Sugarpuss: [After asking the biology professor to  check her throat]  SLIGHT rosiness! It's as red as the Daily Worker and just as sore!

                       *  *  *

Sugarpuss: [looking through Potts' books] Oh, "Greek philosophy!" I got a set like this with a radio inside.
​​
                       *  *  *

Prof. Potts: Make no mistake, I shall regret the absence of your keen mind; unfortunately, it is inseparable from an extremely disturbing body.

                       *  *  *
​
Prof. Potts: I made an ass of myself and I know it.
Prof. Jerome: Oh, well, we all have, Potts.
Prof. Potts: Yes, but I was the lead donkey.

What is it about a tough-talking girl with a good heart, great legs, and a healthy romantic appetite? If that girl has a sense of irony and enough self-confidence to floor a room full of academics, then I'm sunk. This is exactly how Barbara Stanwyck ruined me for other women as Katherine "Sugarpuss" O'Shea, bespangled nightclub singer, in the great Howard Hawks/Billy Wilder romp, Ball of Fire. 

In a Victorian mansion on the quiet side of town, eight rumpled academics are hard at work on a new encyclopedia. They are older, socially-awkward professors, each with his own area of specialty. The youngest among them is Professor Bertram Potts (Gary Cooper), a linguist who is charged with updating the "slang" section. Potts has been gathering regular Joes from around town to help with his research: taxi drivers, garbage men, you know, Allen Jenkins types (and he's one of them). He goes to a nightclub one evening in search of some really good words and tries to recruit the club's headliner, Sugarpuss (Shugie). She refuses point blank.

At that moment, however, Shugie's boyfriend, handsome mobster Joe Lilac (Dana Andrews), has been up to something especially mobby and has to beat it out of town. Before she has time to rip up Prof. Pott's card, Lilac's goons, Pastrami (Dan Duryea) and Asthma (Ralph Peters), yank Shugie out of the club and tell her to lay low until things cool down. Ding! What better place to hide than a house full of Abercrombies?

Still in her costume, Shugie shimmies her way through the front door, and since none of these guys have ever seen spangles up close like this, they're completely on board, 

I mean...

So Shugie settles in and makes friends with all the fellas, teaching them how to dance and mix cocktails and such. She even helps Prof. Potts with his slang research on the regular and begins to take an interest in his work. For his part, Potts has begun to take an interest in her -- not just for the spangles, but on accounta because (that's a pleonasm) she is intelligent and curious. And he is young and healthy and not blind or dead.
​
Shugie also has eyes that see and has not failed to notice that Prof. Potts is one hot philologist. They develop feelings for one another: hers conflicted (she still has Dana Andrews in the wings, remember); his sincere and marriage-minded.

Speaking of the mobster boyfriend, Joe Lilac has been apprised of Shugie's doings and whereabouts by his goons -- who, by the way, are great goons. Dan Duryea is at his high, quiet slippery best and Asthma (the other one) looks like he was born with a machine gun in his hand. Lilac's lawyer advises him to marry Shugie so that she won't be able to testify against him in his upcoming racketeering trial. Posing as Shugie's father, Lilac phones the encyclopedia house to tell her to meet him in Jersey to get married. Potts takes the opportunity to ask "Mr. O'Shea" for his daughter's hand, which Lilac obviously grants, because now he can use the cover of eight professors to sneak Shugie out to meet him right under the cops' noses. 

Poor Shugie. If she refuses Lilac, he'll have everybody killed. Also, with a choice between a guy who "gets more bang outta you than any dame he ever knew" and another who quotes Shakespeare, she'd rather stick with Potts, with whom she has, in spite of herself, fallen in love:

She agrees to marry Potts, knowing she'll break his heart and humiliate him in front his colleagues, who are also her friends. He gives her the world's smallest ring with the world's sweetest inscription. Once they've safely delivered Shugie into Lilac's hands, however, Lilac tosses Shugie a million carat diamond ring, socks Potts in the eye, and sends them all packing back to their encyclopedia, Because he knows Shugie is actually in love with Potts, Lilac also sends Pastrami and Asthma along to guard them until the marriage is official.

