Platicsco Good story, Not enough for a whole film

Supelice Dreadfully Boring

Joanna Mccarty Amazing worth wacthing. So good. Biased but well made with many good points.

Jemima It's a movie as timely as it is provocative and amazingly, for much of its running time, it is weirdly funny.

lasttimeisaw Howard Hawks' emblematic screwball comedy germinates from the wheeze of Billy Wilder when the latter was still in Germany, it is the quintessential coupling of the pedantic and the sultry, Gary Cooper plays Prof. Bertram Potts, a grammarian who is leading a group of eight scholars compiling and collating an encyclopedia, when a sultry nightclub performer Sugarpuss O'Shea (Stanwyck) takes shelter in their residence in NYC, who indeed is the gun moll of mob boss Joe Lilac (Andrews), the rest is written in the stone although it takes a tortuous route to reach its feel-good finish line. Less loquacious and rapid-fire than Howard's BRINGING UP BABY (1938), BALL OF FIRE points up the mine of vernacular in lieu of verbal rebuttal between the opposite sexes, it is during Prof. Potts' field trip to collect current lexicon of slang when he is swept off his feet by a bling-bling Sugarpuss, performing DRUM BOOGIE with Gene Krupa and his orchestra, accentuated by the bandleader's killing drum solo and an ingenious miniature encore with matches. They are two different kettles of fish, a stuffy bachelor vs. a pragmatic siren, a mismatch rarely can make their way out in real life, and that's what enthralls even today's audience, to watch something profoundly absurd but innocuously entertaining without its story being dumb-ed down or defamed by crass jokes pandering to the lowest common denominator is almost too good to be true.Also, the star appeal is in high voltage, Cooper is not just a too handsome specimen in a button- down suit, he also makes the shtick of doing everything with proprieties look effortless and goofy; an Oscar-nominated Stanwyck benefits from an earthier temperament and layers of inner conflicts deviled by her sapio-sexual conversion, is at her best when she retains her phlegm before impishly doling out her "yum yum" to a gawky virgin, which catches him unawares. Another fount of joy comes from the riff on Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, as the other 7 professors grows an unanimous affinity to Sugarpuss, to the dismay of the stern housemaid Miss Bragg (Howard), and among them, the only widower is the botanist Prof. Oddly, Richard Haydn brings about a love-ably prissy mannerism that steals the limelight in the well-orchestrated crunch when the group has to outmaneuver Joe's two pistol-wielding henchmen.In short, considerably more accessible and more laid-back than BRINGING UP BABY, BALL OF FIRE excels in conflating different genre fodder (comedy, musical, gangster) into a helluva ride of a modern fairy-tale, and runs away with our affection on a moment's notice.

Edgar Allan Pooh . . . but BALL OF FIRE offers the next best thing as Gene Krupka "drums" with a pair of matchsticks! FIRE opens with an octet of time-traveling research scientists plopped down like a Bunch out of BRIGADOON, exploring New York City's Central Park for The Jogger's Real Killer. Appalled that the UNBORN Racist Putin Sock Puppet Rump wants to lynch THE USUA! SUSPECTS as he golfs with O.J., the eight professors work feverishly to conjure up an antidote to the COMING STORM of Hep Cat One Per Centers. Miss Totten might be a LADY, but Sugarpuss O'Shea brags about being a TRAMP. "Shove in your clutch!" she counsels a younger Rump years before any ACE$$ H0LLYWOOD TAPES existed (23:50). Resist the "nude shoulders" for the cold ones, Sugarpuss preemptively warns Rump against barging into rooms full of terrified teen "Beauty Pageanteers" in the buff on Moscow's KGB closed circuit TV channel (27:50). "Don't tell me the Jam Session has beat off without Baby," Sugarpuss cautions Rump about the Sticky Wicket seated along side him on the plane (31:10). Lawyers attest that "He gets more Bang out of you than anyone else he's known" in the Biblical Sense, trying to reach into the Future to redact that divorce court bit documenting marital sexual assault upon the Second Lady (48:05). If only the young Rump were a Cinema Buff, BALL OF FIRE could have wised him up before Push came to Shove!

