Review of Ball of Fire (1941) by Rocko P — 23 Apr 2009

I feel a great swell of sympathy for Barbara Stanwyck. She was a heck of an actress. She did a lot of great stuff. She was, however, kind of hamstrung by the Code. Barbara Stanwyck was best at playing clever, witty, independent women. Her best characters were in control of their own lives--and their own bodies. A real Barbara Stanwyck woman chose for herself what she was going to do with herself. Of course, the problem here is that a true Barbara Stanwyck character chose who she was going to sleep with, too, and waiting until marriage was not always required. A lot of women suffered under the Code, in fact, because Hollywood wasn't writing that kind of character anymore. There are exceptions, and there would continue to be exceptions, but some of the best roles for women were written in those few years between the coming of sound and the serious enforcement of the Code.

Eight professors have been living in a house together for nine years, writing an encyclopedia. They are experts in various things, with each writing his own parts of the book. The expert in language is Professor Bertram Potts (Gary Cooper). He has written some twenty pages on slang (how long is this encyclopedia supposed to be, anyway?), only to discover that everything he's written is out of date already. Now, any linguist worth his doctorate would know that it's inevitable, that any work of slang is pretty much obsolete before it's published and would move on. On the other hand, Prof. Potts does not reliably seem to be worth his doctorate. At any rate, he goes wandering around town, looking for people to help him with slang. While he's at it, he meets Miss Katherine "Sugarpuss" O'Shea (Stanwyck). She turns out to be mixed up in a murder of some sort, and her boyfriend, Joe Lilac (Dana Andrews), wants to marry her--mostly, it appears, because a wife cannot be made to testify against her husband. O'Shea finagles her way into staying with the professors, where of course Potts falls in love with her.

One of the things I like about this movie is that it's actually intelligent. It's not just trying to be intelligent, the way many movies do. The only time any of the professors are talking real nonsense is when they're just kind of babbling to distract someone. While a lot of what they say is outdated--one of them, ye Gods, is a Freudian--it was the state of knowledge at the time. Oh, it's a little tedious to have the old stereotype of the clueless men who are clueless [i]because[/i] they are so smart, but based on some of what Potts says, they've been chosen pretty much for just that reason. It is assumed that, because these men are utter social rejects, they'll have all the more time to spend working. It's also true that the movie shows a certain lack of understanding about academia (nine guys writing a complete encyclopedia? Really?), but when they talk, what they say makes sense.

One also rather gets the feeling that O'Shea isn't stupid. She isn't just one of those street-smart but not really intelligent types. She's ignorant, true, but that seems to be the life she's led. When she's left alone, she actually sits and reads. I think that this is, in part, because she's ended up in a houseload of professors (one of whom is Richard Haydn, who voice the Caterpillar in the Disney [i]Alice in Wonderland[/i]), and that's pretty much what there is to do. I think she chooses to read what she's reading because that's what she's working with--and because it's what Potts cares about. But still, she reads and seems to comprehend what must be a relatively complicated book.

I think my new favourite story about the making of this movie is the fact that, while filming a scene wherein O'Shea punches out the housekeeper, Miss Bragg, Stanwyck actually broke Kathleen Howard's jaw. She connected when she wasn't supposed to, and Howard actually ended up laid up in the hospital. And that, boys and girls, is why you don't throw movie punches when you don't know what you're doing.