Three Little Pigskins

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.

Three Little Pigskins (1934)

*** (out of 4)

Gangster mistake the Three Stooges for professional athletes and get them involved in a football game with big cash on the line. Here's one of the better shorts from the series with non-stop gags, although most of the gags come from the first half of the film and not the second half that deals with the game. The various misadventures inside the girl's apartment are terrific and especially they escape down the shoot.

Now available on Columbia's 2-disc collection, which features over 20 shorts.

Harry Cohn was known to use The Three Stooges shorts as opportunities to try out young players in supporting roles. But in his wildest imagination I'm sure he never thought that in casting this short, Lucille Ball would grow up to be a comic icon, every bit as much as the stars of this film.

Of course Lucy who is a Jean Harlow platinum blond in this film does not get to display too much comic talent except as a foil for the Stooges. She's the moll of some gangsters who want to hire some football players from college on the sly so the kids don't lose amateur status. The idea is that they'll be ringers. Instead it's the gangsters who get good and rung when they hire Moe, Larry, and Curly.

College films were so popular in the Thirties, showing upper class kids who did very little study, but always had time for music, girls and the inevitable big football game. This particular short is right in keeping with Horsefeathers, College Humor and so many more I can't count. They all were pretty much the same and Three Little Pigskins doesn't break any new ground.

Still what Moe, Larry, and especially Curly do to the game of football is not to be believed. Knute Rockne must have been turning over in his grave, doubled up with laughter of course.

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.

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.