In the Three Stooges' October 1941's "In The Sweet Pie and Pie," their 58th in the series, the 17-minute short is divided into two different locales. Its opening sees our heroes in jail about to be hanged for a murder they didn't commit. A lawyer played by actor Richard Fiske recommends to his three female clients who stand to inherit a large fortune if they marry before midnight to get hitched to the three since they'll be dead by execution the next day. They do, but a wrench in the women's plans is when the Stooges are found innocent after the real murderers have confessed.
In a sharp turn in scenery, the now married women realize they need a quick divorce. The best way is to show to their hoity-toity friends how barbaric their new husbands are at a formal function. Once the Stooges arrive, the gathering quickly dissolves into one of cinema's wildest pie fights
"In The Sweet Pie and Pie" contains several things rarely seen in film. Usually capital executions are somber events. Here as the Stooges are led into the gallows it's celebrated as a sporting event, complete with cheering inmates as spectators and a radio "jerk-by-jerk" broadcast of the execution. The radio announcer 'Bill Stein' resembles the real-life sportscaster Bill Stern, one of media's most famous broadcasters at the time who handled the play-by-play of television's first baseball game in May 1939 and who appeared as himself in 1942's "The Pride of the Yankees."
Another scene in "In The Sweet Pie and Pie" is a previous clip of one of the Stooges' more famous sequences where actress Geneva Mitchell in 1935's "How Polloi" is teaching the Stooges how to dance. While demonstrating a dance move, she finds a bee flying into the back of her dress, causing her and her three students who were asked to follow her every move to wiggle and prance before jumping out of the window. The Stooges' training sessions lead up to the 'coming out' high society party where among the guests is a United States Senator (Vernon Dent). The gathering ends in a disaster, complete with an audacious pie-throwing confrontation. What's different here from other food fights is all the pies contain crusts, a departure from Hollywood's normal thrown pies where shaving cream is simply sprayed into pie plates. Sadly, this was the final Stooges' movie for actor Richard Fiske, a regular in several of their shorts. He's the lawyer who comes up with all these ideas for his female clients. Fiske was drafted into the Army early 1942 and was killed in action in the Normandy France region in August 1944 at 29. He's buried at Brittany American Cemetery and Memorial, Basse-Normandie, France.
