Three Little Pigskins (1934)

Brilliant and touching

The best films of this genre always show a path and provide a takeaway for being a better person.

It's a good bad... and worth a popcorn matinée. While it's easy to lament what could have been...

It's funny, it's tense, it features two great performances from two actors and the director expertly creates a web of odd tension where you actually don't know what is happening for the majority of the run time.

What I'm now reviewing here is the fourth Three Stooges short made for Columbia Pictures in which Moe, Larry, and Curley (as it was originally spelled at the time) get mistaken for actual football players and get asked to play in a game. This is the first time the boys get involved in a "mistaken identity" plot and boy, whoever makes that blunder usually regrets it soon enough! Incidentally, additional interest for this short is provided by the fact that this is one of the earliest film appearances of one young woman named Lucille Ball. She, and a couple of other young ladies, seemed game in participating in some of the shenanigans with the boys which makes what they do to them a little fun to watch. My favorite scenes, though, involve seltzer water, a dumbwaiter (basically a hand-held elevator), and many of the dumb football plays involving the boys. Not as hilarious as the first three they did but Three Little Pigskins is funny enough to recommend to any Stooge fan that just can't get enough of Howard, Fine, and Howard.

"Three Little Pigskins" is a very good Three Stooges comedy that deals with football follies. Curly, Larry, and Moe are hobos mistaken for the Three Horsemen, a trio of crackerjack football players from Boulder Dam College. In terms of the plot, need I say more? Obviously the major highlight from "Three Little Pigskins" is the much-too-brief football sequence at the end, which features several hilarious mishaps. Other highlights: Curly breaks a dumbwaiter apart, causing his two partners, as well as mob leader Joe Stacks (Walter Long), to fall down the shaft in succession. This short marks the first occurrence of Larry laughing at another Stooge for getting creamed and then receiving the same kind of punishment; in this case, it happens during the way-too-long seltzer bottle scene. AND when the Stooges' seltzer bottle antics have gone too far, they are briefly scolded for horsing around while there are ladies present, so they shift gears and squirt the ladies! (Incidentally, one of the ladies is a very young Lucille Ball, believe it or not.) "Three Little Pigskins" is one of the earliest Three Stooges shorts at Columbia Pictures, so the boys still had the advantage of youth during the strenuous football sequence. Moe once referred to this film as "a humdinger of bangs and bruises"; specifically, this meant a broken leg for Curly, a knocked-out tooth for Larry, and a series of broken limbs for the Stooges' stunt doubles on the football field!

The big professional football game between the Cubs and the Tigers is coming up on the weekend and the Tigers' owner is just informed that his three best backs got plastered and rolled over in their car. Now he has to go out and find three players, fast. He's told about some great amateur backs - The Three Horsemen - at Boulder Dam College.Meanwhile, in the college town our boys are on the street panhandling and getting socked in the jaws for their efforts. However, they do get a job holding signs promoting the big college football in town, and they are dressed in football gear.You guessed it. The boys are mistaken for the Three Horsemen - by the men's girlfriends, no less - and are taken back up to their apartment. One of the girls, by the way, is Lucille Ball, but you wouldn't recognize her.The scenes in the apartment are far better than the football game which is only shown in the last three minutes and aren't much. Overall, okay but a little too dumb and not as good as expected out of the guys. However, it was still early (1934) in their careers and they were learning. It was interesting to find out how many people got injured filming this short.

This is a Three Stooges short comedy that starts and ends a little slowly, but in between there are some hilarious moments. It starts when the three are pan-handling on a college campus, and get mistaken for the school's three star football players. They are then hired by a group of gangsters to play for a professional team, with predictable results. The funniest parts are in the middle of the film, when the Stooges are in the apartment where the gangsters and their girls (which include a very young Lucille Ball) hang out. "Three Little Pigskins" may not be one of the Stooges' best, but it's still pretty good.