Cinema Seminar:
Ball of Fire
Few stories are so compelling a director wants to shoot them twice, but this one makes the list. Remade seven years later as the musical A Song is Born, Ball of Fire (1941) is one of Howard Hawks’s wildest screwball comedies. The story of eight professors writing an encyclopedia and the burlesque girl who gives meaning to their work, the film addresses the complexities of class, gender, language, and performance, all while having a spectacularly good time.
This seminar situates the film among Hawks’s other comedies such as Bringing Up Baby and His Girl Friday, speaking to his interest in witty dialogue as a precursor to romance. We will talk about the place of the screwball in early-1940s American life, acknowledging the film’s other contributors, such as the masterful writers Charles Brackett and Billy Wilder, drummer Gene Krupa (who performs a remarkable number with a box of matches), and cinematographer Gregg Toland, who came to the picture fresh off Citizen Kane. We will examine the star persona of Barbara Stanwyck, who had spent the early 1920s as a chorus girl not too dissimilar from the role she plays here, but in 1941 was Hollywood’s reigning comedy queen, starring in The Lady Eve and Meet John Doe in addition to this film.
We will also consider the fairytale elements of the movie’s plot and ask what critics gained from comparing it to Snow White. Finally, we’ll discuss cinematic depictions of the film’s key oppositional groups—intellectuals and gangsters—to think about how these stereotypes have framed our understanding of masculinity and contributed to great moments in American comedy. Overall, the seminar will show how the right combination of individual creative energies produced a feature greater than the sum of its parts.
