beverly Warren, the blonde starlet playing the hoodlum’s moll. She brought a refreshing whiff of tough glamor to the film, but sadly her acting career went nowhere after this. It’s too bad her one piece of front-and-center acting occurred in this dismal short.