Great Balls of Fire! (Barbara Stanwyck Meets Gary Cooper. and Sparks Fly)

There’s something about a patriotic holiday like 4^th of July that makes me want to go back in time, at least when it comes to my movie-viewing. (It’s easy, on the day of our nation’s birth, to settle on the perfect audio choice: the classic—and still hilarious—1961 comedy album, Stan Freberg Presents The United States of America: The Early Years. But I digress.) This past weekend, when it came to picking a movie, I settled for a screwball comedy with a title that sounds like a fireworks display: 1941’s Ball of Fire. Frankly, this title has nothing to do with the story that unfolds onscreen. But it suggests a blaze of romantic fireworks, which this movie delivers in spades.

 Ball of Fire has quite a pedigree. It was written by Charles Brackett and Billy Wilder, just before the latter decided it was time to start directing his own screenplays, resulting in such masterworks as Double Indemnity and The Lost Weekend. It was directed by Howard Hawks, coming off the sparkling His Girl Friday and the patriotic Sergeant York. On Sergeant York, the true-life story of a soft-spoken country boy who became a World War I hero, the leading role was played by Gary Cooper, who won an Oscar for his iconic strong-silent-type performance. In Ball of Fire, he would pivot to the comedic role of a naïve academic, Professor Bertram Potts. Also in 1941 the always-memorable Barbara Stanwyck was having a banner year, appearing in five films, including The Lady Eve and Meet John Doe, along with her sexy role as Sugarpuss O’Shea in Ball of Fire. With all this talent, plus a boat-load of memorable character actors like S.Z. Sakall and Oskar Homolka, the film proved to be a hit with both critics and the public. It was nominated for four Oscars (one for Stanwyck’s performance), and in 2016 was chosen for the National Film Registry.

 So what’s this slight but very funny film all about? It’s part of a time-honored Hollywood genre in which a good-hearted but naïve young man is transformed through his interaction with a woman of the world. How curious! We know Hollywood (both then and now) to be a place where the sharks are predominantly male, and innocent young ladies proceed at their own risk. Still, viewers in the 1940s seemed to love movies (whether romantic comedy or film noir) in which the man is an innocent, someone who faces and succumbs to the dangers posed by a predatory dame. A comedy classic of this ilk is Preston Sturges’ The Lady Eve, in which it’s Henry Fonda, not Gary Cooper, who’s  an unworldly academic falling prey to Stanwyck’s charms. The Lady Eve is a far more complicated movie than Ball of Fire, with a more ambiguous ending, and a film buff of my acquaintance vastly prefers it. Double Indemnity carries the same trope into  darker territory, with patsy Fred MacMurray lured by Stanwyck (now a blonde bombshell) into a deadly scheme for which he’ll ultimately take the fall. Clearly Stanwyck is a lady who shouldn’t be trusted . . . but Ball of Fire also hints at her softer side.

 It’s said that one of the major influences on Ball of Fire is Snow White and the Seven Dwarves. Cooper’s character, you see, is a grammarian who – along with seven crochety scholars from various fields – is working on a ground-breaking new encyclopedia. All unmarried, they live together in a big house, pursuing their arcane research. Then Sugarpuss shows up and teaches them to dance the conga—and hilarity ensues.

 

Hildy’s Game: “His Girl Friday”

“Molly’s Game,” which I watched while flipping through Netflix offerings, is a 2017 feature based on the real-life story of Molly Bloom. No, not the earth-mother figure in James Joyce’s Ulysses. This Molly Bloom is a former champion skier, one who was derailed by a freak accident from her quest to join the U.S. Olympic ski team.  Looking for challenges in warmer climates than her native Colorado, she decamped to  L.A., where she soon found herself shepherding a high-stakes celebrity poker game. Though not a gambler herself, she was soon risking her reputation and her legal standing in order to keep raking in a small fortune in tips.

It’s a fascinating story, though one I couldn’t always follow. And I’m still not exactly sure what the film was trying to say.  A corny scene between Jessica Chastain’s Molly and her psychologist dad (played by the always earnest Kevin Costner) didn’t strike me as helpful. Was his attempt to explain her life-choices in analyst-speak meant to seem astute, or oblivious?

In any case, the film was the directorial debut of writer Aaron Sorkin, known for his screenplay for The Social Network as well as such stellar TV as The West Wing. Those who are familiar with Sorkin’s work know that his characters are smart, sassy, and speak very fast. More than one review of the film, which earned an Oscar nomination for Sorkin’s screenplay, mentioned that its characters deliver their lines as if they were part of the cast of His Girl Friday. Exactly! This sparkling Howard Hawks film from 1940 is set not in a high-price gambling den but in the world of journalists and daily newspapers. The cast, led by Cary Grant as editor-in-chief Walter Burns and Rosalind Russell as ace reporter Hildy Johnson, speak their lines at a breakneck pace, as though the fate of the world depends on what they have to say. And perhaps, in a way, it does. Though the portrayal of newsmen in the film is hardly sugar-coated—they’ll do just about anything to scoop the competition—there’s still the sense that the news they deliver is important, that the fate of a city (if not the world) hangs on the stories they uncover. Brutal competition is part of the game, and sometimes they may happen to get their facts wrong. But this hardly means they’re manufacturing Fake News. Theirs is an honorable profession, and Rosalind Russell’s Hildy is the best of the best.

The complication is that she’s Walter Burns’ ex-wife, and is on the brink of marrying a much more sedate type, an Albany insurance man played by Ralph Bellamy in the usual Ralph Bellamy role. (Who knew that 20 years later he’d leave behind his boring-nice-guy image by portraying FDR in Sunrise at Campobello?) Walter wants Hildy back, both as an ace reporter and as a wife, and a dramatic jailbreak by an accused murderer arouses her passion for newsgathering just in the nick of time. You can guess how it all ends.

His Girl Friday was based on a hit play of the era, Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur’s The Front Page. The play is an effective melodrama, climaxing with the jailbreak. In adapting it for the screen, someone had a bright idea. Since it featured a newspaper editor trying to hang onto his star reporter, why not make that reporter a ballsy female, as well as the editor’s former wife? That brilliant stroke foregrounds the interpersonal story, relegating the murderer’s plight to a secondary role. As always, the battle of the sexes makes for boffo cinema.