Hawks Marathon: A Song is Born (1948)

I knew, going into this process, that A Song is Born was a musical remake of Ball of Fire, so I intended to spread them out as much as possible.  A Song is Born was also on Amazon Prime, a service which happens to remove movies without any notice at all, so after about a month, I felt enough time had passed to watch the musical remake.

Boy, they really weren't lying when they called this a remake.  This is exactly the same movie as Ball of Fire.  The difference is that Ball of Fire is obsessed with words, primarily early 1940s slang, while A Song is Born is obsessed with music, primarily jazz.  With the exception of when they play music, it's the same movie and I think almost the exact same dialogue.

Now, I can't say how I'd feel about this movie had I watched it first, but I didn't.  And so I really, really didn't like this movie.  And it's almost entirely due to the fact that everything about it is the same as Ball of Fire, but worse.  Everything is worse.

As I said in my Ball of Fire review, Gary Cooper didn't really do much for me in the few movies I'd seen him in prior to Ball of Fire, but nothing better exemplifies why he's good when you compare him to Danny Kaye in A Song is Born.  Now this is my first Danny Kaye movie and as I understand it, he's a lot different here than this in his other movies.  Which is good because it kind of feels like he's just trying to copy Cooper here, but poorly.

Then there's Virginia Mayo.  She really never had a chance.  Maybe she's good in other things.  But my reference point here is Barbara Stanwyck, and in the words of Howard Hawks, Virginia Mayo is no Barbara Stanwyck.  Few are, but never has that point been more clear than comparing Ball of Fire and A Song is Born.

Hell, I even like Dana Andrews as the gangster more in Ball of Fire than Steve Cochran here.  I'm telling you, every thing about this movie is worse than Ball of Fire.  And like I said, maybe if I hadn't watched that movie first, it'd be different.  Ball of Fire had a spark, the movie kept your attention, there was a rhythm to everything that happened.  This movie is just flat.

Well, except for one thing: the music.  I'd recommend A Song is Born just for the historical document, but I'd also tell you to skip everything but the music.  Benny Goodman, Tommy Dorsey, Louis Armstrong, Charlie Barnett, Mel Powell - they're all in this movie and playing music and it's great.  It's the only good thing about the movie, but it's so good that it basically makes the movie worth watching by itself.

Speaking of, the plot makes much less sense here than in Ball of Fire too.  A grammarian working on an encyclopedia cut off from the outside world for years?  Makes sense that he isn't up to date on new slang.  A musical encyclopedia that is completely unaware of jazz makes... a lot less sense.  Surely these extremely smart professors know that music is constantly changing and they need to stay up to date.  I don't know, it seems insane to me that these experts on music just have never heard of jazz in 1948.

Sharing my distaste for this movie is... the director himself, Howard Hawks.  Who admitted that he only directed it because it came with a $250,000 paycheck, which is the equivalent of $2.7 million today.  He called Kaye a basket case because he had separated from his wife.  And he didn't have nice things to say about Mayo either, as expressed above.  He said it was a horrible experience.

How much can music save a film?  That's the question I'm debating when giving my grade, but let it be known that whatever my grade, the music is the only redeeming quality in this movie.  Just watch Ball of Fire instead.

2/4 stars

Hawks Marathon: Ball of Fire (1941)

The old Hollywood system operated under one assumption: you were there to see Cary Grant or Bette Davis or whoever the lead actor was.  They gave the most popular actors the best projects.  It doesn't really work that way anymore, because people don't really see movies for the actors.  Not to say it never happens, but it doesn't drive public interest.  Movie stars don't really exist in the way movie stars use to exist.

I say all that because for the first time, I understand that phenomenon.  Oh sure, I may think I'm more likely to like a movie because somebody's in it, but they aren't really the driving factor.  I'm more of a "is the movie good?  Okay, I'll see it." guy.  But Ball of Fire crystallized something: I want to watch anything Barbara Stanwyck is in.

I am not kidding you.  This is one of the absolute greatest things about how the old Hollywood system worked.  Stanwyck was a star forever and she always got the best projects so there are a ton of movies that I'm naturally going to watch with her in it anyway.  But I want to watch every movie.

By pure coincidence, I ended up watching three Stanwyck movies in the span of about a month.  I watched Baby Face, Remember the Night, and Ball of Fire.  She is fan-fucking-tastic in every one of those movies.   I loved the latter two movies in fact.  (Baby Face is solid, but more notable for what it got away with pre-Hollywood code)

Opposite her in Ball of Fire is Gary Cooper.  I haven't been much of a fan of Cooper in the movies I've seen so far, but he's well deployed here.  Whatever hadn't clicked for me before clicks in this movie.  He plays a good and believable straight-laced character.  Shockingly, I also didn't find it hard to believe Cooper was some nerdy bookworm either.

Here's the premise.  A collection of experts in their field all live together in the service of writing a new and up to date encyclopedia.  All of them are men and all of them are bachelors, purposefully away from any distractions such as women.  With the exception of Cooper, they are old men.

The old men are played by veteran character actors of the day.  Look at each of their IMDB pages, and every one of them has well over 100 credits with careers dating back to silent film.  That experience is certainly felt in the performances which are all good and refined despite not a whole lot of characterization for most of them.

Cooper is a grammarian of the group.  But when he talks with a garbage man, he finds he doesn't understand the slang.  Which means his part of the encyclopedia would be hopelessly out of date.  So he goes out in the town and recruits people to help teach him new slang, one of the recruits being a nightclub performer on the run from the cops.  That nightclub performer is Barbara Stanwyck.

So what you have here is a very classic screwball comedy setup.  Stanwyck is supposed to be married to a gangster so she can't testify against him, but he's trying to stay hidden.  So she needs to stay hidden until they meet.  When Cooper comes along, she jumps at the chance to hide out at the place all the old men are living until she can meet the gangster.

Which proves not particularly difficult since all the old men are excited, understandably, about having Barbara freaking Stanwyck around.  Cooper is very, VERY old school though and is the only one against it, but he's also the only younger guy so of course he falls in love with her and she with him.

But a lot of fun stuff happens in between all that.  Ball of Fire is just delightfully fun to watch.  I had a grin on my face for most of the movie.  A screwball comedy done well is one of the most enjoyable film experiences you can have.  It's just incredibly hard to do.

4/4 stars