"A Missed Fortune" is a fairly good Three Stooges short directed by Jules White and starring Shemp Howard, Larry Fine, & Moe Howard. This short is a remake, with a few little bits of stock footage, of an earlier Stooge short entitled "Healthy, Wealthy and Dumb" (1938), which featured Curly Howard as the third Stooge. In this remake, Shemp wins $50,000 from a radio jackpot program, so the Stooges decide to live it up at the Hotel Costa Plente, all the while having no idea of the trouble that awaits them!
Highlights: Moe uses glue instead of syrup on his pancakes. Shemp drinks champagne until it literally comes out of his ears. Shemp's luxurious "bunk bed" collapses down onto Moe. Upon receiving the letter stating that Shemp's prize money has been significantly reduced by taxes, Shemp and Larry demonstrate some amusing ways of passing out. The boys arm themselves with loaded champagne buckets in order to take care of the hotel manager (Vernon Dent), but just as they open the door and let the champagne fly, they accidentally douse three pretty gold diggers who reside next door.
"A Missed Fortune" is a satisfactory Three Stooges short, but, as was characteristic of many of the 1950s Stooge shorts directed by Jules White, the film suffers from too much forced slapstick that is quite unnecessary. On a personal note, if my memory serves me correctly, "A Missed Fortune" was the very first Three Stooges short I ever saw as a kid; my father, who was a Stooge fan at that time, directed my attention to the television screen just as Shemp's "bunk bed" was about to collapse on top of Moe!
