Ball of Fire (1941)

January 8, 2025 9:04 AM

A sweet, funny 1941 romcom starring Gary Cooper and Barbara Stanwyck. Directed by Howard Hawks. Co-written by Billy Wilder. New York City contains both a house of eight scholars toiling away on an encyclopedia AND a nightclub singer being pushed around by mobsters. Can nerdery, a garbage collector, and a collection of shenanigans get everything to come out right? Viewable for free on Internet Archive.
posted by brainwane (10 comments total)

Some high points:

* the music sequence with the matches
* the widower remembering his late wife, and his colleagues singing with him to comfort him
* Bertram beginning to stumble over his words once in a while as he is overcome with love
* the slang colloquia, e.g., distinguishing "corn" from "baloney"
* Bertram's Fizzbin-esque vamping after being taken hostage
* Sugarpuss deliberately placing herself in the sunlight
* Sugarpuss needing to put a cold hanky on the back of her neck
posted by brainwane at 9:08 AM on January 8 [1 favorite]

I saw this ages ago -- among Gary Cooper's many, many deficiencies as an actor (seriously one of the most over-rated actors of all time), he probably reached a nadir of his career trying to pass himself off as a nerdy scholar.
posted by Pedantzilla at 9:37 AM on January 8 [1 favorite]

Oh hey, his performance didn't strike me as particularly poor; I enjoyed how it wasn't stereotypical. What did you find so deficient about it?
posted by brainwane at 10:03 AM on January 8

I... like Gary Cooper. I don't think he's a great actor, but he's an excellent movie star, so for me it's a matter of whether he is in the right role to just do his Gary Cooper thing.

And Billy Wilder... pretty much doesn't miss.
posted by DirtyOldTown at 11:57 AM on January 8 [2 favorites]

Never caught this movie, but it does sound fun. And re: Gary Cooper - I am duty-bound to like him, as a fellow Montanan - but as an actor, I've never been "wowed" by him - perfectly cromulent, but not among my faves.
posted by davidmsc at 1:08 PM on January 8

What's My Line? featuring Gary Cooper

"I have a delicious feeling all over me that I know who this is"
posted by ginger.beef at 2:19 PM on January 8

My review from last year:

“Once I watched my big brother shave…”

Ball of Fire, a 1941 Howard Hawks screwball comedy with a ridiculous premise. A group of stodgy “professors”, all bachelors except of one widower, live in an old-fashioned boarding house while writing an encyclopedia. The old men, all foreigners but Gary Cooper, know nothing about sex, but are all titillated when a young woman takes refuge there. They are anti-intellectual, creepy and infantile, and the whole story was difficult to swallow. 💯 score on Rotten Tomatoes, but only 1/10 on mine.
posted by growabrain at 2:21 PM on January 8

I did really enjoy the scene where they all start singing Gaudeamus igitur though, that's a great scene and poignant.
posted by Carillon at 2:30 PM on January 8

An IMDb trivia item (no source/citation given) claims:

One of Gene Krupa's four trumpet players was Roy Eldridge, the only Black person in the band. To avoid offending White audiences in Jim Crow markets, the studio and Howard Hawks came up with a plan. In those days, the reels of a movie were shown using two alternating projectors. Sixteen minutes into the film, Barbara Stanwyck comes on stage, sings "Drum Boogie" with the Krupa band, and Roy Eldridge stands to perform his trumpet solo. When the song is over, Stanwyck leaves the stage and the first reel ends. As the next reel begins, she returns for an encore, the band is still in place and the audience is still applauding; however, Eldridge has been removed from the band. By simply switching projectors before Stanwyck's first entry, a projectionist could "edit out" the offending sequence on the fly.

:-(
posted by brainwane at 5:22 PM on January 8

I first saw Ball of Fire while I was working at the Wikimedia Foundation, and it absolutely tickled me to watch a movie focusing on encyclopedians. Now I'm thinking about how you could update this plot for the 21st century to revolve around a set of Wikipedia editors.

Imagine, say, a weekend edit-a-thon where physician contributors along the lines of Netha Hussain and Emily Temple-Wood are working to improve coverage of a particular medical topic on Wikipedia. They need freely licensed diagrams, and come upon a treasure trove of great illustrations that a cute guy inherited the rights to. They plead with him to upload and freely license the illustrations -- but heavies from Elsevier have other ideas!
posted by brainwane at 6:06 PM on January 8 [6 favorites]