When I watched BALL OF FIRE (1941) back in January, I mentioned my disappointment I hadn’t watched it with TYG. So this weekend I watched it again, as a date movie, and for comparison with the 1948 remake, A SONG IS BORN.
As I anticipated, she squeezed maximum dirty jokes out of having gangster’s moll “Sugarpuss” O’Shea (Barbara Stanwyck) rooming with Professor Potts (Gary Cooper) and his seven elderly male colleagues, all working together on an encyclopedia. Potts wants Sugarpuss as a source so he can update the section on slang; she needs to hide out until her mobster boyfriend Joe Lilac (Dana Andrews) can arrange a marriage license. She knows stuff the cops want to grill her about but a wife can’t testify against her husband (to be clear, Lilac was already into her, it’s just that the murder rap he’s facing gave him an extra nudge).
In Romantic Comedy, James Harvey argues the appeal of screwball comedy is that characters can stay sharp, cynical and smartass and still get all goofy over a guy (or a dame). Sugarpuss knows “Pottsy” is a stick-in-the-mud, can’t kiss, is corny in his romantic overtures — but after initially wrapping him around her fingers, she can’t help falling for him anyway. What could have been insufferably cutesy and coy turns out a winner. With Dan Duryea as Lilac’s chief gunman and Richard Haydn and SZ Sakall among the professors. “The human heart reminds me of the windflower, also known as the anemone.”
According to Donald C. Willis in Films of Howard Hawks, Hawks remade Ball of Fire in 1948 as A Song Is Born because RKO offered him “a hell of a lot of money.” The big distinction is that Prof. Frisbee (Danny Kaye) and his crew are researching music; when Frisbee discovers his knowledge of popular music stops with ragtime — no swing, no jazz — he rushes out for a crash course and winds up with singer and mobster’s moll Honey (Virginia Mayo) as an unanticipated house guest.
What makes the film worth remaking was that the set-up allows for some great music. Benny Goodman (playing one of the professors who’s also a clarinetist), Tommy Dorsey, Louis Armstrong and a lot of musicians I’ve never heard of — but no question, these cats can swing, man! However Frisbee going from nightclub to nightclub to listen pushes the nominal plot into the background. And where I found it easy to believe Potts was out of touch with everyday slang, for some reason I find it harder to believe in Frisbee not keeping up on popular music (perhaps because it doesn’t require interacting with regular folks — there’s the radio, vinyl discs …).
A bigger problem is that Hawks is fitting Kaye and Mayo into the Cooper and Stanwyck roles and not making any adjustment. Much as I love Danny Kaye, he’d normally play Frisbee as a nervous, ineffective nebbish; instead he has to play a forceful authority figure like Cooper’s Potts and he just can’t do it. Mayo is a competent actor but she doesn’t have any of Stanwyck’s flirtatious flash and confident swagger. Lines that were funny in the first film — Potts calling the housekeeper a “crab apple annie,” showing he’s learning slang — show up here but they aren’t funny without the slang subplot to anchor them. And none of the supporting cast have the vibrancy of Sakall or Duryea (one of the screen’s great sneering thugs, though also good in rare sympathetic roles). I’d say stick with the original, but if you like the music, it might be worth watching. “I’m merely assuming the role of the lover and you, the role of the maiden.”
All rights to images remain with current holders.
