Commotion on the Ocean is the 174th 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 short is a remake of 1949's Dunked in the Deep, using ample stock footage. In addition, the newspaper room scenes were lifted from 1948's Crime on Their Hands. Commotion on the Ocean was the last of four shorts filmed in the wake of Shemp Howard's death using earlier footage and a stand-in.
The film's plot device of hiding microfilm in watermelons is an allusion to an actual event that occurred in 1948. Time Magazine's managing editor Whittaker Chambers, a former Communist spy-turned government informer, accused Alger Hiss of being a member of the Communist Party and a spy for the Soviet Union. In presenting evidence against Hiss, Chambers produced the Pumpkin Papers: four rolls of microfilm of State Department documents, which Chambers had concealed in a hollowed-out pumpkin on his Maryland farm.
Read more about Commotion On The Ocean: Plot, End of The Shemp Howard Era, Quotes
Famous quotes containing the words commotion and/or ocean:
“Most adults will do anything to avoid going to a party where they don’t know anyone. But for some reason we may be impatient with the young child who hesitates on the first day of school, or who recoils from the commotion of a birthday party where there are no familiar faces.”
—Cathy Rindner Tempelsman (20th century)
“To the Ocean now I fly,
And those happy climes that ly
Where day never shuts his eye,
Up in the broad fields of the sky:”
—John Milton (1608–1674)