March madness, TCM style

I love the screwball comedies of the 1930’s as well as the Peter Bogdanovich homage to them in What’s Up, Doc?, but I hadn’t even heard of Ball of Fire before I caught up with it on TCM last year. I watched it again this week as TCM warmed up for its version of March madness — its 31 Days of Oscar programming. TCM has quite a lineup of films available for viewing back to back this month. See the monthly schedule here and the alphabetical listing of films here.

Last night was a bonanza. with The African Queen followed by The Man Who Would Be King. What do these two films have in common? Both were directed by John Huston. They reminded me that just about everything Huston directed, from Treasure of the Sierra Madre to Wise Blood and The Dead, is worth seeing.

Back to Ball of Fire. Billy Wilder and Charles Brackett wrote the screenplay. Howard Hawks directed it. Gregg Toland filmed it. Alfred Newman wrote the score. Gary Cooper and Barbara Stanwyck are the stars in a fantastic cast. Edith Head designed Stanwyck’s costumes. Trying to avoid overstatement, I will limit myself to saying the talent on display in the film is impressive.

The provenance of the story lies in something Wilder had written in Germany before making his way to the United States, but it obviously derives from Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. A team of unworldly professors has been living together in Manhattan to work on a great encyclopedia supported by the munificence of the Totten Foundation. As one summary has it:

Hoping to update his chapter on modern slang, encyclopedia writer Professor Bertram Potts (Gary Cooper) ventures into a chic nightclub. Inside, he meets the snarky burlesque performer “Sugarpuss” O’Shea (Barbara Stanwyck). Fascinated by her command of popular jargon, Potts invites her to stay with him. But, unknown to Potts, she is the fiancée of a mobster (Dana Andrews) and wanted by the police. In the ensuing mayhem, Potts must stay on his toes or be swallowed up by bigger fish.

It isn’t long before Sugarpuss is calling Professor Potts “Pottsie” and his unworldly team of academics has taken to the wily Ms. O’Shea. Again trying to avoid overstatement, I will limit myself to saying the contrast between Pottsie’s formal diction and Sugarpuss’s eloquent slang is the kind of thing that I find amusing.

Brains win out over brawn and love finds a way to overcome the many obstacles in its way. Gary Cooper is hilarious. Barbara Stanwyck is magnificently lovable. The movie is a delight.

Released simultaneously with our entry into World War II, the film’s timing can’t have helped at the box office, yet it was enough of a commercial success that Wilder earned a $10,000 bonus on it. Our entry into the war coincided with the end of the era of screwball comedy — or brought it to an end.

On the matter of timing, I learn from Wikipedia: “In World War II, a total of 12 servicemen were pen-pals with Stanwyck; two of them asked for a poster of her in the Ball of Fire outfit for their mess hall.” Charles Taylor added this beautiful observation in his 2015 appreciation for the Village Voice: “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.”

And the film was nominated for several Academy Awards, including Barbara Stanwyck for Best Actress. Incidentally, I don’t think she was producer Samuel Goldwyn’s first choice to play Sugarpuss, but it’s hard to imagine anyone else coming close to her in the part.

I bring the film to your attention in case you haven’t heard of it. Chances are you will find something in it to let your mind drift from current events. The clip below, from Sugarpuss’s arrival at the professors’ residential office set-up early in the film, may give you some idea…

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