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134 Wilder/Stanwyck Ball฀of฀Fire,฀Double฀Indemnity Before moving to direction, Billy Wilder, like Preston Sturges, turned out a lot of screenplays (Wilder’s were usually co-written with Charles Brackett). A prickly Austro-Hungarian refugee from Germany, Wilder’s smart-aleck voice as a writer comes through loud and clear in his scripts for Ernst Lubitsch and Mitchell Leisen. Wilder had a weakness for lines of often-questionable taste; Lubitsch and Leisen could put some of these lines over, but not all. For instance, when Greta Garbo’s Soviet commissar is asked about the Moscow show trials in Lubitsch’s Ninotchka (1939), she solemnly intones that “there will be fewer but better Russians.” It’s a line that aims to get a gasp and then a bit of a laugh, a sort of stiletto jab, and it works. But then there’s the moment in Leisen’s Arise,฀My฀Love (1940) when a man says that he’s anxious to get to war with Germany because, “I’ve always wanted to drop something on Hamburg after getting ptomaine from that hamburger.” This isn’t even remotely funny, or interesting, or anything. It’s just a miscalculation of tone. You never know which Wilder you’re going to get in these early scripts or in his later movies. There’s the man who completely understood Gloria Swanson’s demented silent screen relic Norma Desmond in Sunset฀Boulevard (1950) and the changing gender mores of Some฀Like฀It฀Hot (1959), and then there’s the clod whose camera tours the ruins of Berlin in A฀Foreign฀Affair (1948) to the strains of “Isn’t It Romantic?” and who torments Ray Milland’s drunk for showy fun in The฀Lost฀Weekend (1945). To quote his old boss, Samuel Goldwyn, with Wilder you have to take the bitter with the sour. Critical opinion on Wilder has always fluctuated, mainly because it hinges on these highly subjective questions of taste, on deciding when w i l d e r / s ta n w y C k 135 he goes too far or when he doesn’t go far enough. For the first movie he wrote for Stanwyck, Ball฀of฀Fire฀(1941), Wilder gleefully stresses what he sees as the vulgarity in her character, and she rises to the bait while maintaining an untouchable sort of shrewdness. Whatever his faults, Wilder had a keen talent for coming up with character names, and he gives Stanwyck a doozy here: Sugarpuss O’Shea, a gangster’s moll forced to take it on the lam with a cadre of professors working on an encyclopedia. There are seven of these old profs, just like the seven dwarfs, plus one young grammarian, Bertram Potts (Gary Cooper), who needs Sugarpuss to teach him the ins and outs of modern slang, the boogie woogie, the hoi toi toi, the corny and the cheesy. Potts too is well named, and his last name means that Sugarpuss gets to call him Pottsie, reminiscent of Stanwyck ’s name for Fonda, “Hopsie,” in the vastly superior The฀Lady฀Eve, which had been such a hit earlier in the year. Cooper’s character name thus feels like a nudge reminding people of another movie they liked. Ball฀of฀Fire is nothing if not commercial. Stanwyck received her second Academy Award nomination as best actress for Ball฀of฀Fire (it really should have been for Eve, but the academy members had Ball฀of฀Fire more freshly situated in their minds), so it has pride of place in her filmography. While she’s somewhere near her best in it—and certainly as sexy as she’d ever be in a movie—Ball฀of฀Fire is a flawed film, and there are several reasons why it never quite comes together . It runs one hundred and eleven minutes, which is rather lengthy for such a slim subject, and it has several scenes that go on far too long— especially a sequence where Dan Duryea’s hood, Pastrami, is holding the professors hostage and they slowly work toward getting a heavy portrait to fall on his head. Pastrami starts shooting things in their room at random, hitting a flower vase that explodes right next to the camera. This ostentatious shot is a good example of another problem here: Gregg Toland’s deep focus photography seems much more suited to a somber melodrama like The Little฀Foxes (which he shot the same year). So many of Toland’s shots are simply too...

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