Ball of Fire

Ball of Fire has everything anyone could want in a movie: gangsters, dames, car chases, fist fights, and English professors. There's even a production number.

I know: I had you at "English professors." But wait - there's more! Barbara Stanwyck (CDNW) plays the dame, the star of a singin' and dancin' review who can neither sing nor dance, but who has more charisma than just about any actress of her day. [NOTE: Stanwyck came up as a chorus girl in the Ziegfield Follies. I can only assume that the wooden performance she gives during the number is intentional: suggesting, perhaps, that the character didn't get the job on talent alone, if ya know what I mean.] Gary Cooper plays the professor, and his job is to stumble around and act like a bookish innocent who happens to be the best-looking guy in the room.

So, what do they do? Well, Stanwyck's in trouble with the mob and she needs a place to hide out. Taking advantage of Cooper's innocence, she wiles her way into his academic sanctuary. The sanctuary is a New York mansion which Cooper shares with his colleagues in a decades-long effort to write a new encyclopedia, but don't pay too much attention to the mechanics. All you really need to know is that she's Snow White and Cooper & pals are the dwarves.

Naturally, Stanwyck and Cooper fall in love. This is inevitable because (a) who wouldn't fall in love with Barbara Stanwyck, and (b) chicks dig English majors. But, of course, he doesn't know that she's using him, the mobsters are going to have to come for her eventually, and all kinds of other complications must ensue before we get to the kiss and the credits.

And that's fine, and sufficiently madcap. Howard Hawks directed the picture, Billy Wilder co-wrote it, and Gregg Toland (hot off of Citizen Kane) filmed it, so you know Ball of Fire looks great and the jokes hit and everything works. The real revelation here (assuming you haven't seen the transcendent The Lady Eve) is Stanwyck, who is absolutely luminous as the bad girl with a good girl's heart. (Note to impressionable young English majors: in reality, bad girls have bad girls' hearts - that's why they're bad girls.) If you only know the actress as the matriarch in The Big Valley or as Evil with a capital E in Double Indemnity, stand by. The film's named appropriately - she really is a ball of fire.

So there you have it. With a fun story, slick production, and extraordinary performance from one of cinema's greatest stars, Ball of Fire is everything you could want from a night at the movies. I might just watch it again right now.

[NOTE:  Thanks to Thor Klippert for pointing out the Toland connection!]

Ace in the Hole

Billy Wilder's ACE IN THE HOLE is so nasty that I couldn't find a way in to the movie. Watching ACE IN THE HOLE, I felt like I was stuck on a long trip with an insufferable companion. As the third act slowly hove into view, I couldn't wait for it to end.

ACE IN THE HOLE begins with Kirk Douglas, all braggadocio and desperate self-assurance, hustling for work in a smalltime Albuquerque newspaper. He lands the job and settles in to wait for the Big Story that'll get him back to the big time, where he think he belongs. The problem is, I didn't buy him as a newspaperman. I didn't buy him as the kind of guy who'd have the patience to gut it out in the minor leagues. Frankly, I didn't buy him as a human being. When I saw him, I saw only Kirk Douglas hamming it up.

But Douglas gets his break in the form of Richard Benedict, a poor sap who gets stuck in a cave-in while scavenging for Indian relics. Douglas milks the story for all its worth, and the resulting media circus is the real heart of this movie. Problem is, I didn't buy Benedict, either. He plays his character, Leo Mimosa, as too pious, too loving, too simple, too everything. It's as if the movie is part of the circus, building an image of a man who can't exist.

ACE IN THE HOLE may have much to say about human nature, the news media, and life in general. But it clangs its bell so loudly that all I wanted to do was plug my ears. I never thought I'd see a Billy Wilder movie I didn't like. ACE IN THE HOLE proves that there's a first time for everything.

Stalag 17

STALAG 17 is one of those pictures that I knew I was supposed to see, that I knew I was eventually going to see, and that, frankly, I was really looking forward to seeing. How did it fare? Not too well. STALAG 17 is a movie that, for me, lands in the "just ok" file.

STALAG 17 can't figure out what kind of movie it wants to be. Is it a psychological thriller? A buddy movie? A comedy? A critique of capitalism? I don't know. Neither, I suspect, did Billy Wilder, the fellow behind this picture.

There's a spy among the POWs in a German camp, and suspicion falls on Sgt. Sefton (William Holden), a selfish, unfeeling dealer who seems to know all the angles. Sounds great, right? As a study of suspicion and fear, I think it could have been. Problem is, as soon as it grabs us, the movie shifts its attention to Animal and Sugar Lips (Robert Strauss and Harvey Lembeck), a comic-relief pair of buddies who appear to be direct cinematic forebears of Timon and Pumbaa. These caricatures are so broadly drawn that they yank me out of the movie every time they're onscreen, and they're onscreen a lot. Just when I'm ready to submit, however, and play along with their little jokes, I'm confronted with the amazing self-centeredness of Sgt. Sefton, a man who cares only about the bigger, better deal. He sobers me right up every time. This constant whipsawing between various tones kept me off balance. Consequently, I couldn't immerse myself in the universe of the film.

Holden's Sgt. Sefton is a selfish, nasty, cruel, totally unlikeable and totally unsympathetic son of a bitch. That we care about him anyway is a testament to the amazing performance on display here. As we see him go from self-imposed isolation to group-imposed isolation, we see just how much of his disdain is a front, hiding his desperate need for respect. When he finally makes his play, we cheer him on, even though we know he has a lot more in common with Ken Lay than with any of us. Holden's performance is 100% gold, I tell ya, and it redeems the whole picture.

Double Indemnity

Double Indemnity has been on my Netflix queue forever. Actually, it's been sitting in the "pending release" portion, as no one had been willing to pony up for a DVD release. Finally, Turner Classic Movies stepped up and released a beautiful print of the film. It was worth the wait.

Not only does Double Indemnity look great, it sounds great. Billy Wilder and Raymond Chandler put together a cracking good script with quotable lines, and Fred MacMurray and Barbara Stanwyck deliver them with gusto. This is a fun movie in a couple of ways.

Here's the setup: Fred MacMurray is morally flexible insurance man Walter Neff. While making a routine sales call, he meets Barbara Stanwyck, who plays Phyllis Dietrichson. It's a classic Stanwyck performance: she's sexy, she's hard-edged, and, oh, she's bad news as only Chandler can imagine bad news. Before long, Walter's masterminding a complex insurance scam / murder plot, but it won't be long before everything goes awry. I'm not giving anything away, incidentally - the movie begins with a shot and bleeding Walter confessing to a dictaphone.

Since, like Sunset Blvd., Double Indemnity begins by giving away the fate of its protagonist, the question isn't whether the movie will surprise and astonish us. The question is whether it'll make us enjoy the journey. Will it? Well, it depends. Do you like noir? Do you like, MacMurray, Stanwyck, and Edward G. Robinson? More simply, do you like movies? If you can answer "yes" to any of the above, I bet you'll like Double Indemnity.

EDIT: A friend who works for TCM assures me that this DVD was a Universal, not TCM project from the get-go. I was thrown off by the film's introduction, which features Robert Osbourn on the TCM set. I must still have been thinking about that anklet.