"Commotion on the Ocean" is the last Three Stooges short with Shemp Howard as part of the team. Actually, Shemp wasn't even there at the time of shooting; he had suddenly passed away of a heart attack at age sixty, and Moe Howard & Larry Fine were forced to continue the act without him. But before they picked up Joe Besser, Moe and Larry made four more Stooge comedies with ample stock footage of Shemp from previous shorts, mixed in with new footage featuring (mostly) Moe & Larry and (briefly) Joe Palma doubling for Shemp. In the case of "Commotion on the Ocean," most of the stock footage is from "Dunked in the Deep" (1949), with the opening scene in the newspaper editor's office lifting stock footage from "Crime on Their Hands" (1948). The fact that there even WAS a double for Shemp is hidden quite well in this remake; Joe Palma is not even recognizable in the new footage of the newspaper editor's office.
Taken as a whole, "Commotion on the Ocean" is not a bad Stooge comedy, with the only major fault being the weakness of the closing fight scene between the Stooges and foreign governmental spy Bortch (Gene Roth); the stock footage from "Dunked in the Deep" is chopped up quite heavily during this scene, so the finale becomes much less interesting to watch. But here are two of my favorite scenes in this remake. In one of the new segments on the ship, while Shemp is conspicuously absent, Moe, Larry, and Bortch cough up sawdust while eating a wooden fish by mistake. And in the stock footage of the newspaper editor's office, Moe grabs two bookends and presses Shemp's ears with them; Shemp then tells Moe to "stop the presses."
Indeed, Shemp's sudden death was a tragedy, and Moe & Larry were real troupers for continuing with the act. It would never again be the same as before, but fortunately Joe Besser, and later Curly-Joe DeRita, would add their own flavor to the upcoming Three Stooges films.
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