Ball of Fire

Joy of learning, as Godard would say, Cartesian screwball. "I shall regret the absence of your keen mind. Unfortunately, it is inseparable from an extremely disturbing body." The project is an encyclopedia funded by the inventor of the electric toaster, slang is the lacking entry, "a living language" in need of further research. Off goes the fusty lexicographer (Gary Cooper) into the dens of lingo, including the hotspot where the showgirl (Barbara Stanwyck) sparkles. "She jives by night, root, zoot and cute to boot." Wanted by the police in connection with her underworld beau (Dana Andrews), she takes refuge with the beguiled professor and his fellow scholars, a collective of elderly brainiacs quite shaken by the bodacious visitor. "I hear you're hiding out with the seven dwarfs." The key sequence has chalk patterns on the floor yielding to Stanwyck leading a conga line through a library, notion into motion into emotion, the Howard Hawks way. The tightness of the Billy Wilder-Charles Brackett screenplay scarcely curbs the director's predilection for chummy digressions, thus "Drum Boogie" on a matchbox simply for the pleasure of a Gene Krupa reprise. "Who am I to give science the brush?" The distinction between "corn" and "baloney" is at the heart of the matter, books between egghead and moll make for a handy footstool. Of the "squirrely cherubs," Henry Travers and S.Z. Sakall get to fire Tommy guns while Richard Haydn evokes Simon in La Chienne for a stammering aria of wistful romance. The Sword of Damocles is brought to bear on hoodlums and the theorem of fisticuffs is made flesh, the wholeness of intellect plus instinct points up the punchline. "My apologies to Professor Freud." Monkey Business turns out to be a closer remake than A Song Is Born. Cinematography by Gregg Toland. With Oskar Homolka, Tully Marshall, Leonid Kinskey, Aubrey Mather, Allen Jenkins, Dan Duryea, Kathleen Howard, Ralph Peters, Mary Field, and Elisha Cook Jr. In black and white.