Sean Burns
I’ve given up on trying to keep track of the insane culture war nonsense that accompanies contemporary Disney releases. One could lose days going down the rabbit hole of red-faced men taking selfie videos in their big boy trucks while fulminating about how it’s the end of the world because a cartoon character did a feminism. I’m generally baffled anyway by the Mouse House’s business plan of flooding the market with live-action remakes of beloved classics, slavishly replicating familiar scenes except uglier and with dimmer colors. Now that it’s apparently become some sort of referendum on the war in Gaza, I honestly don’t know if it’s woke or not anymore to go see the new Snow White, a perhaps inevitable outcome of people mistaking consumption for activism and grafting their pet agendas and parasocial bugbears onto $270 million studio products. Better to stay home and try to tune it all out by watching Howard Hawks’s 1941 Ball of Fire, the only live-action remake of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs anyone ever needed in the first place.
The delightful screwball comedy stars Barbara Stanwyck as the pricelessly named Sugarpuss O’Shea, a nightclub singer and gangster’s moll who finds herself on the lam and hiding out in a house full of eight college professors who have spent the past few years sequestered among themselves trying to write an encyclopedia. The leggy bombshell is like nothing like these tweedy academics have ever seen, and the movie gets enormous comic mileage out of their wide-eyed and awestruck reactions to finding themselves in the same room as Barbara Stanwyck. (Honestly, they hold it together better than I would have.)
The youngest of the professors, uptight grammarian Bertram Potts, is played by Gary Cooper, who’d just appeared opposite Stanwyck earlier that year in Frank Capra’s Meet John Doe. It’s Potts who first happens upon O’Shea while on an expedition to the streets of New York City to research contemporary slang. One sight of Stanwyck singing “Drum Boogie” with Gene Krupa and his orchestra (she’s actually lip-syncing, Martha Tilton provided the vocals) and Professor Potts realizes he wants to study more than just her vernacular.
But since this is a Howard Hawks picture, the usual gender roles are inverted. The filmmaker didn’t care much for plots about men chasing women. The quintessential Hawks heroine is a brassy dame who knows what she wants and isn’t shy about going after it. Think of Lauren Bacall smoking butts with Bogie in To Have and Have Not, Angie Dickinson hounding John Wayne in Rio Bravo, or—the most obvious model for Ball of Fire—Katherine Hepburn taking a sledgehammer to Cary Grant’s perfectly ordered existence in Bringing Up Baby. As soon as Sugarpuss sets her sights on Cooper’s strappingly handsome English teacher, we know the poor guy’s curriculum doesn’t have a prayer.
Scripted by Charles Brackett and Billy Wilder, Ball of Fire was the latter’s last produced screenplay before he started directing them himself. (Hawks reportedly let the scribe shadow him on set.) It’s got a few choice Wilderian one liners, like when Sugarpuss, feigning a cold, describes her throat as being “red as The Daily Worker and just as sore.” Stanwyck was born to deliver lines like that, and watching Ball of Fire it’s obvious why Wilder recruited her three years later for Double Indemnity.
It’s all extremely pleasurable to watch, though the story construction is a little wonkier than in other classics from this creative crew it most resembles. It’s obviously unfair to compare every comedy to Bringing Up Baby or The Lady Eve (which Stanwyck starred in the same year; what a year). But it’s also impossible not to, and after a phenomenal first hour, Ball of Fire sags somewhat after Sugarpuss’ mafioso boyfriend (Dana Andrews) enters the picture with a cockeyed marriage scheme that will keep them both out of the slammer. The movie is way more fun before this Snow White gets whisked away from her dwarfs.
Hawks had a famously straightforward, unadorned shooting style, but virtuoso cinematographer Gregg Tolland slips a few miracles within the rigid framework, deepening the depth of field in almost as extravagant a fashion as he would in the same year’s Citizen Kane. (Again, what a year.) The film is practically a photo study of the star’s gorgeous gams, but Tolland’s neatest trick is when Stanwyck is hiding in a dark room, overhearing her dear professor professing his love. The actress’ expressive eyes seem to be a light source all their own, an effect gleaned by covering the rest of her face with greasepaint. Anything for art, right?
111 minutes is probably a little too long for a picture like this, with the later, plot-heavy Andrews scenes lacking that screwball snap we expect from Hawks. But there’s just no topping those early sequences when Stanwyck is wowing the house full of bumbling bookworms. She makes you want to say heigh ho.
“Ball of Fire” is streaming on Amazon Prime Video.
