MOVIE · 1942

Ball of Fire

ComedyCrimeRomance111 min

Shut away in a house for years, a team of professors is compiling a definitive encyclopedia when the scholar assigned to slang realizes his entry is badly out of date. Gary Cooper is the sheltered academic who heads into the nightlife to do field research and meets Barbara Stanwyck’s Sugarpuss O’Shea, a nightclub singer with a sharp command of every new expression and a pressing need for somewhere to hide. Invited into the professors’ orderly household as their expert in “slanguage,” she upends their routines while trouble from her world waits just outside.