Louis Feinberg (1902-75) was the non-Howard Stooge: the member of the Three Stooges who positioned himself between Moe’s violence and Curly’s lunacy, and got poked in the eye a lot for his trouble.
Fine had been working in vaudeville for a few years when he first became one of Ted Healy’s stooges in 1928. When he, Moe and Curly split up with the erratic Healy, they signed with Columbia and went on to make over 200 shorts and several feature films (latterly with Shemp Howard and other performers after Curly’s death).
Fine appeared in three MGM musicals in the mid-thirties. He was by himself in Stage Mother (which also featured Healy); with Healy, Moe and Curly in Dancing Lady; and with just Moe and Curly in Hollywood Party.
Fine was central to an important, though censored, gag in Dancing Lady. Throughout the film he is seen working on a jigsaw puzzle. The excised payoff was that, after adding the final piece, he sees that it is a picture of Adolf Hitler and overturns the table in disgust. If left in, this would have been a very early (1933) anti-Nazi protest by a Jewish actor. The footage has now been restored to some prints of the picture.
