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\u2019s moll \u201cborrowed\u201d her sister\u2019s infant to throw the police off her trail. This hard-boiled dame\u2019s boyfriend runs a shakedown racket that tries to pressure the pawnbrokers into giving him \u201cprotection\u201d 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.
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\u201cThree Loan Wolves\u201d is arguably the weakest of the Three Stooges shorts featuring Curly. By this time, Curly\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n
The problem with this short isn\u2019t due to Larry, who manages to squeeze out some genuinely funny moments \u2013 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 \u2013 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. <\/p>\n
And it doesn\u2019t 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.<\/p>\n
As for poor Curly, he is given relatively little to do \u2013 he is conspicuously absent from the climactic fight \u2013 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. <\/p>\n
Perhaps the one redeeming feature in \u201cThree Loan Wolves\u201d is Beverly Warren, the blonde starlet playing the hoodlum\u2019s moll. She brought a refreshing whiff of tough glamor to the film, but sadly her acting career went nowhere after this. It\u2019s too bad her one piece of front-and-center acting occurred in this dismal short.<\/p>\n