Here's why the climax sucks:
1.) There's no humor in the Moe/Shemp fight. After Shemp's big warm-up, footwork, trash-talk, shadow boxing, etc, it would be humorous if Moe took him out with something simple, with a dinky little eye-poke or maybe a toe stomp. What we get is a nasty, closed-fist punch in the mouth. Anybody laugh at this? Watch Moe's expression during Shemp's warm up: it's mean and pinched and not comic at all. This strikes me as witty as a car wreck, and has Jules White's neanderthal sense of humor written all over it.
2. ) The bellows in the mouth is not only disgusting and reminiscent to today's audience of oral rape ( and I call bullshit on anyone who would say that back in 1952 that idea wouldn't have occurred to anyone: I saw this first in 1962 at age nine and that's exactly what I thought of, if not in clinical terms, then certainly to the extent where I said to myself That's not funny at all, that's torture ) and, try as they might ( and they're trying hard ) even the stooges can't save the writers and make this bit funny. I dare anyone to tell me you laugh watching Larry take the bellows in the mouth.
3. ) What exactly is it that exhausts Larry about wailing on Moe with the fireplace shovel? Moe isn't retaliating at all, and Larry is getting groggy from, what? Lifting his arms? Bullshit. Here's an improvement to the bit that I came up with after maybe, oh, eight seconds of thought: maybe the shovel could have ricocheted off Moe's head and fetched a whomp on Larry's, if not every time, then maybe every second or third time. Or, with ten seconds of thought, I'm suggesting maybe Moe in his daze might have either accidentally or on purpose nailed Larry occasionally with some kind of head shot.
4. ) Best yet, Shemp sneaks up behind Larry and wails on him with a different fireplace tool, then, when Moe and Larry are down for the count, the babe grabs Shemp's tool and nails him. She gets away and the stooges are down for the count. This took all of thirty seconds of thought on my part to invent a funny climax with no idiotic, nightmarish action, which suggests to me that the writers took less time than that.
As I have mentioned before, I am of the generation which was in time for the first Stooge Renaissance ( 1959 -1960 ), and, luckily enough, watched for a few years the very best of the Curlys and Shemps ( ie, maybe the first 125 ) before everything else got released, that is to say the post 1949 stuff. As a child comfortable with the best of the best, when they dumped the post-1949 stuff on us, some of it, like this one, was genuinely nightmarish. ( I've spoken with an older friend of mine who saw some of this era's films in a real theater and said they struck the live audience as not so much funny as grotesque). That's how the second half of this strikes me. Non-human ( not inhuman or inhumane, but non-human, ie not how humans on this planet act ). Nightmarish. I blame Jules White: it is my theory that he over time ruined the Three Stooges ( Corny Casanovas being a prime example ) mainly because he did not have an American sense of humor, ( ie he seems to have felt that if a hotfoot was funny then a leg amputation was hilarious ) and his dictatorial direction made the stooges act less and less human.
Forgive me this rant, I have been waiting for fifty years ( no kidding ) to tell somebody - anybody - why I loathe this short. And I may not be done yet. I get it, of course, about budget cutbacks, yeah yeah yeah, but everything wrong with this short is Jules White and his sadistic sense of humor. And yes, the first half is O K.
