Ball of Fire and Red Hot Barbara Stanwyck

 

 

 

 

Ball of Fire (1941)

Directed by Howard Hawks

RKO Radio Pictures, 111 minutes, Not rated

★★★

 

A bad film can be great entertainment. Ball of Fire is a silly movie that tempts you to turn if off to go read cereal boxes. Yet, director Howard Hawks and co-script writer Billy Wilder managed to keep me watching. I’m not sure if that was a good or bad thing! If you decide to try it, it might appear as The Professor and the Burlesque Queen.

 

Ball of Fire is an oddity. It could be considered as a rewrite of Bringing Up Baby, the 1938 screwball comedy starring Cary Grant as a nebbish paleontologist and Katharine Hepburn as his scatterbrained pursuer. Casting Grant as a glasses-wearing nerd assembling a brontosaurus was risky for an actor known for being handsome and suave. But why would RKO reshape it three years later when Bringing Up Baby was originally a box office bomb? (It’s now considered a classic.) If making Grant into a dweeb failed, why would it work for Gary Cooper, another Hollywood hunk? Or for Barbara Stanwyck as the femme fatale/Hepburn substitute? Ball of Fire also riffs on Snow White and the Seven Dwarves with Cooper a surprise prince and eight eccentric professors–one is even named Oddly–as the dwarves.

 

It opens with Professor Bertram Potts (Cooper) leading eight geezer professors for their morning walk before retiring to a fusty Victorian house filled with dusty books and papers. Officially it is the Toten Institute, a bequest of the deceased father of the unmarried Miss Toten (Mary Field). She drops in occasionally with her lawyer to try to hurry the professors along. They’ve worked on an encyclopedia project for nearly seven years and haven’t yet finished the letter S. Potts, a grammarian and the youngest by far, has just about concluded an entry on slang, when his garbage collector lets loose with a spray of colorful idioms Potts has never heard. So do others he encounters on the street, including nightclub performer Sugarpuss O’Shea (Stanwyck). She is a singer for a big band wearing so little that it’s amazing she got past the Hollywood Code censors. Percussion legend Gene Krupa bangs the drums so hard the stage shakes. Potts, though, is so focused on research that he hardly notices Sugarpuss’ costume (or lack thereof).

 

Sugarpuss is actually the main squeeze of gangster Joe Lilac (Dana Andrews) whose pink pajamas, a gift from Sugarpuss, links him to a murder. The cops can’t quite prove it, but O’Shea’s name is mentioned and the cops want her brought in toute de suite. She has to sneak out of a window and find a place to lie low until Joe and his henchmen Duke Pastrami (Dan Duryea) and Asthma Anderson can smuggle her to New Jersey. Joe plans to marry her because a wife can’t testify against her husband. Tough gal Sugarpuss fast talks her way into staying with Potts under the guise of feeding him research. His housekeeper, the Teutonic Miss Bragg (Kathleen Howard) doesn’t like it one bit and the Institute forbids women from staying in the lodging house of the dwarfs/professors. To keep from getting thrown out, Sugarpuss pretends to be attracted to Potts.

 

Before these maters resolve we have to come to grips with the fact that all but one of the professors is a bachelor. (One was a widower before the 20^th century dawned!) There’s also the case of two rings, teaching fidgety “Pottsy” how to kiss, the fawning seven, an “engagement” party in suits appropriate for the Garfield  administration, henchmen holding hostages, and a decidedly drifted Snow White having a change of heart. Got all that?

 

This unexpected hit got five Oscar nominations and has been preserved by the National Film Registry. If this sounds strange, add to your list the fact that it made and lost money at the same time. It was an RKO film to distribute, and nearly doubled its costs yet its deal with Samuel Goldwyn Productions was so one-sided it paid out even more. 

 

 

 

Ball of Fire (sort of) works because it’s absurd enough to be a cross between camp and surrealism. The professors really were like the Seven Dwarfs at a time in which Walt Disney was thought a bold innovator among the avantgarde. It didn’t hurt that Stanwyck was hotter than burning pants and Cooper went from dork to dashing. Is it a great film? No, but I kept watching!

 

Rob Weir