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!]

Sergeant York

hagiography, noun, pl. -phies.
1. the writing of saints' lives.
2. a book about saints' lives.
3. (Figurative.) a biography that adulates or idolizes its subject.

Sergeant Alvin York won the Medal of Honor in WWI for killing 22 Germans and forcing 132 others to surrender in battle in the Argonne Forest. French Marshal Ferdinand Foch called it "the greatest thing accomplished by any private soldier of all the armies of Europe." Hollywood told his story in 1941, just as America was gearing up for another go at the Germans.

Gary Cooper played the titular soldier, a man who sought conscientious objector status but rogered up when his application was denied. Though hampered by clunky dialogue (“I’m’a tellin’ ya that I’m’a gonna marry ya!”), Cooper gamely played the wide-eyed innocent, relying on the same bag of tricks he’d later use in PRIDE OF THE YANKEES. He does a fine job of giving us the sinner turned saint turned hero, and he’s aided by the great Walter Brennan in the role of backwoods pastor.

But there’s a problem with SERGEANT YORK. I fired up this movie expecting a WWI drama. What I got was a roughly 1.8-hr celebration of rural Tennessee wrapped around a brief military interlude. While I understand that I was watching a hagiography, I’d have been very interested to learn about how backwoodsmen like York fit into the Army culture of the WWI era. The more I think about it, the more this movie makes me want to see a modern retelling of York’s story. What was it like that day in the Argonne? How did York adjust to his status of national hero (This version tells us that he shrugged it off and went back to farming.)? Who was this guy?

On second thought, I don’t think a movie can answer all my questions about this interesting character. I’m off to the library.

El Dorado

John Wayne. Robert Mitchum. James Cann. Howard Hawks in the director's chair. EL DORADO has so much testosterone, I'm growing hair on my knuckles just typing this.

EL DORADO is the second of Hawks' and Wayne's three varations on the same story, told also in RIO BRAVO and RIO LOBO. In this iteration, John Wayne's a hired gun come to town to sell his services to one Ed Asner, a rancher involved in a local range war. Robert Mitchum's the sheriff and trusted friend who warns Wayne that he's signing up with the wrong side. Western Stuff ensues.

The problem with John Wayne movies is that the actor often blows his coworkers off the screen. In Robert Mitchum, Hawks found a man that could hold his own with Wayne, one that audiences can believe isn't just his friend but his peer. The casting choice adds that much more punch to the unexpected and delightful tonal shift that marks the beginning of the second act. I'd never seen Mitchum do slapstick before, and I'd never have guessed that the man had the power to make me laugh out loud. The impossibly young James Cann acquits himself well in the heartthrob role, getting in enough of moments of genuine toughness to show us what the film's grizzled vets may have seen in this greenhorn. As for the rest of the cast, well, they're just fine: Asner snarls, Christopher George is a principled competing gunman, and Michele Carey defies gravity as the courageous daughter of the good-guy rancher.

I noticed that Edith Head designed the costumes for this picture, by the way. I suspect she had loads of fun because while these people wear clothes that'd never work in the real West, they sure look great.

I've been in the mood for a solid western for some time now. EL DORADO filled the bill.

His Girl Friday

While viewing HIS GIRL FRIDAY, I had forgotten that it was an adaptation of a play. I'm glad I remembered, because I now know that my fervent wish to see this show performed onstage stands a good chance of being fulfilled.

This is the kind of movie that makes you want run out and buy the screenplay so you can savor every line. It's the kind of movie that has such a great story, such wonderful characters, and such excellent dialogue that you want to see how other productions might handle the material. You may suspect that you'll never again see it done as well as Grant, Russell, Bellamy, and Hawks, but you don't mind - this script is just that much fun.

Grant, as one of the biggest movie stars of his century, gets most of the notice in this production. His editor is charismatic, charming, potentially sociopathic, and an absolute riot. But Rosalind Russell's portrayal of Hildy Johnson -well, it's revelatory. Russell dominates every scene she's in, delivering a hurricane of a performance that combines sly wit with calulated manipulation with raw human power. This is, quite simply, one of the best performances ever committed to film.
Ralph Bellamy plays a wonderful Baxter, bringing the kind of hapless innocence to the proceedings that makes us root for him even though we know he never has chance.

Howard Hawks, of course, does what Howard Hawks does: get top-notch work out of top-notch actors, directing with a sure hand and delivering pure cinema gold. What else would you expect from the guy who made BALL OF FIRE, RIO BRAVO, and GENTLEMEN PREFER BLONDES?

The more I think about this movie, the more I like it. Now, if I can just find a production of THE FRONT PAGE in my town ...