NFR Project: 'Ball of Fire' (1941)

 

NFR Project: ‘Ball of Fire’

Dir: Howard Hawks

Scr: Charles Brackett, Billy Wilder

Pho: Gregg Toland

Ed: Daniel Mandell

Premiere: Dec. 2, 1941

111 min.

What do you get when you produce the combined creative efforts of four individuals at the top of their game? You get a Ball of Fire.

Released days before Pearl Harbor, it marks the high water of screwball comedy in American film.

The eminently versatile director, Howard Hawks, had already proved his ability to make screwball comedy with Twentieth Century (1934), Bringing Up Baby (1938), and His Girl Friday (1940). Brackett and Wilder had been writing together since 1936, and would continue to do so, through 1950. They had already penned Ninotchka (1939), and had The Lost Weekend (1945) and Sunset Boulevard (1950) ahead of them. Cinematographer Gregg Toland had just won the Oscar for Wuthering Heights (1939) and was also working on a little film called Citizen Kane (1941).

Ball of Fire (aka, in some locations, as The Professor and the Burlesque Queen) is an archetypal screwball comedy – a dynamic dame seduces a strait-laced, oafish but handsome leading man and leads him to a finer appreciation of life. Here the dame is the beautiful and witty Barbara Stanwyck, a tough chick who sings in a joint and is named Sugarpuss O’Shea. She’s the reluctant girlfriend of the mobster Joe Lilac (Dana Andrews).

She’s encountered singing “Drum Boogie” (actually it’s the voice of Martha Tilton) with Gene Krupa and his orchestra. She’s being observed by the mild-mannered Professor Potts (Gary Cooper), who is compiling an encyclopedia entry on slang and has bivouacked in the real, vernacular world to learn all the new expressions.

He resides in an ornate brownstone in mid-town Manhattan with seven other shy and retiring bachelor professors, each played by a consummate character actor (Oskar Homolka! Henry Travers! S.Z. ‘Cuddles’ Sakall!). The supporting cast of academics is clearly patterned on the Seven Dwarves in Disney’s Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937). That makes Gary Cooper Snow White and Barbara Stanwyck the handsome prince.

Potts and his septet of colleagues are engaged in creating a reference work in accordance with the dictates of the Daniel S. Totten Foundation. The Foundation has run out of money, and the professors are urged to wrap things up. Potts realizes he is deficient in hipster lingo, and goes out into the big wide world to write it all down.

He is slumming in a nightclub when Sugarpuss O’Shea appears. He asks her to come to the Foundation for research purposes – and she figures it’s a good place to hide out to avoid being forced to testify against Joe Lilac. Lilac wants to marry her so she can’t testify against him.

So, she delivers herself to the professors’ door and makes herself at home. Now SHE is playing Snow White, and she enchants the shy, retiring old men who surround her. She and Potts, or Pottsie, fall in love.

And there’s the rub. Far be it from me to reveal the interesting twists and convergences that flow, symphony-like, straight through the heart of the film. It is all of a piece, directed not obtrusively but in a definitive, convincing manner that sells the absurd premise perfectly. All the actors are skirting around overplaying it, just a bit. Hawks had a way of winding up an actor to make them more vivid.

This is easily the most sentimental of the Brackett and Wilder scripts. It’s simply crisp, wry, a well-made play. (Supposedly, Hawks let Wilder shadow him as he was making the movie, to learn the directing trade. Wilder had impeccable taste.) Sugarpuss and Pottsie’s ill-starred romance is whole-hearted, sincere, and very sweet. You get to watch two people fall in love.

To top it all off, there’s Toland’s cinematography, which ranges from the practical to the dreamy. With precious few setups, he conveys the shimmering loveliness of Stanwyck, the befuddled comedy of Cooper . . . even the goombah toughness of Duke Pastrami, the hood played in what is essentially a gifted cameo by Dan Duryea.

A farce anchored in real feeling, Ball of Fire makes the most of every occasion for humor, wending its way to its improbable but crowd-pleasing finale. It’s a fairy tale with a fairly sexy happy ending for the time. True love, and good  grammar, prevails.

The NFR is one writer’s attempt to review all the films listed in the National Film Registry in chronological order. Next time: The Blood of Jesus.