Synopsis
Ball of Fire (1941) is a screwball comedy you can watch online on iFILM, directed by Howard Hawks and written by Billy Wilder and Charles Brackett before they teamed up on Sunset Boulevard.
Eight linguists have spent years locked in a mansion compiling a definitive encyclopedia. Professor Potts (Gary Cooper) discovers his entry on slang is three decades out of date and ventures out — straight into a nightclub. There he meets Sugarpuss O'Shea (Barbara Stanwyck), a sharp-tongued singer with reasons of her own to disappear from the police and her gangster boyfriend. She brings street vocabulary; the professors provide bewilderment.
Hawks quietly built the whole story as a Snow White riff — seven befuddled academics and one very dangerous woman. The Wilder-Brackett script crackles in a way that lands just as well today. Stream Ball of Fire (1941) online on iFILM.
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