Love and Language in Ball of Fire (1941)
With a title like Ball of Fire, you expect real fireworks, and this 1941 screwball comedy delivers them with spectacular energy and skill. There’s so much to love about the film that it’s hard to know where to start, much less how to boil it down to a single, short discussion of the picture’s many outstanding qualities. We start with a modernized twist on the Snow White fairy tale penned by Billy Wilder, Thomas Monroe, and Charles Brackett, which is brought to life by direction from Howard Hawks and the acting talents of a first-rate cast, including Barbara Stanwyck as the titular (and titillating) ball of fire and Gary Cooper as the academic bachelor who gets overheated in her presence. Supporting the two leads are iconic classic stars like Dana Andrews, Dan Duryea, Henry Travers, S.Z. Sakall, Oscar Homolka, Leonid Kinskey, and Richard Haydn, each of them giving memorable performances that keep the large ensemble from becoming muddled. As a former academic myself, I love the re-imagining of the fairy tale dwarfs as scholars and the ways in which their intellectual specialties drive both the dialogue and the plot, and I find their found family dynamic a deeply moving element of the story. With Gary Cooper’s character specializing in language, it’s little wonder that language and love are entwined in this story, and those two elements seem worthy of some additional examination, given the many ways they manifest in the picture.
Cooper plays Professor Bertram Potts, a former child prodigy now grown and leading a group of scholars in their creation of a large encyclopedia on which they have already been working for nine years. The men, all bachelors except for the widower, Professor Oddly (Richard Haydn), live together and commit all their energy to their work until Bertram accidentally gives night club singer Sugarpuss O’Shea (Barbara Stanwyck) the idea of hiding out from the police in their house. Sugarpuss is already involved with wanted gangster Joe Lilac (Dana Andrews), but that doesn’t stop her from lighting a fire in Bertram’s inexperienced heart. Unfortunately, Joe realizes that a wife can’t be made to testify against her husband, so Sugarpuss has to choose between marrying the mobster or the scholar, and Joe is willing to take extreme measures to influence her decision.
Bertram’s desire to learn modern American slang creates the opportunity for Sugarpuss to enter his life but also hints at his unconscious urge to leave his monastic confinement for a freer, more fully realized existence in the world. As a linguist, Bertram knows many words and their meanings, but his brief summary of his own life reveals that he has been constantly locked away with his studies since early childhood, leaving little time for him to comprehend words like “passion” and “sex,” much less “love” in a romantic context. If Sugarpuss is Snow White (albeit rather drifted, as the joke goes) then Bertram is Rapunzel or Sleeping Beauty, awaiting rescue from the imprisoning tower of a dry scholarly life. He ventures into the nightclubs and city streets to find a living language at work and play, but he doesn’t really begin to imagine having that kind of life for himself until Sugarpuss boogies her way into his heart.
The most important word that Sugarpuss and the other consultants teach Bertram is “corn,” a slang term that classic movie fans know well from the description of Frank Capra’s sentimental movies as “Capra-corn.” Critics originally meant the term derisively, but Ball of Fire argues that corn can be endearing and lovable, especially when embodied in a package that looks like Gary Cooper. For all its gangsters and third act hijinks, Ball of Fire is an unabashedly corny movie, one that sees its heroine exchange her jaded view and materialist aims for true love with a shy, naïve scholar who, as she says, “doesn’t know how to kiss, the jerk.” Bertram’s love for her is passionate, but, ironically, the linguist can’t find the words to express that to her. It’s shown not told, in the way sunlight on her hair mesmerizes him, in the way he rushes off to cool his neck after she kisses him, and in the way he literally learns to fight for her by studying a boxing guide on his way to stop her from marrying Joe Lilac.
While Sugarpuss and Bertram teach each other about romantic love, they also come to appreciate the different kind of love experienced in the found family of scholars. It’s clear that the older scholars regard Bertram not only as their leader but also as a beloved younger brother or even son. They delight in the rambunctious energy Sugarpuss brings into their lives and root enthusiastically for the young couple. They even join Bertram’s heroic quest to save his lady love from forced marriage to Joe, although instead of a white charger they all ride a white garbage truck to the rescue. In a cast of veteran character actors and scene-stealers, it’s Richard Haydn, really the same age as Cooper but made up to look elderly, who gets the best bits of both physical comedy and sentiment. His Professor Oddly, the sole widower of the group, struggles to explain romantic love to Bertram given his Victorian sensibilities, but his tender memories of his long-dead wife are deeply moving to the audience and his fellow characters. When the scholars join together to sing “Sweet Genevieve” in tribute to Oddly’s lost love, it’s the epitome of corn in the very sweetest sense, old-fashioned and utterly sincere but so emotional for Oddly that he leaves the room because of the depth of feeling the gesture stirs. It’s clear that his friends love him very much, just as they love Bertram and extend their affection to Sugarpuss, who is no more immune to their corny charms than she is to those of Bertram. We don’t see their future together, but the other professors will always be part of the life Sugarpuss and Bertram share because they really are a family.
Ball of Fire earned four Oscar nominations, including a nod for Stanwyck as Best Actress, but it went home empty-handed in a year that also included Citizen Kane, How Green Was My Valley, The Maltese Falcon, and Sergeant York, for which Gary Cooper actually won Best Actor. Other screwball comedies from director Howard Hawks include Twentieth Century (1934), Bringing Up Baby (1938), and His Girl Friday (1940). For more comedy starring Barbara Stanwyck, see The Mad Miss Manton (1938), The Lady Eve (1941), and Christmas in Connecticut (1945), and for more of Cooper’s comedy roles, try Design for Living (1933), Mr. Deeds Goes to Town (1936), and Bluebeard’s Eighth Wife (1938). Stanwyck and Cooper also star together in Meet John Doe (1941) and Blowing Wild (1953). In 1948, Hawks directed Danny Kaye and Virginia Mayo in a musical remake of Ball of Fire called A Song is Born, in which the focus shifts from language to music. Mary Field plays the same character, Miss Totten, in both versions.
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— Jennifer Garlen for Classic Movie Hub
Jennifer Garlen pens our monthly Silver Screen Standards column. You can read all of Jennifer’s Silver Screen Standards articles here.
Jennifer is a former college professor with a PhD in English Literature and a lifelong obsession with film. She writes about classic movies at her blog, Virtual Virago, and presents classic film programs for lifetime learning groups and retirement communities. She’s the author of Beyond Casablanca: 100 Classic Movies Worth Watching and its sequel, Beyond Casablanca II: 101 Classic Movies Worth Watching, and she is also the co-editor of two books about the works of Jim Henson.
