Review of Ball of Fire (1941) by Blake P — 15 Aug 2011

This is a completely delightful classic comedy. It's a wonderful example of the old Hollywood studio system at its best - a film with a cute story, brilliant dialogue, very good lead performances, and hilarious supporting performances, all of it put together very elegantly.

The story is a straightforward and earnest, but still a bit quirky, version of "Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs"; this time, it's "The Club Singer and the Eight Professors." There's a group of eccentric professors who have been living together in a house for nine years compiling a dictionary. The youngest of them, an awkward grammarian (Gary Cooper), realizes that his entry on "slang" will be woefully incomplete since he hasn't talked to normal people in years, and so he sets out to learn and set down the common slang terms of the day (which, since the movie was made in 1941, add their own level of hilarity today). He meets a saucy, street-smart nightclub singer (Barbara Stanwyck), who takes advantage of the opportunity to hide out from the police with the professors, who are looking for her because of some trouble her gangster boyfriend has stirred up. See if you can guess where it goes from there.

Gary Cooper, usually known for playing stalwart badasses (High Noon, e.g.) is very charming here as the stilted and awkward but well-meaning professor. Barbara Stanwyck is great as the free-spirited singer, who's a perfect example of the sort of strong female character that was popular in the 1930s and 40s but kind of disappeared after (others include Rosalind Russel in His Girl Friday and Katharine Hepburn in Bringing Up Baby, both of which were made by this film's director, Howard Hawks). The other professors are one of the best collections of 1940s comedic character actors ever. Among them are Richard Haydn, whom you have heard as the Caterpillar in the old Disney Alice in Wonderland, with his hilarious nasal voice and accent, and Henry Travers, who played Clarence in It's a Wonderful Life. The professors are just great - they always move around in a big pack, try to teach themselves slang and conga dancing, and are just generally awesome.

The screenplay, which was co-written by Billy Wilder and Charles Brackett, is very smart. The professors use a higher level of vocabulary than you usually hear in movies, and in one very funny sequence one of them puts lots of fancy words together into nonsense to distract a henchman. The much focused-on slang terms might have just been common words in 1941, but today they seem especially quaint and funny. Howard Hawks's direction is smooth and efficient and doesn't draw attention to itself. This is just a great comedy that has stood the test of time very well, and I think anyone would enjoy it.