Ball of Fire (1941) / A Song Is Born (1948)
Howard Hawks remade his own screwball comedy after a gap of just seven years. A few brief notes on what the two films have in common, and what was changed.
Ball of Fire, starring Gary Cooper and Barbra Stanwyck, just arrived on the Criterion Channel as part of their ‘Screwball Comedy Classics’ series. I grew up watching the remake A Song Is Born, which stars Danny Kaye and Virginia Mayo (and is currently streaming on Amazon Prime). Both films were directed in the 1940s by Howard Hawks. I watched the two films back-to-back about two and a half years ago and wrote some notes about them on my private Facebook page. I am re-posting those notes here. Incidentally, a clip from A Song Is Born is also featured in the new Louis Armstrong documentary on Apple TV+.
Today’s double-bill: Ball of Fire (1941), and A Song Is Born (1948).
A Song Is Born is one of the many Danny Kaye films that I watched repeatedly while growing up. It was Kaye’s fourth and final film with Virginia Mayo as his leading lady (following 1945’s Wonder Man, 1946’s The Kid from Brooklyn and 1947’s The Secret Life of Walter Mitty), and it wasn’t until years later, after I took some film classes at university, that I realized the film had some significant names behind the camera, too, including director Howard Hawks, co-writer Billy Wilder and cinematographer Gregg Toland (of Citizen Kane fame).
I did learn at some point that the film was a remake of an earlier Hawks film—Ball of Fire, starring Gary Cooper and Barbara Stanwyck—but until last night I had never seen the original. And then I watched A Song Is Born itself for the first time in decades, and I was struck by how very, very similar the two films are.
Both films concern a group of seven or eight professors who have been living together for nine years while working on a major project of some sort (an encyclopedia in Ball of Fire, a series of books and recordings on the history of music in A Song Is Born). At some point a blue-collar guy (a garbage man in Ball of Fire, a couple of window washers in A Song Is Born) enters their home, looking for answers to a quiz on the radio, and one of the professors (the Cooper/Kaye character) realizes that his research is now out of date because there have been so many recent developments in his field of interest (language in Ball of Fire, folk/popular music in A Song Is Born).
So the professor leaves the home and spends time with the hoi polloi (looking for data on slang in Ball of Fire, and looking for data on jazz in A Song Is Born). And along the way he catches the eye of a nightclub singer (the Stanwyck/Mayo character) who needs to go into hiding so that she won’t be forced to testify against her gangster boyfriend. And where does she hide? With the professors, of course. And what happens there? She falls in love with the professor, of course, and he falls in love with her.
The story beats are all the same, and much of the dialogue is copied exactly in the remake—even to the point of repeating specific dollar figures. (The academic project had a budget of $250,000 but has already cost $283,000, and the Cooper/Kaye character has an annual salary of $3,200. Was there no significant inflation between 1941 and 1948?)
The one significant difference is that the professors in Ball of Fire are working on an encyclopedia that is meant to cover every bit of knowledge in the world, whereas the professors in A Song Is Born are focused only on music—and I find the latter premise a lot more plausible.
Actually, there is one other significant difference: If you grew up on the remake, which features many jazz musicians as themselves—including Louis Armstrong and Lionel Hampton—and in which the window washers who introduce the professors to jazz music are themselves African-American, you cannot help but notice how white the cast of the original film is. I think I spotted a single African-American in the original film: a trumpeter in Gene Krupa’s band who gets a brief solo, and even then, his face was obscured by shadows. So, kudos to the remake for broadening things a bit, there.
Interestingly, there is one actor who plays the exact same character in both films: Mary Field plays Miss Totten, the heiress who is financing the professors’ project—even though it has gone over-budget—because she has a not-exactly-hidden crush on the Cooper/Kaye character. The remake actually plays up her attraction to the Kaye character, by having her get involved in his performance of a Polynesian courtship chant.
A few other quick points:
I vaguely recall that the remake is how I first learned the word “subpoena” as well as the tradition that engagement rings go on the “third finger, left hand”.
I still sometimes sing bits of ‘Daddy-O’, the first song Virginia Mayo sings in the remake (“Daddy-O, I’m gonna sing you some blues / From now on, that’s all you’ll be able to use... / But that lipstick on your shirt isn’t mine / So I’m getting off, it’s the end of the line...”).
Ball of Fire is more frank and/or suggestive about sex than A Song Is Born. When Cooper says his knowledge of slang is out of date, one of the other professors says, “Maybe my data on sex is a little outdated too!” And when Cooper thinks he’s about to marry Stanwyck, the one professor who is a widower begins teasing him by asking if he knows about “the basics”. The former scene never happens in the remake because the profs aren’t working on a full-fledged encyclopedia any more, and the remake’s version of the latter scene focuses entirely on the widower’s sentimental attachment to his deceased wife.
That being said, the remake does make one bit slightly more sexual. In the original film, as Stanwyck moves into the house, Cooper is flustered and protests that no woman should be there overnight even if she is his research asistant, but his colleagues all rally to Stanwyck’s side, and there is some talk about how Isaac Newton got his ideas from observing an apple, after which Stanwyck walks up the stairs and says she’ll be “just another apple.” But in the remake, one of the professors says if it weren’t for research, people would still think tomatoes were poisonous, and Mayo walks up the stairs and says, sexily, “Think of me as a tomato. Just another tomato.” And “tomato”, of course, is slang for “a desirable-looking woman” (in the words of Wiktionary).
I love how, when someone uses some new slang term for money in Ball of Fire, the Cooper character says, “The accepted vulgarism for a dollar is a buck.” The accepted vulgarism! Reminds me of an “official bootleg” album in my CD collection.
The original film makes a few references to other films and/or the actors therein, such as Andy Hardy, Helen Hayes, and Don Ameche (we are told that “Ameche” is slang for “telephone”, because Ameche starred in a 1939 biopic about telephone inventor Alexander Graham Bell). There are no pop-culture references of that sort that I could detect in the remake, though.
Interestingly, at least two actors in the original film went on to co-star in Danny Kaye films. The gangster is played by Dana Andrews, who played Kaye’s best friend in Kaye’s first film, 1944’s Up in Arms. And one of the professors is played by S.Z. Sakall, who played a delicatessen owner in 1945’s Wonder Man (he’s probably best known for playing one of Bogart’s nightclub employees in 1942’s Casablanca).
Here’s the trailer for Ball of Fire:
And here’s the trailer for A Song Is Born (note how it duplicates the “yum yum” scene):
Also worth seeing: Richard Brody discussed A Song Is Born in a video at The New Yorker back in 2011. He calls the scene where Danny Kaye gets Miss Totten to participate in a ritual mating call “the greatest comic set piece that Howard Hawks ever filmed.”