Critics reviews

Ball of Fire doesn't always reach the same heights of hilarious Hawks perfection as Twentieth Century (1934), Bringing Up Baby, and His Girl Friday (1940), and Wilder was at his most proficient when directing his own scripts, yet all involved are doing what they do best. Even if it isn't the finest example of their individual strengths, there is still much to appreciate about this delightfully silly entry into the screwball subgenre. With all of this talent, how could there not be?

Not as well-known as some other Howard Hawks films, Ball of Fire, starring Gary Cooper as the nerdy linguistics professor (only in Hollywood ) and Barbara Stanwyck as the wise-cracking two-bit showgirl Sugarpuss O'Shea is one of my favorite Hawks films. It has all the familiar Hawks-ian elements: men doing manly stuff in a masculine cloister, a cloister disrupted by a compelling wise-cracking dame who livens the mood, bringing the possibility of sex with her.

The patter that flows forth whenever some regular Joe flaps his jaws is a wonder to hear. Garbagemen and waiters, pool hall bums and showgirls, newsboys and college boys — they're all virtuosos singing the wisecracking arias Wilder and Brackett have given them.

Ball of Fire is not Howard Hawks' best comedy. Compared with the director's greatest achievements within the genre, Twentieth Century (1934),Bringing Up Baby (1938), His Girl Friday (1940), and Monkey Business (1952), it lacks many of the elements that have become synonymous with the Hawks comedy such as frantic pacing and rapid-fire dialogue... Despite its status as a different type of Hawks comedy, Ball of Fire remains a solid work with signs of the director's growing maturity as an artist.

[Sugarpuss'] dawning love for Pottsie is so perfectly calibrated it's like watching a thermostat turned up notch by notch. Her attack of late-movie remorse over having deceived Pottsie is delivered with one line, "a tramp," spoken in a way that tells more than her tears seconds later. In a movie stacked with some of Hollywood's greatest character actors, one gorgeous future leading man and one eternal legend, Stanwyck still carries the whole thing.

After the rush of His Girl Friday, Ball of Fire is a more sedate ride, full of such marvelous passages as the conga line Stanwyck's delectable Sugarpuss teaches the professors; ultimately, the film's optimistic integration of intellectual and physical impulses lends it a feeling of wholeness (greatly aided by Gregg Toland's deep-focus cinematography) closer to Hawks's later, more serene films than to his breathless early comedies.

Marvellous performance from Stanwyck, all snap, crackle and pop as the brassy nightclub entertainer Sugarpuss O'Shea... Rather surprisingly, Hawks slightly muffs the sequence in which the gangster and his aides get their comeuppance; otherwise his handling of the sparkling Brackett-Wilder script and its subversions of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs is pure joy.

Howard Hawks's 1941 version of "Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs" is a delight, as showgirl Barbara Stanwyck moves in with seven prissy professors (headed by Gary Cooper) who are compiling a dictionary of slang. Far superior to Hawks's 1948 remake, A Song Is Born.