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Critics Consensus: A splendidly funny twist on the story of Snow White, Ball of Fire boasts a pair of perfect leads in Gary Cooper and Barbara Stanwyck.
Critic Consensus: A splendidly funny twist on the story of Snow White, Ball of Fire boasts a pair of perfect leads in Gary Cooper and Barbara Stanwyck.
All Critics (26) | Top Critics (6) | Fresh (26) | Rotten (0) | DVD (3)
Ball of Fire came out five days before Pearl Harbor. You can imagine Americans listening to its flood of slang and knowing exactly what they were fighting for.
Actor Cooper plays his Mr. Deeds role with the authority of long familiarity, and Miss Stanwyck (once Ruby Stevens, of Brooklyn) is equally at home in hers.
Casting is meticulously perfect to make every character a caricature of itself.
A delight.
Pure joy.
Mr. Cooper may be a little loose-tooth in spots, but he gives a homespun performance such as only he can give. Miss Stanwyck is plenty yum-yum (meaning scorchy) in her worldly temptress role.
Great, deep, humane, well-built comedy. But throw in Barbara Stanwyck's unbelievable act of character creation, and that's when Ball of Fire becomes its best self.
'I've gone goofy, completely goofy,' Cooper says, as the chaos of slang overwhelms his orderly vocabulary: 'Bim-buggy, slap-happy.' Watching 'Ball of Fire,' you feel similarly liberated.
One of the best screwball comedies.
As the timid professor and burlesque stripper, Cooper and Stanwyck are at the top of their form in Hawks' delectable screwball comedy, based on a witty script from Billy Wilder and Charles Brackett.
After the rush of His Girl Friday, Ball of Fire is a more sedate ride, full of such marvelous passages as the conga line Stanwyck's delectable Sugarpuss teaches the professors.
Does a fine job subverting the Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs children's story.
Gary ("aw shucks m'am!") Cooper leads a collection of every eccentric nerd uncle character actor ever as they attempt to understand how 40's swell cats canoodled the English language through the cypher of OMG sweltering Barbara Stanwyck. Heat ensues, and how! Big fun tiger.
Super Reviewer
A grammarian who is toiling away at an encyclopedia meets a nightclub singer who teaches him slang. In the Hollywood's mind, making a film often involved merely pairing the two right movie stars, actors who would look good together and whose respective markets would overlap. To a large extent, that's even true now (e.g. You've Got Mail and Runaway Bride are re-hashes of couples that worked well in the past). It's like multimillion-dollar match.com. I suspect that's the thinking that went into Ball of Fire. The story is trite and cliche. It's re-telling of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs [sic] -- how cliched can you get? But Gary Cooper and Barbara Stanwyck are delightful, rapping their dialogue in a staccato that often makes classics classic. Overall, it's a fun diversion and easy to predict, but there's a lot to like about Ball of Fire.
Not only is this movie hilarious, unique, and witty, but you learn a lot about slang words too. This movie is really fun, great cast and story and everything, I loved it, and I highly recommend it.
Ah. A dilemma every English dork struggles with. Kinda reminded me of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs but modern. Very cute and funny. Gary Cooper kinda surprised me in this, the only other movie I had seen before this was High Noon, but his refined nature in this was well played. And I loved Barbara Stanwyck, loved her carefree nature in this.
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