Goodness, Gracious, Great . . .

While watching a Billy Wilder documentary that accompanied Ace in the Hole, I was reminded that Wilder and Charles Brackett had done the screenplay for Howard Hawks's screwball comedy Ball of Fire. Since that was in my stack of DVDs-to-be-watched, I pulled it out and had a wonderful couple of hours watching a movie in which an English professor gets to be the romantic lead--and played by Gary Cooper, no less.

Of course, much of the comedy lies in listening to the normally laconic Cooper deliver the professor's sesquipedalian verbiage in his clipped bursts; much of the rest lies in the gulf between the slang that Cooper's character is trying to nail down and his own vocabulary, as well as that of the other seven dwarfs--I mean, professors. (The resemblance of its plot to that of Snow White is intentional; "Heidy Ho!" says Barbara Stanwyck as she greets the professors). Some of this humor must have flown in under the censors' radar, as Cooper explains the slang etymology of "Sugarpuss" O'Shea's first name as referring to her face, while those with more lecherous minds muse upon a more venereal location.

What was surprising--and also delightful--about the movie was its cinematography by Gregg Toland. He employs his deep-focus technique very effectively, such as in the still above, with Cooper and Stanwyck in the foreground, three professors in varying degrees in the middle distance, and one sneaking down the stairs in the background--all clearly in focus. The scene in which Coooper first mentions his attraction to Stanwyck is even more striking: Cooper confesses this attraction just as he is about to throw her out, that he particularly noticed her the previous day when she was standing in the window and the light hit her hair. Stanwyck moves back a few feet until she is framed by the window, and poof! it glows. No CGI, just a knowledge of light, lenses, and film, and how to combine them.

Wilder said that after he wrote the script, he hung around the set to watch Hawks direct the film, a kind of "working vacation." Wilder admitted that he became a director to have ultimate control over his scripts, and told the anecdote about Charles Boyer and the cockroach again ("If he won't talk to the cockroach, the sonovabitch won't talk to anybody!"). But he also said that he became a director because that's where the fun in movie-making is. Writing, he tells the interviewer, is, "to quote Winston Churchill, 'blood, sweat, and tears.'"

Amen, Billy.