Ball of Fire

Gene Krupa was like a movie star handsome.

I don't know if you've ever seen the Howard Hawks movie Ball of Fire with Barbara Stanwyck.

It's a great movie.

And there's a sequence with Benny Goodman where first he plays the drums and it's fabulous.

Although, I'll tell you what, The Heights, their list is pretty cool.

They've actually included Ball of Fire, and they're doing a special Coke thing for 1, 2, 3.

They're having fun with it.

So if people are in Minnesota, highly recommend checking out at least one of the films in that series.

And Andrews, we recently talked about.

I got to bring up ball of fire in public Cameron, uh, because we just saw Dana Andrews in ball of fire as the mobster.

So it was absolutely lovely, lovely talking to these, these women, uh, not just because of the connection, but they were also real, you know, film, you know, I get to talk about William Wyler or whatever.

And she's like, Oh yeah, I knew his daughter.

I was like, Oh my God.

That's so funny.

I bet they were like, wow, you're a little young to be talking about Ball of Fire.

Yeah, the luck of having all this random knowledge in my head.

She had so many great films in the 1940s.

Lady Eve, Remember the Night, Ball of Fire.

Yeah.

So many good ones.

Yeah

... like, like Ball of Fire came out a couple days after Pearl Harbor-

Mm-hmm

... and it still was a box office success.

We have seven incredible performances to explore today.

We've got The Lady Eve, Ball of Fire, Double Indemnity, Dark Victory, The Great Man's Lady, The Other Love, and Remember the Night.

It's an amazing lineup.

We're gonna track her range across comedy, romance, tragedy, noir.

That is the acoustic signature of tenderness and vulnerability.

But now we take our control variable, Fred MacMurray and Barbara Stanwyck, and we throw them into an acoustic centrifuge.

We pivot from the soft folk ballad of Remember the Night to the frantic polyrhythmic jazz of 1941's Ball of Fire.

This is just a radical shift in physics.

Hand on your stomach.

Did you ever see the movie Ball of Fire with Barbara Stanluck and Gary Cooper?

Ball of Fire?

Yeah, it's a 40s jazz movie.

Gene Krupa's orchestra's in it and Gene Krupa's all high and does a matched drumming thing.

Originally, Stanwyck was hesitant about taking on the role of Phyllis Dietrichson, believing playing someone like Phyllis could potentially kill her career.

Wilder, who had worked with Stanwyck a few years prior on the excellent screwball comedy Ball of Fire, was direct with Stanwyck and simply said, Are you an actress or a mouse? Stanwyck took the role.

Now, Edward G. Robinson almost turned down the role of Barton Keyes, not due to the nature of the character, but because it was more of a supporting role and not a lead one.

Robinson had received top billing ever since his star-making role as Rico in 1931's Little Caesar, and thankfully, he didn't turn down the role of double indemnity because he's a vital part of why the movie is one of the best films ever made.