Four Fabulous Foils
(Click on the image to zoom in.)
Everyone knows about the Three Stooges - Larry, Moe, Curly, Shemp, Joe, and Curly Joe.1 They were the most successful and popular comedy team of the Twentieth Century - and arguably of all time.
In the films2 the basic plot was the Little Guys on the Outside versus the Big Guys (and Big Gals) on the Inside.3 So every film had to have not just the Stooges, but also some Bigs Guys and Big Gals to act as their foils.
Footnote
It's not often appreciated that the original Stooges were Larry, Moe, and Shemp. Yes, Larry, Moe, and Shemp. The trio started off in vaudeville in the 1920's, and in 1930 together with actor and comedian Ted Healy they appeared in the movie Soup to Nuts. Billed as "Ted Healy and his Stooges", they were in fifteen more movies, usually short subjects, that is, films lasting between 15 and 30 minutes. However, Shemp left a couple of years after Soup to Nuts was released to pursue an independent and successful motion picture career. So Moe's brother, Jerome - who later adopted the "Stooge" name of Curly - joined the act and was in most of the films with Ted.
Footnote
The social "bigness" and "littleness" of the character was reinforced by the physical differences in the Stooges and their foils. Moe and Larry's height were both 5'4". Curly was 5'5" and Shemp 5'6". Joe Besser was maybe half an inch taller than Shemp while Joe DeRita was the same height as Curly, 5'5".
Sources vary somewhat as to what was the "average" height was during the Stooge's heyday. But for someone in the United States born in 1895 - as was Shemp - 5'6" was about average. From photographic comparison, then, the "foils" appear to be well above average height with some being close to 6'.
From the years 1958 until 1964, there were six full length feature films starring the Stooges. This was in their last incarnation of Moe, Larry, and "Curly Joe" DeRita.4 However, in this discussion of the Stooges' Adversaries, we mostly are considering the early "shorts", particularly those that were filmed from 1934 to 1947 and which featured Moe, Larry, and Curly.
Footnote
The Stooges kept performing throughout the sixties but in 1970 Larry suffered a major stroke and could no longer perform. At first there were plans to have Emil Sitka, who had appeared in nearly 40 Stooges films, take Larry's place together with the long frizzled hairstyle. However, no later productions were filmed and once Moe died in 1975, The Three Stooges as an act came to an end.
As far as the Four Foils pictured above, moving from the left we first see the foil of longest duration. That was Vernon Dent. A veteran of vaudeville and silent movies, Vernon first appeared in Half Shot Shooters in 1936 and was in nearly a hundred of the more than 180 Stooges "shorts". Throughout his tenure he often appeared as figures of authority: policemen, judges, prison wardens, and even as an Egyptian Pharaoh named Rootentooten.5 Vernon's last appearance with the Stooges - and his last film - was as the judge in Guns A-Poppin' in 1957 with Moe, Larry, and Joe Besser. This was a reprise of Vernon's role in Idiots Deluxe from 1945.
Footnote
Obviously the name was a play on the name of the most famous of pharaohs, Tutankhamun. Although in 1945 the "Egyptomania" that had swept the world in 1922 after the discovery of the tomb had largely subsided, no explanation was needed about who Rootentooten was supposed to be.
There are variants in the spelling of "Rootentooten" in the articles about the Stooges. Sometimes it's "Rootin' Tootin'" or even "Rutentuten." Only a reading of the original script can really provide a definitive clarification.
Ironically, the actually Ancient Egyptian spelling is much less ambiguous than the English. In hieroglyphic characters the name is 
.
In 1947 Vernon played the part of a professor in Half-Wits Holiday. Here Vernon bets a colleague that he can take anyone, no matter how lowly born and uncouth in behavior, and turn them into gentlemen. This was to prove that environment, not heredity, is the primary factor in how a person develops. Naturally he ends up with Moe, Larry, and Curly on his hands and looses the bet.
