A Ducking They Did Go

Watching a Three Stooges' film today gives a great insight to the historic times these short movies were made. Recovering from the 1937 recession, the country was still reeling from jobs losses when April 1939's "A Ducking They Did Go" was released.

The Stooges' 38th film in the series opens with the three experiencing extreme hunger from not finding employment when they spot a truck full of watermelons. In their attempt to steal one, they are pursued by a police officer (William Irving) before they escape into an office of two shady businessmen who hire them to sell memberships to a duck hunting club. They end up signing the city's police chief, his officers and the mayor to the club, resulting in a hilarious duck hunt where the Stooges have to catapult flying decoys to fool the members of the foray.

At this juncture of the series, Curly Howard dominates in several memorable scenes, with director Del Lord and his writers including an elongated sequence of him, who 'pied pipered' a flock of ducks into a pond for the hunters to shoot. Curly's own battle with a rogue duck, whose expertise is spraying water out of his beak, is priceless. Columbia Pictures spent an inordinate amount of money (for a Three Stooges film) by constructing an artificial pond inside one of its sound stages as well as hiring more than a dozen people to populate its cast. Not knowing how to conclude "A Ducking They Did Go," producer Jules White went back into the studio vault and dug up the ending clip from the Stooges' 1936 "A Pain in the Pullman" to show the three, running from the hunters' wrath, jump over a hedge onto wild horses, galloping away.