Tea at Trianon: Ball of Fire (1941)

John Wilson Croker on Marie-Antoinette

"We have followed the history of Marie Antoinette with the greatest diligence and scrupulosity. We have lived in those times. We have talked with some of her friends and some of her enemies; we have read, certainly not all, but hundreds of the libels written against her; and we have, in short, examined her life with– if we may be allowed to say so of ourselves– something of the accuracy of contemporaries, the diligence of inquirers, and the impartiality of historians, all combined; and we feel it our duty to declare, in as a solemn a manner as literature admits of, our well-matured opinion that every reproach against the morals of the queen was a gross calumny– that she was, as we have said, one of the purest of human beings."

~from History of the Guillotine by John Wilson Croker, 1844

Edmund Burke on Marie-Antoinette

"It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the queen of France, then dauphiness, at Versailles; and surely there never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision. I saw her just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she had just begun to move in, glittering like a morning star full of life and splendor and joy. Oh, what a revolution....Little did I dream that I should have lived to see such disasters fall upon her, in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honor and of cavaliers! I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards, to avenge even a look which threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone; that of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded...."

~Edmund Burke, October 1790

Saturday, October 21, 2023

Ball of Fire (1941)

From Tony Esolen at Word and Song:

I’ve always thought that Gary Cooper was tremendously underrated, as people made fun of his straight-arrow slow-talking laconic type, but he was like Ronald Colman in this sense: both of those actors could speak volumes with a look of the face and a movement of the hands. You could give them words, but they didn’t need them. As for Barbara Stanwyck, she makes my top four or five actresses in American film, and she somehow never won an Oscar. But she could do, and she did do, everything. She was brilliant in romantic comedy (Christmas in Connecticut), in screwball comedy (The Lady Eve), in straight-up romance, in melodrama, in film noir (Double Indemnity). Here she steals every scene, or she would, if she weren’t so obviously intent to make everybody around her better for her presence.

There’s nothing quite so charming as watching the beautiful Stanwyck teaching seven clumsy old professors how to do the conga; unless it’s watching those same seven dwarfs, for that is what they are called by one of the mugs, uniting to protect their Snow White against the bad guys, with Cooper, the eighth, at the lead, bouncing about in Marquis of Queensberry style, trying to throw a right cross at the mobster’s nose. For the heart of all screwball comedy is the nuttiness of the sexes, usually with the female running dizzy rings around the male, but the male also a good sensible fellow who ultimately will do anything for her. We know that Sugarpuss O’Shea just has to be together with Professor Bertram Potts. Is that unlikely? If it weren’t for such unlikely things, where would the human race be now? Would there still be a human race at all? (Read more.)