Emil Sitka

The Three Stooges effectively kept a fourth man on retainer, and Sitka was him. Across hundreds of shorts, features and television appearances he played the flustered butler, the minister, the delivery man, the professional victim of whatever the trio were doing that week. When Larry Fine had a stroke in 1970, Sitka was tapped to become the new middle Stooge, a promotion that was never really cashed, which is what the word unofficial is doing in the phrase people still use about him: the last Stooge. He is also one of only two actors to have appeared on film with all six men who passed through the group.

This catalogue holds a thin slice of that, because the two-reel comedies where he did most of his work are not indexed as features. What is here is the tail end and the afterlife: The Three Stooges Meet Hercules, an uncredited bit in My Sister Eileen, television work on Waterfront and The Adventures of Spin and Marty, and then a late run for younger film-makers who grew up on him, in a couple of pictures out of Sam Raimi's circle. His most widely heard line reached its largest audience decades after he recorded it, in Pulp Fiction, where archive footage of him greeting a pair of newlyweds plays on a television set in the background.