Review of Ball of Fire, directed by Howard Hawks

If you’re new here, and stumbled upon this blog through the mythical powers of the Internet, welcome! I know a lot of visitors to my website are people who randomly come upon this website through search engines like Google, but I also do have a lot of visitors who come back. Regardless: my name is Ashley, and I started this blog in order to keep track of everything I’m coming across in the world.

I feel like a lot of my blog introductions, especially when it comes to movies, have been lamenting on the fact I don’t have a ton of time lately. I used to work as a film critic (which, in fact, was so incredibly underpaid that I now make more off of this blog’s display ads than I ever did publishing anywhere else), and then when I was in graduate school I was writing a lot about film, so I used to watch so many movies.

But now I work an 8-5, come home, and then doom scroll my evenings away instead of watching the movies I used to love so dearly. And recently I realized I want to stop doing that, so I’ve set limits on my phone and am fully prepared to sit back and watch more movies and read more books in order to feed my brain.

I ended up acquiring a Criterion subscription in order to try and nourish my brain in this way, and I have actually been watching a ton of movies on the Criterion Channel. I feel like I’m never going to get through the entirety of their catalogue in my life, especially considering I’m pretty broke to pay for this every single year—or at least right now.

I’ve been on a kick for pre-1960s movies, and this is one of the movies I’ve watched as of late. I just really like Barbara Stanwyck and this came across my radar at just the right moment. So I pressed play!

Let’s get into the review.

As a group of professors work on an encyclopedia, a nightclub worker teaches them about vocabulary and scenarios they’ve never encountered.

This movie takes place in New York City during the forties, specifically in the home of a group of professors. They’ve all lived together for years and never really date anyone, as they’re all bachelors except one guy whose wife died, and they’ve been dedicating their lives to an encyclopedia on “human knowledge.” They have a housekeeper, Miss Bragg, and they basically just do their research.

The youngest of the bunch is Bertram Potts, who is our protagonist. He’s a grammarian focusing on American slang in the contemporary area. The conflict starts when the financier demands that they finish their work, but when a garbage man comes in, Bertram realizes he has no idea what the slang on the street is right now.

He then does a rare venture outside of the home to conduct his own research, and he ends up meeting Katherine “Sugarpuss” O’Shea. She works as a nightclub performer and uses a bunch of slang he has no idea about, and while she resists helping him out, she realizes he can help her hide out from the police.

Turns out her boyfriend is a mob boss and she needs a place to stay to avoid the cops. She ends up in the house with the other professors, leading to tension, as Bertram doesn’t want her there and the housekeeper keeps threatening to quit. Her mob boss beau decides to marry her to avoid her testifying against him.

With time though the professors warm up to her and she teaches them how to do conga. She also starts falling for Bertram, and he to her, leading to some confessions and him offering to propose. She initially resists that as well, but after some incidents, she realizes that she actually loves him back.

However, her mob boss boyfriend still wants to get married, and she realizes he’ll send his guys after the professors if she refuses to marry him. She proceeds with that marriage, leaving Bertram heartbroken and ready to dive back into research. He does realize she loves him though after some time, leading to the professors to plot a rescue attempt.

They manage to get Sugarpuss out of there, and she denies that she will ever be good enough for Bertram. He uses some vocabulary and actions she taught him earlier in the movie, and she finally agrees to go with him. The movie ends with them being together in the room as the other professors file out.

Overall Thoughts

Well, I came into this movie with little to no expectations, as I had read the simple synopsis on the Criterion website and literally only knew Barbara Stanwyck in it. I thought the premise was really interesting, but it kind of falls flat as a movie.

The pacing was a tad off to me and I thought that it was sliding towards the boring end as we hurtled toward the final conflicts of the movie. It’s a classic screwball, if not one of the more well known ones from this period, but I simply could not get into the humor nor plot. It just didn’t click with me by the end.

I think that someone else might love this movie more than I did though, so if you’re interested in it, give the film a chance. Taste is so incredibly subjective at the end of the day, so if you want to watch movies like these, ignore the negative reviews and give it a chance.

Follow me below on Instagram, Letterboxd, and Goodreads for more.