School's out with Sugarpuss in the house

When a nightclub singer moves in with a house full of studious professors – most of whom have virtually no experience around the opposite sex – you know things are about to get delightfully screwy. Ball of Fire, released in 1941, is a prime example of a sharp-scripted classic comedy, one that’s regarded as the last substantial screwball released prior to World War II. The plot follows Professor Bertram Potts, a shy linguistics expert played with unexpected comic flair by Gary Cooper. Sequestered with seven other scholars in a Manhattan mansion while compiling an encyclopedia, Potts heads into the city to study contemporary slang and crosses paths with Sugarpuss O’Shea, a street-smart nightclub singer played by the incomparable Barbara Stanwyck. Sugarpuss, hoping to avoid police scrutiny over her mobster boyfriend Joe Lilac, finds refuge with the unsuspecting academics, turning their orderly world upside down. What follows is a lively mix of romance, mistaken identities, and cultural clashes.

To listen to a recording of our CineVerse group discussion of Ball of Fire, conducted last week, click here (if you get an error message, simply refresh the page).

Ball of Fire boasts an astounding glut of talent from Hollywood’s golden age—including director Howard Hawks; producer Samuel Goldwyn; cinematographer Gregg Toland (note how he shoots the professors in deep focus, as was his pioneering trademark style; the result is that they are depicted as harmonizing well together, with each having equal importance to their group); co-writers Billy Wilder and Charles Brackett; stars Stanwyck and Cooper; familiar character actors Oskar Homolka (I Remember Mama, Sabotage, War and Peace), Henry Travers (It’s a Wonderful Life, Mrs. Miniver, The Bells of St. Mary’s), S.Z. Sakall (Casablanca, Christmas in Connecticut, Yankee Doodle Dandy), Tully Marshall (Queen Kelly, The Cat and the Canary), Leonid Kinskey (Casablanca, Duck Soup), Richard Haydn (The Sound of Music, Alice in Wonderland), and Aubrey Mather (The Green Years, The Hour Before the Dawn); along with heavies Dan Durea and Dana Andrews (what a luxury to have leading man Andrews rounding out your cast!); legendary costume designer Edith Head; film composer extraordinaire Alfred Newman; and even Gene Krupa and his band, who make a memorable cameo.

This is an obvious modernized retelling of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, only told in reverse: In the fairy tale, a pure young woman finds shelter with seven kind old men who protect her from danger; in this version, a worldly woman hides out with seven eccentric fellows, not to be ultimately saved by them but to soften and transform their sheltered lives – especially that of the bashful Potts.

Ball of Fire is loaded with coded adult content in its language and situations: Consider how Sugarpuss is a striptease dancer who flaunts her legs, midriff, and attractive figure, and recall how she and others use suggestive lines and double entendres like “Once I watched my big brother shave,” “This is yum-yum,” “Brother, we’re going to have some hoy toy toy,” “Shove in your clutch,” and “I figured on working all night.” It’s a wonder this work got approved by the censors.

Cooper is an interesting, if not offbeat casting choice—he’s not known for playing a stuffed shirt bookworm; instead, he was often cast as a populist everyman who made up in looks, bravery, and honesty what he lacked in the brains department.

Ball of Fire isn’t a comedy of remarriage or a classic confrontational battle of the sexes like other screwballs, including The Awful Truth, His Girl Friday, and The Philadelphia Story. It’s also not a picture that pokes fun at the idle rich or depicts their comeuppance, like My Man Godfrey, It Happened One Night, or The Lady Eve. While there is ample witty dialogue, this is certainly less frenetic and slower-paced than Hawks’ other two previous screwball masterworks Bringing Up Baby and His Girl Friday. The director remarked that the tone was more subdued here because, he said in an interview: “…it was about pedantic people. When you've got professors saying lines, they can't speak 'em like crime reporters. So we naturally slowed up - couldn't do anything about it. Also, it was a little bit further from truth and a little more allegorical…It didn't have the same reality as the other comedies and we couldn't make it go with the same speed."

Senses of Cinema essayist Brian Wilson noted that “Ball of Fire is among the very few Hawks films in which the intellectual, although treated at times as an absurd figure, achieves a level of heroism.”

Interestingly, Hawks was known for recycling and borrowing elements from his own films and those he remade. He directed His Girl Friday, a reimagining of The Front Page, and helmed the classic western Rio Bravo, which he later reworked as El Dorado and Rio Lobo. Similarly, his film Ball of Fire inspired a musical remake, A Song is Born, also directed by Hawks, with many of the shots, sets, costumes, and actor mannerisms closely mirroring those in the original.

Several core concepts drive this narrative. Certainly, this is a “street smarts versus book smarts” story: Sugarpuss possesses the former while Potts has the latter. Ball of Fire teaches us that worldly wisdom from learned experience is often more valuable than classroom knowledge. As the tale progresses, the professors become more accepting of streetwise sensibilities and come out of their sclerotic scholarly shells.

It’s also a film contrasting highbrow from lowbrow. The movie cleverly juxtaposes the refined, structured, and ordered world of academia and its flowery language and snooty sensibilities with the more gritty, street-level culture and zeitgeist vernacular represented by Sugarpuss, the gangsters, the garbageman, and other off-the-street characters who infiltrate the professors’ world.

Thanks to his exposure to Sugarpuss, Potts branches out from the claustrophobic confines of his rigid academic sphere and learns more about the real world as well as the value of love and affection, signifying that symbiotic growth is a latent idea here. Potts’ decency and chivalry, meanwhile, rub off on her and trigger a personal transformation by the end of the story; O’Shea refuses to marry Lilac, turning her sincere affection to Potts. Likewise, the seven other professors seem changed for the better thanks to their exposure to Sugarpuss.

Similar works

• Meet John Doe, a Frank Capra drama also released in 1941 and starring Cooper and Stanwyck
• The Lady Eve, another screwball that debuted in 1941 and features Stanwyck
• Bringing Up Baby, Hawks’ superior screwball from 1938 that also presents a hilarious dynamic between a similar stuffed shirt scholar and the free-spirited woman he falls in love with
• The More the Merrier, a 1943 screwball depicting a woman (Jean Arthur) who shares her apartment with two men, leading to a series of humorous misunderstandings

Other films by Howard Hawks 

• Scarface (1932)
• Bringing Up Baby (1938)
• Only Angels Have Wings (1939)
• His Girl Friday (1940)
• Sergeant York (1941)
• The Big Sleep (1946)
• Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (1953)
• Rio Bravo (1959)
• To Have and Have Not (1944)
• Red River (1948)
• The Thing from Another World (1951; directed by Christian Nyby)