Ball of Fire (1942) ~ A Recipe for Success

Ingredients:

Actors:
3 Gangsters
1 Hard Nosed Dana Andrews
1 Sexy Barbara Stanwyck
7 Loveable Professors
1 Uptight Maid
1 Tall, Goofy yet Charming Gary Cooper
A few extra bit players with good parts

Script Elements:

A generous helping of Comedy

1 pinch of Drama

A dash of Sex

A sprinkling of 1940's slang

Spoonfuls of good dialogue

Several parts Romance
1 homage to Snow White and the Seven Dwarves
Silly character names (optional)

Instructions:

Preheat your DVD player.

With a Billy Wilder, a Charles Brackett and a Thomas Monroe, write your script for Howard Hawks' direction. Add generous doses of Comedy. This will provide you with the majority of the plot. Mix by hand while adding pinches of Drama to create interesting tension. When thoroughly combined add the Sex, enough to spice things up but not too much to get us in trouble with the Legion of Decency. Mix in dialogue and generous sprinklings of slang to keep the initial cultural element of proper speech versus 1940's colloquialisms interesting. Spoonfuls of good dialogue are essential to round out the script. Add Romance to please the women in your audience and 1 homage to a classic fairy tale just to make this film unique. For a final touch, add some silly character names just for fun.

Set aside script elements and work on the actors. Start with your character actors. Mix separately those characters who epitomize education, namely the 7 professors. Then add in one uptight maid to prevent those professors from getting too excited. Add Gary Cooper as Prof. Potts to introduce some youthfulness to the mix. Make sure you give him top billing! Now for the characters with street smarts. First you'll need various bit players with charisma. If you have an excellent Garbage-man in the form of Allen Jenkins throw him in! Add your gangsters for some excitement and violence. Now you'll need your leading lady. She needs to ooze sexiness and wit but also be genuine. You can't go wrong with an enchanting Barbara Stanwyck as Sugarpuss O'Shea. You'll notice that when you throw Stanwyck in, chemistry will happen between her and Cooper. You can't make it too easy on the mixture, so right before you are done, throw in Dana Andrews as Joe Lilac to get in the way of their romance. This will keep things flavorful and satisfying.

Turn mixture into a DVD and insert into player. Bake for 1 hour and 51 minutes and enjoy!

Norma Shearer Week was a success!

I just wanted to thank everyone for their support and encouragement with Norma Shearer week. I'm really happy with the results and the feedback. I just wanted to take this opportunity to thank a few folks in particular.

Jennifer Z. ~ For being the ultimate Norma Shearer fan!

Jonas @ All Talking! All Singing! All Dancing! ~ For supporting this and all my other crazy ideas.

Kate Gabrielle @ Silents and Talkies ~ For her superb Norma Shearer painting and allowing me to do a guest post for Norma Shearer week on her site.

Carrie @ Classic Montgomery - For helping me with info on Robert Montgomery and his relationship with Norma Shearer. She also posted an ad for A Free Soul on her site.

Laura @ Laura's Miscellaneous Musings - She plugged Norma Shearer Week in her review of Lowell Sherman's Bachelor Apartment (1931).


Thank you goes out to these folks for their encouragement on Twitter and elsewhere:

Wendymoon @ Movie Viewing Girl
Casey @ Noir Girl
Operator 99 @ Allure
Tommy @ Pluck You Too
Cliff @ Vintage Meld -> who Tweeted every post!
Nicole @ Classic Hollywood Nerd
Mercurie @ A Shroud of Thoughts

... and everyone who commented!

Norma Shearer week got some links:

Fox News & Chicago Sun-Times ~ Posted my From Montreal to Hollywood: Norma Shearer's Story.
Large Association of Movie Blogs (L.A.M.B.) ~ My fellow LAMBs (baa) helped me plug Norma Shearer week.
Deliberate Pixel ~ The editor thought Norma Shearer week was going to be on TCM. Oops!
Turner Classic Movies ~ With Norma Shearer week I have a lot more Norma content on this blog, so I submitted my label link Queen Norma Shearer as a fan site for her TCM page and got accepted!

I leave you now with an anecdote from Gavin Lambert's Norma Shearer biography. Enjoy.

