Eight professors have been residing in a mansion for 9 years, compiling an encyclopedia of all human knowledge, sponsored by Miss Totten's late father, the inventor of toast, who was angry that his name was not mentioned in an encyclopedia, so he set out to finance his own encyclopedia with himself in it. The professors arrived to letter S, but the linguist among them, Bertram Potts, who is compiling the section on slang, is shocked that he knows so little new slang words, so he invites a night club singer, Sugarpuss O'Shea, to the mansion to help him with the analysis of jargon. O'Shea really shows up at the mansion, but only to hide from an investigation of her boyfriend, gangster Joe Lilac. Potts falls in love with O'Shea, and proposes her, but she misleads him and only ostensibly accepts the proposal to flee safely to Lilac. Potts is disappointed and returns with his professors to compile encyclopedia, but when Lilac's two henchmen show up, threatening to shoot them unless O'Shea says yes to Lilac's marriage proposal, Potts realizes she really loves him. The professors overrun the two henchmen, and stop the wedding, saving O'Shea from Lilac and allowing her to end up with Potts.
One of Howard Hawks' lesser films, "Ball of Fire" is an amusing and well-paced screwball comedy, offering a rare glimpse inside the long process of scholars trying to compile an encyclopedia, working almost as a modern re-telling of "Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs" (the seven professors, Barbara Stanwyck's character as the Snow White and Gary Cooper's character as her Prince), but it has two problems: for one, it has too many archaic slang terms which were used in 1941, but seem dated today (words such as "hunky-dory" and "skedaddle"); for the other, it is simply not that funny. The screenplay caught the worst traits of Billy Wilder at certain moments, the one of ponderous, "geeky" talk of naive characters, which just go round and round in circles relying too much on the faint notion that all of this will carry the story because it sounds cute. None of the seven professors, for instance, is particularly funny, and just relying on them talk like geeks is kind of empty. The film has two great moments: one is when O'Shea explains to the coiled Potts what the slang "yum-yum" is by kissing him: "Here is yum." She then kisses him again: "Here's the other yum". And then she embraces him so fully, until he falls over backwards: "And here's yum-yum!" The other is when Potts serves breakfest to O'Shea and basically admits that being an intelligent scholar who only has books is lonely: "Dust settles on your heart. And then you came and blew the dust away." While the finale involving gangster Lilac is kind of corny, especially the way the professors overrun him, and the story is somewhat too far-fetched, it ocassionally has witty lines ("Richard ill. Who's Richard ill?") while the two leading actors have charm.
Grade:++
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