Half Wits Holiday was a remake and had essentially the same plot as Hoi Polloi from 1935. The principle difference between the two versions is that in Hoi Polloi Curly appears throughout the film while in Half Wits Holiday, Curly is missing from the last few scenes. Only Larry and Moe take part in the inevitable pie fight that follows.
What had happened was that after shooting a scene that appeared at about 14 minutes into the film, Curly sat down to wait for the next shot and suffered a stroke. Moe found him in the chair unable to rise or speak. Curly was taken home and except for a brief cameo as a non-Stooge in Hold that Lion with Moe, Larry, and Shemp (and where Curly has a full head of hair), he never appeared in another film.
Probably ranking #2 in the list of foils just behind Vernon was Bud Jamison. Like Vernon, Bud was a veteran of vaudeville and silent movies, and was in the first film where the Stooges appeared as an independent act. That was in Woman Haters where the dialog was all in rhyme.
Bud next appeared in Men in Black where the Stooges play a trio of bumbling doctors and was the only Stooges film ever nominated for an Oscar. Bud was also prominently featured in the classic Disorder in the Court as well as in other favorites like Hoi Polloi, We Want Our Mummy, A Plumbing We Will Go, I'll Never Heil Again, and Crash Goes the Hash. Although Bud was one of the most recognizable of the Stooges' adversaries and he appeared in over 40 of the films, he was rarely credited in the cast list, one exception being Three Little Beers in 1935.6
Footnote
The truth is apart from the Stooges themselves, few of the actors got credits. On the title card the Stooges got first name identification and occasionally one or two of of the co-stars. The producer, directors, and writers would also usually get named, but not the extra actors.
Woman Haters is not only the first film to feature the Stooges without Ted Healy, it was also the only film where they played characters with fictional names. Moe was Tom, Larry was Jim, and Curly was Jack. In Women Haters the plot centers around Larry which was rare in the later films.
Woman Haters was also the Stooges film where we first see the infamous "eye poke". And the one who delivers it to all Three Stooges was - Bud Jamison!
Vernon and Bud played a variety of characters. Sometimes they were good guys who simply suffered the dealings with the Stooges and sometimes they played bad guys with whom the Stooges usually ended up having the upper hand. But the third character in our list, Dick Curtis and who appeared in over a dozen episodes, was almost always a bad guy. Tall with mustachioed and craggy features, he could hardly have played anyone else. Probably his best films were in 1939 where he appeared in Yes, We Have No Bonanzas and We Want Our Mummy.
The Fourth Foil pictured above was one of the most famous celebrities of the 20th Century and yet even today almost no one recognizes her in her sole appearance with the Stooges. That was in Three Little Pigskins which was produced in 1934 and which remains a favorite.
Strictly speaking she wasn't really a "foil" in the adversarial sense. Instead she played the girlfriend of one of the owners of a professional football team who through misinformation and misunderstanding took the Stooges to be top notch ball players. Of course, Larry, Moe, and Curly are fiascos as much on the field as off.
The reason even her fans rarely pick her out is that she was only 23 at the time, and when she became a household name she was in her forties. Yes, people do change appearance over the course of 20 years.
But most of all she had yet to adopt her trademark hair color which even in the black and white films could easily be differentiated from her platinum blonde coiffure in Three Little Pigskins. And of course she wouldn't meet Desi for another five years.
References and Further Reading
Moe Howard and the 3 Stooges: The Pictorial Biography of the Wildest Trio in the History of American Entertainment, Moe Howard, Citadel Press, 1977.
Curly: An Illustrated Biography of the Superstooge, Joan Howard Maurer, Citadel Press, 1988.
Larry: The Stooge in the Middle, Morris Feinberg, Last Gasp of San Francisco, 1984.
Lucille Ball, Nicholas Yapp, Sterling Publishing, 2010.
Stooges Fandom.
"Vernon Dent", Internet Movie Data Base.
"Bud Jamison", Internet Movie Data Base.
"Dick Curtis", Internet Movie Data Base.
"Lucille Ball", Internet Movie Data Base.
World Atlas