By Edwin Jahiel
BALL OF FIRE (1941) A remarkable, funny screwball variant of ³Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs.² Linguist Gary Cooper and seven fuddy-duddy scholars on a foundation grant, are cloistered in a mansion where they are preparing an encyclopedia. Cooper ventures into the forbidding outside world to do research on slang. He meets cabaret singer Sugarpuss O¹Shea (Barbara Stanwyck) a gansgter¹s moll. The mob stashes her in the professors¹ house and, to our great merriment, the outrageous follows the preposterous. Little-known comedy was directed by the great Howard Hawks who worked in all genres and who, like the flyers who flew by the seat of their pants in so many of his aviation movies, had all the right instincts. Script by Billy Wilder and Charles Brackett. It is uncanny that Wilder, who had come from Germany a few years before, could write such American and such slangy dialogues. Cooper, who was just as versatile as Hawks and could play anything from a romantic lovers to strong, silent men of action, shows again what a marvelous comedian he was. He sometimes even looks like Johnny Carson¹s Floyd Turbo character. Hawks remade the movie in 1948 as ³A Song Is Born,² a musical version with Danny Kaye. (Edwin Jahiel)
" Le mauvais gout mene au crime" (Stendhal)
Edwin Jahiel's movie reviews are at http://www.prairienet.org/ejahiel
The review above was posted to the
rec.arts.movies.reviews newsgroup (de.rec.film.kritiken for German reviews).
The Internet Movie Database accepts no responsibility for the contents of the
review and has no editorial control. Unless stated otherwise, the copyright
belongs to the author.
Please direct comments/criticisms of the review to relevant newsgroups.
Broken URLs inthe reviews are the responsibility of the author.
The formatting of the review is likely to differ from the original due
to ASCII to HTML conversion.
Related links: index of all rec.arts.movies.reviews reviews