Great Endings Series: The Three Stooges “Boobs in Arms”
This article will be the first in a new regular series looking at memorable endings in film, and I’m kicking it off with one of my very favorites.
title card for Boobs in Arms (1940)
The famous and beloved 16-minute Three Stooges film shorts from the classic era spanning from 1934 to about 1947, before the health complications of Jerome Lester Howard (a.k.a. Curly) rendered him unable to perform, typically never ended on grand or poignant notes. During this period, the most fertile in the history of the comic trio whose legacy completes the definition of the word slapstick, 97 film shorts were produced. The trio had outgrown their roles as sidekicks to comedian Ted Healy and signed a contract with Columbia Pictures that would lead them to international fame and recognition. Of these 97 shorts, 1940’s Boobs in Arms stands out for its sublime take on the lunacy of war and of life.
We all march to our own beat.
What’s amazing about this short is the way the trio progress from the lowest lot in life to a kind of lunatic’s ascension to Heaven. They begin as door-to-door greeting card salesmen who run afoul of a belligerent, jealous husband (Richard Fiske) and wind up hiding in what appears to be a breadline. But it turns out it’s a line for enlistment in the army and their drill instructor turns out to be the jealous husband they assaulted and humiliated. Their basic training scenes find them again driving him insane with their innocent, sweet-natured stupidity.
A good name for this famous still would be, “Nyah-ah-ah!”
There’s a beautifully funny moment in this sequence that works as a perfect example of the level of sophistication often overlooked in The Three Stooges brand of humor. It’s conveyed only with simple physicality and requires no spoken dialogue. The sergeant orders the marching company to turn 180 degrees around. Then he runs past them to lead them in the other direction, correcting himself to be in time with their steps with a brief skipping of his legs. The Stooges, who’ve gone from being at the back of the marching company to the front, imitate his skip. Then the soldiers behind them imitate them and so on until the entire company is skipping down the road like schoolchildren. The sergeant turns to watch his troops march past and the look on his face as he performs a textbook Three Stooges double-take is priceless.
Cut to the battlefield where The Stooges, of course totally unprepared for combat, are ordered to fire a laughing gas bomb from a heavy gun mount at the enemy. Through some more buffoonery, the cannon’s barrel points skyward and the bomb travels straight up into the air and lands on The Stooges, who are rendered helpless with laughter. They’re surrounded and then captured by enemy forces. As they laugh in the faces of the men marching them off the battlefield at gunpoint and presumably into imprisonment or execution, they begin to skip.
The short continues with this appraisal of war as a silly kids game. What happens next is inspired. The Stooges are brought into a command room with officers who want information but are met with more laughter. They’re then assaulted by The Stooges with a series of head bonks, eye pokes and belly bumps. One officer falls so that his butt lands right on his pointed helmet. It’s as if their inability to stop laughing all the while has made them invincible. They don’t fear their enemy, so he has no power over them. They manage to throw a slapstick beating to every officer in the room. In this light, combat and the violence of war carried out by men in uniform look like inflated formalizations of this crude slapstick. Brilliant.
Then there’s a kind of liftoff, metaphorically and literally.
Heavy fire rains on the building and The Stooges realize it’s coming from their side. “Our own army is shooting at us!” shouts Moe in a fit of laughter. “We’ll be killed!” shouts Larry, helpless against his own laughing. A shell is then fired from a heavy gun that travels underneath the legs of all three men and carries them along with it. But it doesn't matter. By now, they’re in a state of Grace.
The last shot, achieved with awkward miniatures, finds them riding the huge bullet up into the clouds, laughing all the way up to the heavens, as if in derision of the utter lunacy of human existence. It’s a sublime touch, every bit on par with the most inspired ideas of Charlie Chaplin in combining what was then a radical social commentary with empathetic humanity, physical slapstick and satire born from the noblest aspects of Jewish fatalism - a proven motherload of comedy.
I’m almost positive this closing shot inspired the iconic closing image of Slim Pickins riding the A-Bomb down to oblivion in Dr. Strangelove. The only dignified way to go from life in this backward world of ours to the next world - according to The Stooges - is to go out laughing, if only to keep from feeling the pain. Higher and higher, we climb towards the afterlife, each muscle and rib tickling at the idea that life can be any more than one big cosmic put-on. Trying to express the feeling of this moment here in writing makes it sound totally off the rails. But this ending, saying something far wiser and deeper than the usual resolutions to typical Stooges plots concerning get rich quick scams or evading police, is one of the most poignant ideas the trio would ever articulate in their work.
A trip to the next world, seated on a ballistic hunk of death, meeting God in style alongside one’s buddies for life, laughing at the sheer absurdity of it all. What a wild joke our time on Earth really is. This group of blue-collar vaudevillian backup players from Brooklyn, who fell down and slapped each other in the face on camera for a living, sauntered up and taught us that comedy is a shield against the dying of our light, presenting us with perhaps the only truly sensible way to appraise human folly and the passing of life.
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