Blazing Stewardesses (1975)

Sometimes in life we think about the "What could have been" with a sense of longing and and a far off look in our eyes.

And sometimes we're simply just better off than "What could have been".

In the case of a sex comedy starring the surviving Three Stooges, I think the world dodged a bullet.

Watch the trailer from the film above and you might be inclined to agree with me.
I had mentioned this in passing a couple times on this blog but after Larry Fine's death in 1975 Moe Howard had decided that he was not quite ready to retire the act and hired longtime Stooge foil Emil Sitka to fill the "Middle Stooge" role the same way Joe Besser and later Curly Joe were to fill the "Third Stooge" void of Curly and Shemp earlier on.

Not that either of the "Joe's" were great replacements to begin with and the Stooges probably should have packed up their Nyuck's and called it a career after Shemp died of a heart attack...
...however I digress because the point is moot. The act continued after either Curly or Shemp's untimely deaths and it looked as though it was going to continue further after Larry's death. And I'm not sure if this was Moe's idea or not but one of the vehicles they thought might be a great idea for a Three Stooges film was a sex comedy.
A sex comedy, in my opinion, are usually movies like Frankenstein General Hospital, Stewardess School or The Underground Comedy Movie is thinly veiled soft-core porn that is rarely ever funny. Not to mention the attempt at humor in the film are usually just obnoxious.

Most of the time, if you have a friend who is a completely jerk, this is the film they'll bring over and make you watch. Which then makes you wonder why you remain friends with this person.

Never heard of Frankenstein General Hospital? There's a good reason for that.

X-Rated comedies, much like X-Rated cartoons, are the appendix of the film world. They don't really have much of a function and they can be removed as far as I am concerned.

I say this yet one of my favorite Peter O'Toole films The Ruling Class had an X-Rating. So did the John Neville Sherlock Holmes film A Study in Terror. However, unlike the movies I just mentioned, both films had substance to them and the sex that did appear was very minimal. In the case of the Sherlock Holmes film, it was nonexistent.

And this would have been the fate of the Three Stooges. Their final films in the 1960's with Curly Joe were bad enough. But think how awful it would have been to see a 77 year old Moe Howard whose sight gag would probably consist of him running face first into a woman's cleavage? Or accidentally ripping a woman's panties off. Or perhaps the Stooges walking into a room where a couple is having sex.

With Moe's passing shortly after Larry Fine's the world was spared and this turkey was handed over to the two surviving Ritz Brothers.
As seen above the Ritz Brothers looking like they're appearing in a commercial for Preparation H. Did I mention my late Grandfather hated the Ritz Brothers?

Although, Curly Joe DeRita continued to perform live into the mid-1970s with Mousie Garner and Frank Mitchell as "The New 3 Stooges" this line-up would never make a movie and would ultimately retire in 1979.

Even though the original line-up would die with Moe Howard, I feel as though the Stooges in their purest form would die with Curly and Shemp.
All in all, let's count our lucky stars that The Three Stooges swan song wasn't Blazing Stewardesses.