Ball of Fire

A group of scholars has spent years cloistered in a house, funded by a wealthy benefactor, compiling a comprehensive encyclopedia of human knowledge. One of them, the young philologist Bertram Potts, realizes that his entry on slang is completely out of date. He goes out into the city to study how people actually speak, and in a nightclub he meets Sugarpuss O'Shea, a singer fluent in the slang he needs. She needs somewhere to hide from the police, who want her to testify against her gangster boyfriend, so she moves in with the academics. Her presence disrupts the household, and Potts finds his research turning into something more personal.

Howard Hawks directed the film, the seventh of the nineteen features he made in chronological order, following Sergeant York and preceding To Have and Have Not. Billy Wilder and Charles Brackett wrote the screenplay, and Samuel Goldwyn produced it for RKO Radio Pictures. Gary Cooper plays Potts and Barbara Stanwyck plays Sugarpuss, with Oskar Homolka, Henry Travers, S.Z. Sakall and Tully Marshall among the credited cast of sixty-nine.

The film runs 111 minutes and mixes comedy, crime and romance. It took about three million dollars worldwide. On IMDb it holds a 7.7 rating from roughly sixteen thousand votes, and on TMDB a 7.4 from around two hundred fifty. A critics' rating of 8.4 from twenty-nine reviews sits above those audience scores, suggesting reviewers rate it more highly than general viewers do.