Back in their library under the watchful guns of Lilac's goons, the professors realize that the ring Shugie gave back to Potts was Lilac's ring. According to the psychology professor in their midst, this means she kept the one she truly wanted: the one Potts gave her. Emboldened by love and hope, Potts and his friends science their way past the gunmen and rescue Shugie just in time. 

And they lived happily ever after, see?

I love Sugarpuss O'Shea for the same reasons Professor Bertram Potts does: she's tough, sweet, smart, and sexy. ​She had us both at "yum-yum."

This post is my contribution to the Reel Infatuation Blogathon, hosted by Font & Frock and Silver Screenings.

Visit the blogathon pages to see how many ways a person can swoon. So many great posts and picks. 

It's impossible to watch this movie today without the miasma of a year's bitter primary campaigning oozing in around the edges of Frank Capra's bumpy tale of a forgotten but otherwise happy man tempted and victimized by cynics and optimists alike. There are too many parallels and sad reminders that not much has changed in our political discourse over the past 75 years, and like us I guess, the film can't quite commit to either cynicism or optimism.

John Doe isn't real. He's the product of the disgruntled imagination of Ann Mitchell (Barbara Stanwyck), a sob sister columnist for the Bulletin, who has just been laid off by the paper's new management. The old Bulletin's motto was "A Free Press Means a Free People;" the New Bulletin is "A Streamlined Newspaper for a Streamlined Era." Ann's parting shot at the new paper was to invent a letter for her column from an unemployed Everyman (Doe) who vows to leap off City Hall on Christmas Eve to protest the sorry state of American civilization. Most people in the newspaper game suspect this is a hoax, but the public believes the story and floods the New Bulletin with offers to help and pleas for Someone to do Something.

In order to avoid exposure managing editor Henry Connell (James Gleason) hires Ann back to help manage the public's expectations and to figure out a way to cover up the fraud. Luckily, a stampede of tramps has descending on the offices claiming to be John Doe in order to get the work and other help offered by the citizenry. Ann persuades Connell to pick one of these men to pose as the "real" John Doe and use him as a front to write a column about the plight of downtrodden regular folks and to boost circulation.

They hire "Long" John Willoughby (Gary Cooper), a strapping, kind of dopey ex-ballplayer who never goes anywhere without his friend, a professional hobo called The Colonel (Walter Brennan). The Colonel believes that anyone who keeps money of any amount for any length of time is bound to be corrupted. "When you become a guy with a bank account, they gotcha, " he says, Who's gotcha? Heelots (a lot of heels) gotcha, because when you have money people want to sell you stuff and then you're caught, "you're not the free and happy guy you used to be, then you become a Heelot* yourself."

Sheesh. Who is that guy, Bernie Sanders' dad?

So here's the score so far: Ann's original column is a cynical move but it stimulates the public's optimism and basic decency. Willoughby makes the cynical decision to pretend to be John Doe, but is optimistic that it will help him earn enough money to get his pitching arm fixed. The Colonel walks around calling everyone Heelots and threatening to redistribute any wealth coming his way, which is either extra-cynical or wildly optimistic, depending on who you're voting for this cycle.

​Pretty soon everyone starts getting in over their heads. Ann's column is a huge success, but it's ruffling political and journalistic feathers. The Bulletin's new publisher, D. B. Norton (Edward Arnold), makes a deal with Ann to put Willoughby on the radio as John Doe to put to rest suspicions that he's a fake (which he is), while providing Norton with a populist proxy for his political ambitions with Ann writing speeches at triple her former salary. Win-win.

Ann needs the money, by the way, because she is the breadwinner for her widowed mother (Spring Byington) and two school-aged sisters. Her mother has a habit of giving the leftover household money away on the needy, which Ann finds both irritating and inspirational. And at 62 cents on a man's 1941 dollar, a raise would come in handy. Mrs. Mitchell helps Ann past her speech-writing block by suggesting that "People are tired of hearing nothing but doom and despair on the radio... Why don't you let him say something simple and real. Something with hope in it?" So Ann writes a real barn burner and in the process, starts to believe in this John Doe stuff.

