One of my favorite moments in this short occurs fairly early in it, when
Blanca Vischer, the fetching Pepita of
Cookoo Cavaliers ("My English is not so good-looking, no?"), returns as a chicly clad female passerby, who puts up such fearsome resistance to the salesmanship of the Stooges that they take to their heels. My fondness for this bit may owe to a personal association of memory. Once, my sister brought her Airedale terrier to visit the house in which, at that time, I lived with my parents. We put away our dogs, but it never occurred to us to put away the cat. This cat had grown up with the dogs and seemed to consider himself their guardian, so when a four-legged intruder appeared, no matter that it was about four times his size, the cat stalked right up to the Airedale and gave her a swat on the snout. He then
continued to approach the dog after she had sprung back! He would have chased her right off the property if we had not picked him up and taken him away. Pepita's response to the Stooges' sales pitch, when she gives Curly a punch in the face that is carried on to Moe by the movement of Curly's head, and follows it up by approaching them menacingly, reminds me of the action of that cat. The look on her face seems to me exactly the same!
Another of my favorite moments occurs on the drill field, when Sergeant Dare uses Curly's rifle to show the Stooges how to do the manual of arms, then throws the rifle back at Curly, saying (fatal words in comedy!), "Now it do it just like I did it!" Of course, when he gets to the same point in the sequence of orders, all three Stooges simultaneously throw their rifles at him—hitting him with a sound effect like a metal pipe being struck and knocking him over. Well, he did say to do it just as he did it!
The final few minutes is epic, one of the most energetic bursts of Stoogedom out there. You gotta wonder if the final shot inspired DR. STRANGELOVE's man riding nuclear bomb finale in any way.
I can imagine that such a suggestion would be dismissed with scorn by some admirers of Mr. Kubrick, who would think him superior to the influence of such low-brow stuff; but to me it seems a highly pertinent observation! It would be interesting to know if Kubrick watched the Stooges' shorts (I don't think any American growing up seeing a lot of movies when he did could have avoided them) and what he thought of them.