For some reason Ball of Fire doesn’t figure in the Grand Canon of classic Hollywood sound comedies. Film historians who write endlessly about its director, Howard Hawks, and its screenplay writers, Billy Wilder and Charles Brackett, rarely mention the film, except maybe in footnotes. Apparently it isn’t dazzling enough when compared with Hawks’s ground-breaking motormouth comedies, Bringing Up Baby and His Girl Friday. But for my taste, Ball of Fire is a masterpiece. It’s original and daring, a comedy about language that pretends to be a sex comedy. Well… it is a sex comedy, but the sex is the language.
Audiences could well have expected the sex to be more up front. Barbara Stanwyck gets to display her famous gams, and Gary Cooper was already established as the Stud of Hollywood. Yet all the seduction, and all the comic power, is in the characters’ ability to create language, not just to spout it. Unlike any other film of that time (to my knowledge), Ball of Fire is a fantastic work of love for American English — its expressiveness, its poetry, and most of all for its inexhaustible energy.
The film has some Hawksian traits — there’s a male group (the professorial seven dwarves), and a girl who becomes one of the guys (Stanwyck’s “Sugar Puss”). But the film is mainly a work of writers’ art. And probably mainly of Billy Wilder’s. Wilder was still learning English and American idioms after arriving in the States in 1933. The themes of researching slang and jazz as if they were new languages reflect the ideas of a Berlin writer working overtime to learn the language that he wants to write in.
It’s said that Wilder brought the story with him from Berlin. It fits the mold of stories that the Lubitsch world liked: a fractured fairy tale like Love Me Tonight, Bluebeard’s Eighth Wife, and Midnight. In this case, it’s Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs transposed to contemporary Manhattan, complete with cloistered professors, gangsters, and a gorgeous dish. Wilder believed that a screenplay should be an integrated work of art; he didn’t want a single word changed. That of course rarely happened. The word on the page often doesn’t translate to words in an actor’s mouth. Wilder claimed that he decided to become a director out of disgust for the way Mitchell Leisen kept changing his script for Midnight. And the best Wilder scripts — Double Indemnity, Sunset Boulevard — do have an unusually literary power. In Ball of Fire, the language and the actions fit together as in the best literary dramas. It’s very funny, but — like Preston Sturges’s scripts — it’s so beautifully and intelligently constructed, it’s scary.
Sometimes you can feel the thinness of the line between screwball comedy and noir. Some of Ball of Fire‘s dialogue prefigures Double Indemnity:
It’s also interesting that Stanwyck’s two best comedies were released in the same year, both by superior directors (the other one was The Lady Eve). Her other comedies are often humorless, with poor timing, tipping over into melodrama.
Ball of Fire has one of my favorite examples of what Henri Bergson called “semantically cogent nonsense.” The professors defeat the gangster thugs Asthma (Ralph Peters) and Pastrami (Dan Duryea) when the once-rigid grammarian Professor Potts (Cooper’s character) delivers academic crazy.
