Howard Hawks (1941)

Eight professors, seven of them bachelors (and one a widower), have devoted the many years of their cloistered, swotty lives to compiling an encyclopaedia.  Every day they take their constitutional in Central Park before getting down to their books, under the strict eye of their scold of a housekeeper.  Two of the group, the grammarian Bertram Potts (Gary Cooper) and the mittel-European Gurkakoff (Oscar Homolka), are decades younger than the rest, although Potts seems perhaps the most timidly superannuated of the lot – until he decides to go out into the real world of New York City to do some research on slang.   He comes across a burlesque performer called Sugarpuss O’Shea (Barbara Stanwyck) and is immediately smitten by her vocabulary.  He goes backstage to find out more.  The police want to question Sugarpuss about her mobster boyfriend Joe Lilac and she needs somewhere to hide out to avoid them; she accepts Bertram’s invitation to visit him at home where they can take his research further.  The first few minutes of Ball of Fire, which introduce the encyclopaedists and their daily routine, aren’t encouraging.  The geriatrics are, for the most part, emphatically harmless eccentrics and some of the actors are theatrically effortful – especially Richard Haydn (Uncle Max in The Sound of Music), playing the oldest of the professors even though Haydn was only thirty-six at the time (four years younger than Gary Cooper).  But once Sugarpuss – a Snow White with a difference – joins their ménage à huit, the Seven Dwarfs and Cooper (a fustian Prince Charming) are transformed through the situation they’re caught up in. The twin engines of a collision between two worlds (academe and crime) and romantic comedy (Cooper quickly falls for more than Stanwyck’s turn of phrase) start firing to great effect.

Watching a film like this, you can’t help thinking that there has been dumbing down since it was made.  The dialogue by Billy Wilder and Charles Brackett is so cleverly literate and the picture so thoroughly enjoyable (and the literacy so much part of what makes it enjoyable) that this is a case where you genuinely regret they don’t make films like this anymore.  (Even as you bear in mind that they now make good ones like Blue Valentine which they couldn’t seventy years ago …)   Billy Wilder emigrated from Europe to the US in 1933; and you get a sense that Ball of Fire reflects an immigrant’s fascination with the varieties of a still new language:  his and Brackett’s writing brings out the foolishness and the charm of all manner of smart talk – by scholars, by gangsters, by working people in New York City.   Ball of Fire has a lovely tempo and tone:  in spite of the plot twists the pace is often leisurely (the film may be a few minutes too long) and Howard Hawks makes the piece both thoughtful and celebratory.  When Joe Lilac’s henchmen burst into the professors’ home, Hawks takes it seriously:  while you don’t believe there’ll be a massacre of the innocents, you do feel a sense of threat and outrage – the invasion of the mobsters is the other side of the coin from the vivifying effect of Sugarpuss’s arrival in the household.   It’s pleasing that the professors use a different kind of intelligence from book learning to outwit their captors; and the build-up to their success – in every sense a slow burn – is beautifully controlled.  The quality of celebration in the film seems to emanate both from Potts and Sugarpuss falling in love, and from Hawks’ self-confident pleasure in the material he’s working with and realising on screen.

Although ivory towers trump lowlife in the story’s resolution, the romance between prim academic Gary Cooper and avid good time girl Barbara Stanwyck is a vindication of the polar opposite qualities of them both; what’s so satisfying about casting Cooper as mind and Stanwyck as body is that he is primarily a physical presence on screen while she naturally combines sexuality with a shrewd intelligence.   She’s much the more talented and exciting performer but Cooper plays the prematurely mildewed Bertram Potts with such light, witty consistency – keeping his virility under wraps – that he’s charming, and a perfect foil for Stanwyck’s candid carnality.  Her acting is miraculously modern and penetrating – although the film obviously isn’t meant to be realistic, she’s completely convincing.  They play so straight, without any nods or winks to the audience, that you feel both admiration and delight watching them (and Hawks’ direction of them).  There are a couple of details that struck me as in-jokes:  giving an account of himself on the telephone to a voice he thinks is that of Sugarpuss’s father (in fact it’s Joe Lilac), Potts explains that he voted ‘straight Republican ticket’ in the latest election – Cooper was a staunch, publicly avowed Republican.  The number ‘9’ on Sugarpuss’s chalet door comes unstuck so that it turns into a ‘6’ – the same accident starts off the relationship between Stanwyck and Adolphe Menjou in Capra’s Forbidden (1932).

Dana Andrews as Joe Lilac and Dan Duryea as his sidekick Pastrami both deliver just the right blend of comedy and nastiness; Oscar Homolka is the standout among the other professors (Gurkakoff seems to be a Freudian mathematician), who also include, as well as Richard Haydn, Henry Travers, the amusingly long-faced Tully Marshall, S Z Sakall, Leonid Kinskey and Aubrey Mather.  Kathleen Howard is the housekeeper, Mary Field the spinsterly sponsor of the encyclopaedia project, Charles Lane her snooty assistant, and Ralph Peters Lilac’s other henchman.  Elisha Cook Jr has only a moment on screen as a nightclub waiter but it’s a good moment.  The film was shot by Gregg Toland, who, earlier in the same year, had won the Academy Award for Wuthering Heights and been feted for the deep focus photography that remains one of the hallmarks of Citizen Kane.  Stanwyck’s singing voice for the burlesque number ‘Drum Boogie Woogie’ was supplied by Martha Tilton.

28 January 2011