Movie Quote of the Day (Gary Cooper, Unnerved by Barbara Stanwyck)

Professor Bertram Potts (played by Gary Cooper): “Make no mistake, I shall regret the absence of your keen mind. Unfortunately, it is inseparable from an extremely disturbing body.”—Ball of Fire (1941), written by Charles Brackett and Billy Wilder, based on an original story by Wilder and Thomas Monroe, directed by Howard Hawks

Today marks the 70^th anniversary of the release of Ball of Fire, which came toward the end of Hollywood’s magnificent screwball-comedy era. Five days later, Pearl Harbor would be bombed, and once Hollywood was done with its propaganda products and home-front dramas, it began to explore in earnest a genre it only began to touch this year, in The Maltese Falcon: film noir that reflected a newfound understanding of man’s darkest impulses. The world would never look so bright again.
 
Ball of Fire would be the last film that Billy Wilder, chafing under the restrictions placed on his work by the men behind the camera, would make only as a screenwriter. The following year, The Major and the Minor began his nearly 40-year career as a director. In the meantime, he convinced the studio to allow him to observe the work of Howard Hawks, whose films he greatly admired.

For all the fast-and-furious action that Hawks packed into this two-hour film about a “nightclub singer” holing up with a group of linguistic professors to avoid police questioning about her mobster boyfriend, the film really can be seen as one long wink to the audience. 

Even the quote marks in that prior sentence represent a raised eyebrow. Barbara Stanwyck’s “nightclub singer” is a stripper, one of two she would play in her long, illustrious career (the other being Lady of Burlesque, based on a mystery by Gypsy Rose Lee, whose pretensions as an intellectual exotic dancer were mocked by lyricist Lorenz Hart in the musical Pal Joey.)

The more knowing members of the audience would also catch on to the film's central satiric premise,  seven professors studying slang centered around one brassy female with an especially vivid sense of it--Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, if you will. 

And Hollywood insiders were probably beside themselves guffawing over box-office champion Gary Cooper--so laconic that Art Buchwald, in one of his funniest early columns, used the actor’s characteristic “nopes” and “yups” to respond to Coop’s own questions--as the chief linguistics professor. (How Cooper got around the formal, polysyllabic but hilarious lines above, addressed to Stanwyck, can only be imagined.)

And how can you not find a place in your heart for a stripper named Sugarpuss O’Shea?

The queen of film bloggers, Self-Styled Siren, has a characteristically astute analysis of what made this film so worthwhile here.