Ball of Fire

Another classic Howard Hawks comedy, Ball of Fire (1941) teams the great director with screenwriter Billy Wilder for a match made in heaven. It isn't a masterpiece like His Girl Friday, but it's a hilarious film in its own right, featuring one of Barbara Stanwyck's best performances.

Eight professors have been commissioned to write a volume of new encyclopedias, and settle in New York for research purposes. The youngest of the lot, Bertram Potts (Gary Cooper), is a linguist who's intrigued by a chance encounter with a gabby garbage man (Allen Jenkins). Realizing he and his colleagues are woefully ignorant of current slang, Potts goes into the city for research, meeting hot-to-trot singer Sugarpuss (Barbara Stanwyck) and enlisting her in his efforts. Sugarpuss and her hubby, gangster Joe Lilac (Dana Andrews), are on the lam, so Sugarpuss takes Bertram up on his offer and agrees to live in their quarters - much to the Professors' collective delight. Things are complicated, of course, when Bertram and Sugarpuss fall for each other, and when Joe and his goons come calling.

Ball of Fire recycles the plot and thematic concerns of Bringing Up Baby, with a dash of Pygmalion thrown in: the nebbish intellectual, absorbed in his studies and unknowing of the real world, who's brought down off his ivory tower by a feisty, sensual, strong-willed woman. This is either auteurism (if you believe Cahiers) or laziness, but it's pure Hawks either way. Wilder's influence is also obvious, most notably in the adorably bumptuous professors who serve as a Greek Chorus, not unlike the Russian diplomats in Ninochtka, the servants in Sabrina or the POWs in Stalag 17 - or the Seven Dwarves to Sugarpuss's Snow White. Along with Charles Brackett, Hawks and Wilder prove a perfect comedy team, their respective styles meshing brilliantly.

Auteurist concerns aside, Ball of Fire is hysterically funny, though it lacks the off-the-wall absurdity of Bringing Up Baby and machine-gun dialogue of His Girl Friday. The verities of the plot are nothing to get worked up over - think a basic romcom with gangsters thrown in - but Hawks and Wilder (and the cast) make it work. The "fish out of water" premise gets a lot of mileage but the film crackles with pointed wit, including surprisingly risque, barely-coded banter between Potts and Sugarpuss. Perhaps the film is better than Bringing Up Baby in the sense that the two lovers have to meet each other half-way rather than one fully "converting," and the lack of an obnoxiously-scatterbrained Katharine Hepburn doesn't hurt either.

Hawks's direction is superb. The movie makes impressive use of deep-focus and blocking by none other than Gregg Toland (Stagecoach, Citizen Kane), making it a handsome film to watch along with its verbal delights. The film is more slow-paced and deliberate than most Hawks films, but it's no less funny and doesn't lack for carefully-constructed set-pieces - our Professors's confrontation with Joe's goons is extremely clever and surprisingly suspenseful. Alfred Newman's delightful, jazzy score is also a highlight.

Gary Cooper does surprisingly well against type, his stiff and uptight persona making for an unexpectedly-effective (and funny) straight man. But it's Barbara Stanwyck's show all the way: as usual, she perfectly combines raw sensuality, a snappy wit and forceful personality with a hidden vulnerability, the Hawksian woman to a T. Dana Andrews (The Best Years of Our Lives) gets a thankless villain role, but the gaggle of haplessly naive Professors - Oskar Homolka (Mission to Moscow), Henry Travers (Shadow of a Doubt), S.Z. Sakall (Casablanca), Tully Marshall (Grand Hotel), Leonard Kinskey (Manhattan Melodrama), Richard Haydn (Young Frankenstein) and Aubrey Mather (For the Love of Rusty) - provide a hilarious running commentary.

So yeah, Ball of Fire is a treat. See it.