Rhapsodies

Due to a hectic week, I decided to keep things light and went back to another one of my favorite genres, screwball comedy. Specifically this time screwball comedy with Scripps by the great Billy Wilder. 

The first on my list was Howard Hawk’s Balls of fire. Gloriously against type, Gary Cooper plays Professor Bertram Potts a professor of English the youngest of eight elderly bachelor professors have been spending the last couple of years cloistered in an old brownstone writing an encyclopedia. 

Potts has discovered that his treatise on slang is terribly out of date. He goes out into the city to interview people on the street to discover the latest changes in the language. Eventually, this leads him to a nightclub where the vivacious “ Sugarpuss” O’Shea (Barbara Stanwyck) is performing. When her mobster fiancee needs her to hide from the Attorney General for a couple of days, she sees the professor’s invitation too good to pass up. 

Can eight extremely sheltered professors survive living with a gorgeous, flirtatious burlesque performer? Let’s find out. 

Loosely based on Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (with Gary Cooper as the prince, I guess) In a way I could almost consider this as a 40s version of the Big Bang Theory. This was a fun and witty movie. Still, I had a few problems with it, the first thing, having been raised in an academic community I take issue with intellectuals being shown as childish and socially clueless. The other thing is the first comes love, then comes marriage attitude in these films. Every time I see a scene in these films where someone proposes just after they declare their love for each other, all my modern mind keeps saying is “are you crazy?”  It seemed all the more abrupt in this film because I feel like I missed the fall in love scene. All I saw was Sugarpuss seducing Professor Potts so he wouldn’t throw her out of the house and next thing I see is he’s buying a ring. 

Still, it was very witty with lots of great dialogue with some of my favorite character actors having fun enabling our couple. 

The next film on my list, Ernst Lubitsch’s Ninotchka tells the story of a simpler time in Paris before World War II. A trio of Soviet Diplomats arrives in Paris to hawk a collection of jewelry formally belonging to a grand duchess. The Grand Duchess (Gregory Gaye) who is living in Paris finds out. Her friend Count Leon d’Algout (Melvyn Douglas) agrees to help her get them back, by filing a nuisance suit claiming the jewels as stolen goods and seamlessly corrupting the diplomats. Just as things seem to be working in Leon’s favor, another Soviet agent is sent to clean up the mess. The gorgeous and completely by the book Ninotchka, (Greta Garbo) Leon is immediately smitten by her. 

I liked this film. It was one of the few pre-cold war films where it was okay to mock the Soviet Union shamelessly. (In fact, it was held back because of the fear of making Uncle Joe look bad during World War II) Garbo is great as the eponymous Ninotchka. I could imagine her play ing Spock in an alternate version of Star Trek. 

The dialogue is wonderful as is the satire. My favorite bit is how Ninotchka and her friends shut up every time another resident walks by. Is he an informant? We don’t know! Why take chances.