Boobs In Arms is the 52nd short subject starring American slapstick comedy team The Three Stooges. The trio made a total of 190 shorts for Columbia Pictures between 1934 and 1959.
THE PLOT
The Stooges are street peddler greeting card salesmen who anger a man on the street after an accidental altercation. They are then approached by a woman (Evelyn Young) with a request to help her make her evil man-hating husband (Richard Fiske) jealous. Realizing it the same man they faced before, the Stooges defend themselves against the irate husband with their usual combatives and flee from the husband shouting his threats. In hiding from him, they line up on a queue that takes them to a recruitment office by mistake and end up joining the army.
No sooner are they getting acclimated with their new army surrounding when they meeting their Drill instructor-sergeant: Hugh Dare, the irate husband/man on the street. Sgt. Dare desperately attempts to teach the Stooges the standard military drill from the manual of arms. He then threatens them during bayonet practice.
The Stooges are sent to the front line, where they decide to take a long nap. After learning that Sgt. Dare has been captured by the enemy, they are instructed to detonate a laughing gas shell. After putting the laughing gas bomb in, Curly and Moe use a swab to push the shell further in the cannon, but ends up getting the end of the swab stuck from the inside. As they successfully get it out, Moe falls in a puddle of mud, which Curly states to him about going swimming; this angers Moe as he kicks Curly into the cannon where his head becomes lodged. As Larry and Moe get Curly's head out of the cannon, it points to where Curly is and they point the cannon upward. Naturally the shell goes up and then down which manages to explode on them.
Laughing hysterically, the Stooges are brought to enemy headquarters where Sgt. Dare is being detained. The enemy communicate in pig latin. Hopped up by the gas, the Stooges gleefully use their violence in a wild free for all fight against their captors, including an accidental sword thrust to the rear of the sergeant and his retaliatory punch to the enemy captain that makes him fall on the pointed end of his picklehaube helmet. The Stooges knock out everyone, including all the enemy soldiers and Sgt. Dare. After emerging victorious, several guns fire at them, with shells whizzing past, the Stooges always ducking in laughter or leaning back giggling, each time missing another shell. Finally, the last shell passes between their legs and takes them into the clouds.
TRIVIA
Filmed on August 15–20, 1940, the title is a parody of the 1939 MGM film Babes In Arms based on the Rodgers and Hart musical. The working title was All This and Bullets Too, a parody in itself of the title of the Warner Bros. film All This And Heaven Too.
Joe Besser had his own version of the army drill routine, which was used on stage for the first time in April 1941 and titled "You're in the Army Now". Jules White adapted the routine for Boobs in Arms, and would reuse the footage for the ending of Dizzy Pilots in 1943. The skit was revised with Joe Besser and his straight man Jimmy Little who first joined Joe in October 1940 in the Olsen and Johnson production of Sons of Fun (October 1941 until January 1944). White later filmed Besser's performing his army drill version of the routine in 1952 Columbia short, Aim, Fire, Scoot, and its 1956 remake, Army Daze.
Laurel and Hardy played greeting card salesmen who try to make a married woman's husband jealous in 1935's The Fixer Uppers
The closing gag of a person riding a bombshell through the air would be re-created by Slim Pickens in 1964's Dr. Strangelove or: How I learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb.
Curly's print ad for "O'Brien's Kosher Restaurant" has "dessert" intentionally misspelled as "desert".