jakob13 They do not make romantic comedies in the Preston Sturges mold anymore. And they probably won't even with the best of intentions. 'Ball of Fire', made a year after Sturges' 'Christmas in July' is a better film, and in a way formulaic of other of the filmmaker's comedies during the years of world war II. Barbara Stanwyck is the nightclub singer Sugarpuss O'Shea. She is a ball of fire and when she sings 'Boogie Woogie' accompanied by a big band drummer and a great jazz musician, you know you've hit pay dirt. The immovable object is Gary Cooper with the improbable, stuffy name of Bertram Potts--at first--straight laced, ivory tower compiler of a dictionary with as colleagues straight out of Hollywood wonderful array of colorful characters. These lexicographers live in splendid isolation, in a Brownstone house off of New York's fashionable Fifth Avenue near Central Park. Its a character of aw shucks me! that he will reprise in other romantic comedies with Stanwyck and later Jean Arthur. Potts has put eight years or so collecting American slang which soon appears outdated when he meets a garbage man who speaks hip slang that he doesn't understand. And so he ventures out of his comfortable, endowed position to a world he never suspected. And he finds himself in a night club where O'Shea wiggling hips, shimming and showing a pair of legs knocks him for a loop. He invites her to come to a group of slang speakers he has assembled during his wanderings in working class New York. She demurs. As in all romantic comedies, it turns out she's the squeeze of a gangster Joe Lilac, played with quiet menace by Dana Andrews before he broke through in 'Laura' or 'The Best Years of Our Lives'. As his right arm is the young Dan Duryea, who is less a villain than comic relief. Standwyck is wanted by the police because of pyjamas she gave to Lilac, and like a summer storm she shows up in a den of lonely bachelors who play their tasks in the dry lore of churning out a dictionary on sex, slang, climate, geography, plants and flowers and the like. Her presence brings out the playful inner child locked inside each and everyone of them. And so at a good tempo the comedy hums along...Look for 'Ball of Fire' on YouTube, it won't disappoint. SZ Skall is subdued in slapping his cheeks, Oscar Homulka and Leonid Kinsky and Henry Travis come through fine, and Richard Hayden, a widower, speaks in a pinched nosed voice which he would bring to his role as the nosy neighbor in 'Mr. Belvedere' a few years later. You have to hand it to the Studio System that honed the talents, major and minor, of the actors in 'Ball of Fire'. As for Stawyck, she already had an Academy Award, but she never shied away for any role that came her way. You've to see her in the film version of Gypsy Rose Lee's murder mystery, 'The G String Murder', for snappy dialogue and fast pace timing that she admirably shows in 'Ball of Fire'.

binapiraeus An eccentric, out-of-this-world group of scientists have been working for nine years now on a huge encyclopedia which is supposed to be complete and entirely up-to-date; until the youngest of them, Professor Potts, the philologist, after a short talk with the garbage man finds out that his article about slang is COMPLETELY outdated - because he used old books about the slang words of the last generations instead of listening to today's real-life people... And that's exactly what he decides to do: to leave their secluded study for once, to go out and gather new slang words and people who are liable to know a LOT more of them - and one of them is nightclub singer Sugarpuss O'Shea (Barbara Stanwyck); and very soon he becomes not only romantically involved with her, but also PRETTY unromantically with her gangster friends...One of the very FOREMOST examples of the classic screwball comedy, this movie is a perfect example for its genre from the first to the last minute; directing and writing are 'super-duper', as Professor Potts' helpers from the street would say - and the performances, EVERY single one of them, are simply outstanding: Cooper and Stanwyck, the mobsters with Dana Andrews and Dan Duryea as leaders, and of course the lovable elderly professors who are so much wrapped up with their work - until Sugarpuss brings a breath of fresh air into their lives! This is certainly one of the movies that everybody can watch over and over again without ever getting tired of it - and it's one of the most IDEAL movies for the purpose of bringing classic black-and-white movies which today's kids find 'old-fashioned' closer to them and awake an interest in classic cinema in them; a great masterpiece of comedy that will get generations to come to die laughing!!