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

 

 

Twist: A Fine Novel from Fine Threads

 

 

 

Twist  (2025 Releases Today)

By Colum McCann

Random House, 256 pages

★★★★

 

“Everything gets fixed. And we remain broken.”

 

Colum McCann is rapidly becoming one of my favorite authors. If I were to ask you if you had any interest in reading about underwater fiber optic cables, I suspect that you would think I was joking. Nope! McCann’s latest novel Twist is indeed about cables and it takes some mighty good writing to stoke interest in such things. But, like the communication cables hugging the ocean floor, Twist is also about hidden things lurking within the human psyche.

 

Twist centers on two men who, in very different ways, are broken. Our narrator is Irish journalist Anthony Fennell. He has been a respected writer, but has grown bored and stale. Few know what a mess his personal life is. His ex-wife and son live in South America and he hides his pain in insularity and perhaps too much booze. As much out of escapism as burning interest, Fennell takes an assignment to write about crews that repair cables by dragging the ocean floor with a grappling hook to find broken cables, repair them, and lower them back to the ocean floor.

 

Where better for a broken man to go than the ends of the earth? Fennell’s journey begins in South Africa where he boards a ship captained by another Irishman, John Conway. But if you think Fennell and Conway will bond, you’re wrong. Conway is suspicious, taciturn, avoids the limelight, and projects a get-it-done attitude toward a job he seems neither to like nor hate. About all Fennell learns for quite some time is that Conway is dating Zanelle, a South African actress who is fast becoming a famous celebrity. Fennell has connection issues of his own, but he can’t help but wonder why Conway has chosen to leave “Zee” and sail away for an indeterminate time along Africa’s west coast. Why indeterminate? The ship can’t leave one spot until it actually finds all of the broken cables. It is a task akin to finding a needle in a haystack. Currents are strong in many parts of the ocean floor, cables get snagged on bottom formations, and all the crew knows are the approximate coordinates of where the cable was originally laid. Undershoot and you miss it; overshoot and you miss it. Either way, you must turn about and try again until you snag something not much larger in diameter than a heavy-duty garden hose.   

 

Readers of McCann’s Let the Great World Spin (2009) will recall that tightrope daredevil Philipe Petit is used as a metaphor. If you think of fiber optics as a bundle of thread-like wires, you can infer that McCann has a thing about life on the thin edge. Petit hovered over 1360 feet into the air surrounded by empty space; Conway searched for a cable in the vastness of the Atlantic Ocean. Sometimes he even free dives to fix a cable, a skill requiring extraordinary breath control. Precarious odds doesn’t even begin to get it. Conway has an exacting job to do and Fennell has a lot of time to think. He is like the elusive cable in that much of the time WiFi is unavailable, unreliable, or access is tightly controlled. But Fennell does get enough online time to make inquiries about Captain Conway and learn that he's not who he says he is.

 

The ship makes its way slowly up the coast fixing cables that could literally leave much of Africa, the world’s least-wired continent, cut off from the world. The mission continues, though Fennell leaves the boat to pursue a bigger mystery that consumes him as he dives deeper and drifts further away from discovery.

 

The title Twist takes on various meanings, cable kinks,  disconnections, unexpected revelations, twisted minds…. The novel has been compared to various other dark mysteries but to my mind, McCann has given us a new take on Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. Fiber optics as high-falutin’ literary fiction? Bet on it. Cables can be fixed once you find them, but can lost men be repaired?

 

Rob Weir

 

#Twist #NetGalley