Like the men in the photo above, I'm in love with Barbara Stanwyck.
I watched the 1941 Howard Hawks comedy Ball of Fire last night and was once again struck by how versatile, funny, and sexy she was.
Ball of Fire is the story of a group of professors working to write a new encyclopedia. They live together, eat together, take their morning constitutional together, and are basically isolated from regular life as they pursue their goal. When an errant garbage man makes his way into their gloomy mansion, the group's resident gramarian, Professor Bertram Potts (convincingly played by Gary Cooper), realizes his encyclopedia entry on slang is dated and useless. He determines to go out into public to do some research and, among other places, he ends up at a nightclub where the singer Sugarpuss O'Shea is performing the song "Drum Boogie" with the Gene Krupa Orchestra. Potts is fascinated with O'Shea and asks her to be part of his roundtable discussion on slang. O'Shea brushes him off but later decides to not only take him up on his offer but to take up residence in the mansion. O'Shea is the girlfriend of the gangster Joe Lilac and she finds that she needs to hide out for a few days while the cops are looking for her because they want her to testify against Lilac.
So the professor and the showgirl end up in the same house along with seven hilarious professors whose adoration of Sugarpuss is, without question, the comedic highlight of the entire movie. Comedy and star-crossed love ensue. It's a very sweet, very funny movie and I enjoyed it a lot.
3 comments:
After all the denouncing reviews of HSM3 on the Family Blog, it is good to read a positive suggestion for the "rental of the weekend". Who could not love a character named "Sugarpuss" ?
And who could play her in the remake ? (Or has there been a remake ?) Who, nowadays, pulls off what Stanwyck and Lombard and Colbert used to be so expert at ? Maybe Meryl ?
You know, it seems to me that actresses these aren't required to do the same things they were back then. Meryl Streep is a terrific actress without question but it seems like these days, you're either a great thespian (like Meryl) or you're a sex bomb (like Angelina). Actresses back then had to be engaging, interesting, enticing, and fun - without the "advantage" of being half (or completely) naked. They had to be magnetic all on their own - and I don't really know who does that these days. I'm sure there are some - but who? Who can command the audience's attention with just her presence these days?
Howard Hawks remade this film as "A Song Is Born" with Danny Kaye and Virginia Mayo in 1948. It's premise dealt with jazz music and Kaye and his nerdy musicology professor cohorts all fall in love with Virginia Mayo, a nightclub singer who's engaged to a creepy gangster played by the awesome Steve Cochran. It's not nearly as good as the original but is still worthwhile because a few jazz greats are in the film including Tommy Dorsey, Lionel Hampton, Louis Armstrong, Charlie Barnet and Benny Goodman (playing one of the professors). Not a great film, but it has some great scenes and I kind of love it. :)
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