I love the screwball comedies of the 1930s as well as the Peter Bogdanovich homage to them in What’s Up, Doc?, but I hadn’t even heard of Ball of Fire before I caught up with it on TCM in 2022. I watched it again last night in TCM’s lineup of films starring Gary Cooper. This is what I had to say about it the first time around.
Billy Wilder and Charles Brackett wrote the screenplay. Howard Hawks directed it. Gregg Toland filmed it. Alfred Newman wrote the score. Gary Cooper and Barbara Stanwyck are the stars in a fantastic cast that includes an array of memorable character actors. Edith Head designed Stanwyck’s costumes. The talent on display in the film is mind-boggling.
The provenance of the story lies in something Wilder had written in Germany before making his way to the United States, but it obviously derives from Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. A team of unworldly professors has been living together in Manhattan to work on a great encyclopedia supported by the munificence of the Totten Foundation. As one summary has it:
Hoping to update his chapter on modern slang, encyclopedia writer Professor Bertram Potts (Gary Cooper) ventures into a chic nightclub. Inside, he meets the snarky burlesque performer “Sugarpuss” O’Shea (Barbara Stanwyck). Fascinated by her command of popular jargon, Potts invites her to stay with him. But, unknown to Potts, she is the fiancée of a mobster (Dana Andrews) and wanted by the police. In the ensuing mayhem, Potts must stay on his toes or be swallowed up by bigger fish.
It isn’t long before Sugarpuss is calling Professor Potts “Pottsie” and his unworldly team of academics has taken to the wily Ms. O’Shea. The contrast between Pottsie’s formal diction and Sugarpuss’s eloquent slang is inspired.
Brains win out over brawn and love finds a way to overcome the many obstacles in its way. Gary Cooper is hilarious. Barbara Stanwyck is magnificently lovable. The movie is a delight.
Released simultaneously with our entry into World War II, the film’s timing can’t have helped at the box office, yet it was enough of a commercial success that Wilder earned a $10,000 bonus on it. Our entry into the war coincided with the end of the era of screwball comedy — or brought it to an end.
On the matter of timing, I learn from Wikipedia: “In World War II, a total of 12 servicemen were pen-pals with Stanwyck; two of them asked for a poster of her in the Ball of Fire outfit for their mess hall.” Charles Taylor added this beautiful observation in his 2015 appreciation for the Village Voice: “Ball of Fire came out five days before Pearl Harbor. You can imagine Americans listening to its flood of slang and knowing exactly what they were fighting for.”
And the film was nominated for several Academy Awards, including Barbara Stanwyck for Best Actress. Incidentally, I don’t think she was producer Samuel Goldwyn’s first choice to play Sugarpuss, but it’s hard to imagine anyone else coming close to her in the part. The clip below, from Sugarpuss’s arrival at the professors’ residential office set-up early in the film, may give you some idea…
