Part of Weekend Classics: 1941’s Greatest Hits
When lead encyclopedist Professor Bertram Potts (Gary Cooper) ventures out of the ivory tower and into the streets of New York in effort to bulk up a compendium of current slang, he finds the perfect study in “astounding specimen” Sugar Puss O’Shea (Barbara Stanwyck), who uses the professor’s domicile to hide out from her gangster boyfriend. The laugh-a-line vernacular lingo scripted by Billy Wilder is a perfect match for quick-paced direction from Howard Hawks in this early-’40s riff on the Snow White story.
“[Samuell Goldwyn] has produced a picture which deliberately kicks the language around in a manner so colorful and lively that you can almost sense his tongue stuck in his cheek. BALL OF FIRE is the title of this wholly ingratiating lark, and so pleasant is its spoofing of the professional pose, so comprehensive is its handling of the modern vernacular and so altogether winning are Gary Cooper and Barbara Stanwyck in it that it had the customers jumping with enjoyment at the Music Hall yesterday.” —Bosley Crowther, New York Times (Jan 16, 1942) “The writing…is a marvel. The patter that flows forth whenever some regular Joe flaps his jaws is a wonder to hear. Garbagemen and waiters, pool hall bums and showgirls, newsboys and college boys — they’re all virtuosos singing the wisecracking arias Wilder and Brackett have given them…. 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.” —Charles Taylor, Village Voice “Howard Hawks liked to hide behind the role of unpretentious genre craftsman, but he was truly classic Hollywood’s closet intellectual, perpetually fascinated by the clash between mind and body…. The film’s optimistic integration of intellectual and physical impulses lends it a feeling of wholeness (greatly aided by Gregg Toland’s deep-focus cinematography) closer to Hawks’s later, more serene films than to his breathless early comedies.” —Fernando F. Croce, Slant Magazine