Saturday, January 23, 1936. The annual Mayfair Club Ball... It took place in the Garden Room at the Victor Hugo restaurant, a supreme example of Beverly Hills posh, designed like a Roman atrium with a rounded glass roof, fake Appian Way statuary, genuine flowering vines, and an oval carpet of grass-green wool. The official hostess, Carole Lombard, had asked all the ladies to come dressed in white. Fairly late, two couples arrived together, Norma and Irving and Merle (Oberon) and David Niven. Merle looked decorous in protocol white, but Norma was a study in strapless and backless scarlet.

Lombard managed a polite greeting, then turned away and made the rounds of other guests, expressing her opinion of Mrs. Thalberg in her usual pungent, four-letter-word style. "Sheer ego" was Eleanor Boardman's verdict, but John Houseman had a different slant. He knew Norma only slightly at the time but later noticed "her occasional compulsion to assert herself publicly by refusing to conform." This seems close to the mark, for a photograph of the event shows Norma looking openly pleased with herself, as if enjoying the effect of not giving her expected, perfect social performance.

That's so Norma!

A Lady of Chance (1928)

In her last silent film, Norma Shearer stars as Dolly Morgan, a telephone operator who tricks wealthy men out of their money by using her devious feminine wiles. Dolly once known as "Angel Face" used to work worked with fellow con-artists Brad (Lowell Sherman) and Gwen (Gwen Lee) on the same racket, but escaped by them by changing her look and going independent. Brad and Gwen find her and try to hoodwink her out of a scam of $10k but she hoodwinks them right out of the same money! Not happy with being one-upped, Brad and Gwen follow Dolly on her biggest scam yet, a newly made millionaire, Steve Crandall (Johnny Mack Brown) who is falling head over heels in love with Dolly. They marry and when he takes her home Dolly realizes that Steve is only a millionaire at heart. Dolly is at first thrown off by this but finds herself falling in love with Steve. She wants to protect him from Brad and Gwen but also doesn't want him to know about her sordid past. Things become wonderfully complex as Dolly tries to make things right.

In 1928, various other studios were already full-speed ahead making part-talkies and all-talking pictures while MGM was still dragging their feet. They had been so successful with their silent pictures that they didn't want to throw out a good thing. The change to talkies was inevitable, as even poor-quality talkies were proving to be box-office gold as the novelty of the form drew crowds to the theaters. A Lady of Chance (1928) started off as a silent film and then talking scenes were spliced in making it a part-talkie. Norma Shearer didn't partake in the talking scenes so Norma fans only got to hear her voice in MGM's first talking picture The Trial of Mary Dugan (1929). I have only ever seen the version TCM has shown of A Lady of Chance which is all silent.

I consider this film a silent-talkie hybrid. It works very well as a silent. All of the characters have their own dualities, they are not what they seem to be. They are all putting up fronts whether deviously or on subconsciously. This relegates a lot of expression in their faces which we read in order to understand what's going on. The form of the story and how it flows is very much like talkies from the early '30s and less like the silents from the early to mid '20s. It seems less theatrical and staged and more fluid.

Dolly: I had no idea a big business man could be so tender.
Steve: It's easy to be tender with you.

This is by far my favorite Norma Shearer film. Norma is at the height of her natural beauty and because this is a silent film, she still uses plenty of her vibrant facial expressions and characteristic hand movements which suit the movie and her character. Hunky former college football star Johnny Mack Brown complements her very well and I think they made a very good-looking onscreen couple. Also, this film is just fun and doesn't take itself too seriously. It's a romantic comedy with a good amout of dramatic tension. The only thing I don't like is that there are a couple racist moments, but I concede it's 1928 and in comparison to some other silents this one is pretty tame.

Johnny Mack Brown & Norma Shearer on set (at the beach) with Director Robert Z. Leonard

A Lady of Chance is not available on DVD but my fingers are crossed that the Warner Bros. Archive will make it available for a made-to-order DVD-R very soon (they own all pre-1986 MGM films). If not, Turner Classic Movies shows this film once in a blue moon, usually at some ungodly hour or on their regular Silent Sunday nights feature.

I hope you enjoyed Norma Shearer week!