I was still too young to see this on its first release, I saw it maybe two years afterwards, and haven't seen even a snippet again until tonight, when I sat through a DVD I bought for cheap on eBay, as did Metaldams, I think, a purchase I did my best to shame him into, as can be read on some earlier posts.
Undeniably, this is a slog. One gets the idea that someone at Fox had the idea for a Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs extravaganza, and then some hip young genius said, No, that's corny, let's update it, the Three Stooges are hot at the moment, how about Snow White and The Three Stooges !!!
It might have been better if someone at 20th was familiar at all with the Three Stooges. They brought in Elwood Ullman as a writer, but they needed a stooge director, someone to give them some schtick, because that's what's really lacking here is schtick. At one point, the three of them actually walk through a door that's too short and too narrow for them, and they DON'T get stuck, they DON'T bump heads, they actually just WALK THROUGH THE FUCKING DOOR ! That's just one of a dozen opportunities that just scream for Stooge Slapstick 101 and are completely missed. One gets the feeling that the director or whatever other powers-that-were said, No thanks, boys, that's too slapsticky for our movie, completely forgetting what the title of their movie was. Actually denying them the moves that you can see coming a mile away, and then just don't happen.
The photography and color are indeed beautiful, and of all things, it's in CinemaScope, which it certainly wasn't when I saw it at a kiddie matinee in New Bedford, Massachusetts in 1962. My cheapo eBay DVD is lovely. Edson Stroll, whom I knew only as one of the crew extras on the old TV show McHale's Navy, was not bad at all as Prince Charming. Carol Heiss skated nicely, cried quite credibly, and aimed for Judy Garland-as-Dorothy Gale the rest of the way, to less success. There are quite a few Wizard of Oz references - all right, steals - here, in fact, the most blatant being Patricia Medina as the Wicked Queen/Wicked Witch. She is as hammy as the Smithfield factory. She's awful.
I'm beating a dead horse here. This was a dog when it came out, bombed at the box office, it's a dog now. I told Metaldams when he was reluctant to review this that he didn't have to do it sober. Well, after the first fifteen minutes, neither did I.