TCM, 8:00 p.m. ET
In one sense, 1941’s Ball of Fire can be considered a comic forebear of Some Like It Hot: It involves homicidal mobsters, and witnesses who know too much who go to extraordinary lengths, and unusual hiding places, to avoid their deadly pursuers. In Some Like It Hot, Tony Curtis and Jack Lemmon played musicians who avoided their gangster posse by donning drag and going on tour with an all-women’s orchestra. In Ball of Fire, a nightclub singer and gangster’s moll named Sugarpuss O’Shea is hunted by both police and the mob because of information she possesses. And by coincidence, when a professor writing an encyclopedia on slang encounters Sugarpuss, and is enchanted by her so-current vocabulary, she’s invited back to the college house where he and his fellow lexicographers are working. They have a valuable resource; she has a hiding place. Amazingly, this movie began as a partial variation on Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, which explains the exaggeratedly comic characters of the seven professors who work with the much younger Professor Potts, who has discovered and temporarily housed Sugarpuss. And, at the same time, explains Sugarpuss as a sort of less pristine Snow White. So that’s the movie’s premise. What makes it such a classic – saluted, as such, as one of “The Essentials” tonight on TCM – is the casting of the two primary stars. Playing prim Professor Potts, in a delightful comic role, is Gary Cooper. And stealing the film as Sugarpuss O’Shea, in one of the most playfully sexy, and sexually playful, roles of her marvelous career, is Barbra Stanwyck.
