Three Men in a Tub

An OUR GANG Comedy Short.

When Darla's affections turn from Alfalfa to Waldo & his miniature yacht, it's time to fight back. Challenging the verbose twerp to a boat race, Alfalfa skippers a floating contraption of his own, crewed by Buckwheat & Porky. Are these THREE MEN IN A TUB really up to the contest?

Not a lot of laughs in this little film. Waldo's persiflage & Darla's histrionics become rather annoying. Highlight: the three-duck power engine.

This Hal Roach comedy short, Three Men in a Tub, is the one hundred sixty-fifth entry in the "Our Gang/Little Rascals" series and the seventy-seventh talkie. Alfalfa is peeved that Darla didn't show up for the gang picnic, thinking she's taking care of a younger sibling. Then he sees her actually with Waldo in his boat! So he challenges him to a boat race. Hmmm, I wonder who wins and gets Darla's hand...This marked the first time Alf had a rival for Darla's affections and it's handled quite hilariously with the requisite clichés concerning fickle women, spurned lover, and arrogant rival. Darwood Kaye really shines as Waldo with his nonchalant attitude about his superiority. So on that note, Three Men in a Tub is worth seeing. P.S. This was the first of two shorts in the series directed by one Nate Watt. He had previously directed some Hopalong Cassidy westerns.

The very nerdy and ridiculously adult Waldo is wooing Darla in his mini-boat in this episode. The gang naturally hate Waldo since he's a bookish rich kid and challenge him to a boat race--him and his fancy boat and them with their piece of trash homemade boat.

There's a lot to dislike in this episode of Our Gang. Like most of their later shorts, this one looks rushed and lacked the comedic touch of the earlier films. A few examples of the shoddy quality of this one includes the use of rather poor rear projection, the flag blowing the wrong direction on the boat (simple details like this should have been caught) and, inexplicably, bad overacting by Darla Hood. While she'd made quite a few shorts before this one, here she really hams it up later in the film. In addition, there just isn't that much comedy in this one.

THREE MEN IN A TUB is a late-era Our Gang effort which feels very much like the team are simply going through the motions, although it's not without merit in the slapstick stakes. The story sees the gang members interrupted by the arrival of a love rival, so they decide to challenge him to a boat race with outlandish consequences. It's simplistic stuff but has some nice little camera tricks to recommend it.