During college, my friend Cookie and I bonded over Gary Cooper and Barbara Stanwyck's romance in Howard Hawks' BALL OF FIRE (1941). Of course "Cookie" isn't her real name - we picked it up from Katharine Hepburn in SUMMERTIME (1955). Anyway, BALL OF FIRE was by far our favorite classic film.
Professor Bertram Potts (Cooper) and his seven co-professors are shut up every day working on completing an encyclopedia when their hum-drum lives are overturned by the arrival of Sugarpuss O'Shea (Stanwyck). Potts meets O'Shea in a nightclub where he was doing some research for his article about slang. When her crooked boyfriend runs into some trouble with the fuzz, his compatriots convince Sugarpuss to go into hiding with the bumbling professors, where she causes incredible upheaval, teaching them the cha-cha and generally interfering with their work. Of course, Sugarpuss and Potts sort of unwillingly fall for each other and that causes all manner of trouble with her boyfriend's mob of gangsters. Not to worry - if you didn't know it already, professors are actually superheroes and they can sort out any problem using wit, brain, and a little bit of adorableness.
