Within the wooded walls and fusty halls of the home graciously provided them by the Totten Foundation live and work eight mossy professors, researching and “updating” an encyclopedia which becomes obsolete faster than the doddering pedants can down their morning prunes. Professor Potts (Gary Cooper), who stands out as the youngest (though perhaps the more priggish for his youth), discovers, in an impossible conversation with two representatives from the outside (garbage men) that his entry on “slang” is, at best, antiquated. A field trip is in order, and it turns up a gold mine of data in the form of Sugarpuss O'Shea (Barbara Stanwyck), a nightclub singer and gangster's moll, whom the gentlemen adopt as their own Snow White. Potts - the extra dwarf - adopts her as something else. “The regression of intellectual man to the level of caveman is accomplished here in the fast raucous style which is invariably the Hawksian trademark” (Andrew Sarris), but when Sugarpuss is abducted by her old cronies Duke Pastrami and Joe Lilac (Dan Duryea and Dana Andrews), the professors turn to their storehouse of previously useless knowledge - including Greek mythology and Chinese torture techniques - to rescue her.
The zany screenplay by Billy Wilder and Charles Brackett, deep-focus photography by Gregg Toland, and, finally, the sparks lit by ball-of-fire Stanwyck under Cooper's hilariously demure Potts, make this underrated Hawks comedy a gem. (Hawks remade Ball of Fire in 1948 as A Song Is Born, with Danny Kaye and Virginia Mayo, filmed in color on the same set.) (JB)