Willoughby, meanwhile, is offered $5,000 from a rival newspaper to read an alternate speech on the night of the broadcast confessing to the hoax. Gary Cooper does a masterful job conveying his internal conflict while deciding what to do​: admit the hoax, ease his conscience, and get the operation he needs, or do right by Ann, with whom is is falling in love, and read her speech about tearing down fences, loving your neighbor, and being decent. He decides to go ahead with Ann's speech, but bolts with The Colonel immediately afterward to slip back into a life of poor but honest obscurity.

But Willoughby can't hide for long from Norton's media machine. While he and Bernie's dad have been out riding the rails, "John Doe Clubs" have been popping up all over; just regular citizens picking up his call to be nice to one other. And No Politicians Allowed. He is recognized at a local diner, corralled by "fans" and convinced by a local John Doe Club in one of the more tedious, Capra-esque, aw-shucks, cornfields of a speech to go back on the radio and spread the word.

Soon John Doe Clubs are spreading like wildfire. D.B. Norton is thrilled, because it's an election year and he has plans to make Willoughby announce the formation of a new political party and endorse Norton as The John Doe Party candidate for president. But John Doe Clubs are specifically apolitical, Ann and Willoughby remind Norton, and that would be wrong. Oh wise up, kids. Besides, Norton explains, he could very easily expose the whole racket that Ann concocted in the first place and ruin them both.

The kids don't back down; Norton exposes Willoughby on national radio and steps in as the savior of the movement. John Doe's once adoring fans are heartbroken and angry and they turn on him It isn't pretty. A despondent Willoughby disappears. Months go by and around Christmas time the main characters start to wonder whether he'll make his way to City Hall and make good on the original plan: throw himself off the roof in protest over how horrible people are.

Sure enough, that's where he winds up. He almost does it too, but a feverish Ann, a less cranky Colonel, and Bulletin editor Connell are there to stop him. Even Norton is there to convince him, in his sincere but Scroogey way, that it would be pointless to kill himself, because he'd just remove all traces of John's existence (come on, he's trying). What does the trick ultimately, is the cornball members of the first John Doe club -- also on the roof, at midnight, in the snow -- telling him they don't care if he's a fake, the message was a good one and whaddyasay? Ann faints from illness; Willoughby carries her off the roof (the regular way).

Is this a happy ending? I don't know, does Ann die of fever? This is the trouble with conservative Capra directing the script of liberal Robert Riskin: the tone is all over the place. The Heelot stuff is meant to be annoying, but Ann's mother is just as free with other people's money, and somehow she's more sympathetic. Why is the Colonel a crackpot and Mrs. Mitchell the heart of the people?

In the end it all goes to pieces HARD and big money wins again: that one rich bad apple probably became president for all we know. At the beginning of the picture, Long John Willoughby's is broke and can't afford an operation that will save his baseball career, but he has a friend and a harmonica and freedom. At the end, he's just as broke, still can't pitch, his friends love him, but now he wants to jump off the roof. Why? Because he had hope? Because no one turns on a savior faster than his disappointed followers?

That's bleak, man. No wonder It's a Wonderful Life  is the Christmas picture.

This post is my contribution to the CMBA Spring Blogathon: Words! Words! Words!

There's a lot going on over there, so please catch up and read all the entries in this wordfest.

"... but it isn't fun enough to take the place of one hundred percent virtue and three square meals a day." 

Design for Living is what happens when you add Ben Hecht to Noel Coward, deliver through Edward Everett Horton, and let Ernst Lubitsch surround you with eye candy like young Gary Cooper and Frederic March. It's the story of Gilda Farrell (Miriam Hopkins), a commercial artist, who meets a struggling playwright (March) and painter (Cooper) on the train to Paris, falls in love with both, but can't decide between them.

It's a smart, funny, modern (by that I mean they use the word "sex"), and sophisticated (by that I mean they don't use the word "f**k") story that may surprise you. Frederic March is very funny, for instance, Gary Cooper speaks French, for another,  and Miriam Hopkins holds her own (I'm not her biggest fan) in this believable, never-resolved love triangle.

The best news is that you can watch it in pieces on YouTube or see the whole thing on DVD all at once without remembering which part you're on.