Snow White and the Three Stooges

This time the Three Stooges rather kept their usual grimacing, capering and horsing around on the leash, and maybe that’s the problem. This film is pretty much a disaster with clumsy directing, a complete lack of humor, extraordinarily banal dialogue and a number of awkward and boring passages. The story is based on the classic fairy tale Snow White, but with the difference that instead of the seven dwarves, the cottage is occupied by the aforementioned trio of comedians (the cottage actually belongs to the seven dwarves, but it just so happens that they aren’t at home). And the prince, who has been raised by the three dolts since that time they saved his life, suffers from memory loss, so he isn’t aware that he was promised to Snow White as a young boy. The film is also partly a musical, so there is occasional singing and even ice skating (Olympic figure-skating champion Carol Heiss was cast in the role of Snow White). However, these scenes rarely push the plot forward and are often boring. The runtime exceeding one hundred minutes is inexcusable, mainly because nothing at all happens in most of the film. At the same time, the film works in a completely irrational and random way with unspecified spells and magical props (e.g. a magical sword that grants wishes), which don’t do much to serve the story and, in the case of many of them, it is impossible to understand how they are supposed to work. This film is neither entertaining nor exciting, and you would search in vain for something resembling acting. In particular, the performance of the brutally overacting evil queen is unbearable and, what’s more, her complicated witchcraft makes no sense. When Snow White is supposed to wake up from her deathly sleep, you wait in vain the whole time for her to spit out the piece of apple that she had eaten; the film is packed with such lapses and for the most part, there’s really no humorous intent. This is one of the worst adaptations of Snow White ever. EDIT: I found an even worse adaptation of Snow White and the Seven Dwarves, namely the Czechoslovak version from 1933. (19.02.2021)