Three Dark Horses

The Stooges are janitors-turned-delegates after being recruited to support bad news political candidate Hammond Egger. Egger's corrupt campaign manager Bill Wick (Kenneth MacDonald) and his assistant Jim Digger (Ben Welden) are desperate after the original three delegates departed the campaign after realizing Egger was rotten. Upon finding the bumbling Stooges, who nearly destroy Digger's toupee after vacuuming it from his head, Wick is enthralled. He hires the Stooges outright, and lays out their responsibilities as delegates. They gladly accept and start caucusing.

It does not take long for the Stooges to realize that Egger is a crook, and throw their votes to opposing candidate Abel Lamb Stewer. When Wick finds out that his new boys have double-crossed him, he comes looking for revenge, with the trio defeating Wick and Digger in a wild fight with the boys winning by capsizing them in the bathtub.

Though he never appears in the film, a photo of candidate Hammond Egger appears several times in Three Dark Horses. The photo is actually of supporting actor Bud Jamison, who died suddenly in 1944. The inclusion of his photo in the film was done as tribute to the late actor, whose talents were missed during the post-Curly Howard era. This is the sixteenth and final Stooge short with the word "three" in the title.[1] Hammond Egger is a pun on "ham and egger," a slang term for someone working a menial job, the inference being that ham and eggs (a relatively cheap dish) would be the only substantial thing he could afford to eat.

Three Dark Horses was filmed on August 26–28, 1952 and released October 16, 19 days before the actual 1952 United States presidential election between Republican Dwight D. Eisenhower and Democrat Adlai Stevenson II.[1]

• Three Dark Horses at IMDb
• Three Dark Horses at AllMovie
• Three Dark Horses at threestooges.net