Here’s what I know. It’s fate. It has to be. In the 1941 classic film, Ball of Fire, Barbara Stanwyck and Gary Cooper play a mismatched couple.  And yet they fall in love. How could it be otherwise? How could Sugarpuss O’Shea (Stanwyck), a charming night club singer, not fall for Bertram Potts (Cooper), a serious linguistics scholar who is “investigating” slang for an encyclopedia article.   

And how can he not yearn for Sugarpuss O’Shea, who teaches him to loosen up and boogie while she is more or less on the lam.  She teaches him slang like “corny” and” “slaphappy.” More important, she teaches him what “yum-yum” means.  (More about that later.)

Have you ever heard of this film?  Well, I had not. It’s one of the joys of YouTube, discovering old moves with great actors and brilliant scripts, films that were probably stuck in the equivalent of card catalogues until somebody rediscovered or decided to release them.

And, yes, it is the best movie I’ve seen this year.  One can hardly count Dune 2 as a movie, which I did see in a theater.

I am a fan of Barbara Stanwyck.  I believe my mother imitated her hairdo for several years.  But the only Barbara Stanwyck film I have seen besides Ball of Fire is Christmas in Connecticut, based loosely on Gladys Taber’s columns about country life.  Barbara Stanwyck plays a New York columnist who writes about the country without actually living there.  Charming, funny, and I watch it even when it’s not Christmas.

In Ball of Fire, the encyclopedists charm us with their air of smart bafflement. Professor Potts is a staid grammarian who, with seven aging bachelor scholar assistants, referred to flippantly as “the seven dwarfs,”  has been working for several years on an encyclopedia.  Everything is timed: their daily exercise, meals, work, and they go to bed at 9. Some of them sigh and wish they could stay up later.

In the dusty, book-lined room where they work, with tall piles of books on the floor and papers everywhere, the scholars are up to volume S, and, as Potts says with a gleam in his eye, “Only three years left!”  He tells their housekeeper, “The only crime you’ve committed is a split infinitive.” Others babble about Cleopatra and herbs.

But after a conversation with a garbage man, Professor Potts realizes he has approached his article on slang all wrong, spending hours in reference books but none with the common man.  Soon he is making friends with the garbage man, talking to the newspaper boy, and organizing an informal daily seminar with working-class guys who teach him slang.

And then he sees Sugarpuss perform at the club.  As she sings “Drum Boogie” and sedately wiggles her bare midriff in an otherwise fairly modest metallic dress, he hears a jazz band for the first time.  It is utterly enthralling when Sugarpuss and the famous drummer Gene Krupa gather with fans around a table so she can sing and he can drum with matches, light up with the last one. And the audience sings along, and even the fascinated professor calls out “Boogie,” though not quite at the right time.

Professor Potts visits Sugarpuss backstage and gives her his card, but she shoos him away: she is not interested in talking to a bore about slang.  But when she has to go on the lam, because the police are looking to subpoena her, since her gangster boyfriend has committed a murder , though she truly knows nothing about the crimr, she holes up with the encyclopedists.  And is there anything funnier than the elderly professors trying to learn the Boogie with diagrams on the floor?  She shows them how to do it while laughing at the diagram, and a funnier scene I’ve never seen.

Stanwyck was nominated for an Academy Award for this film, and too bad she didn’t win!  Nevertheless, she had many good roles – she was even brilliant in a Western TV show, Bonanza,  I think. Cooper is brilliant as the humorless handsome guy who falls in love with a smart gal who is in a LOTTA trouble! Oh, and she calls him “Pottsie.”

But after she teaches him the yum-yum (kissing), they fall desperately in love. But there are a few misadventures.

All’s well that ends well.

Five stars out of five stars out of five stars… endlessly.