Stealin' (Poison) Apples
Billy Wilder clearly had a penchant for fairy stories and having fashioned Cinderella into Midnight he turned his attention to Snow White And The Seven Dwarfs a couple of years later and came up with Ball Of Fire in which the seven dwarfs were compiling a dictionary of Slang. Ball of Fire appeared in 1941 and Howard Hawks remade it seven years later with the dwarfs now engaged in compiling a history of Jazz complete with musical examples. For reasons mostly unfathomable Benny Goodman was given a speaking part as one of the Professors whilst the actors are supplemented by the likes of Charlie Barnet, Louis Armstrong, Tommy Dorsey, Mel Powell, Lionel Hampton and Buck and Bubbles. Whilst light years short of Wilder's script this does have the merit of the real jazz musicians to compensate for the acting of Danny Kaye, Virginia Mayo and Steve Cochran, woefully inadequate replacements for Gary Cooper, Barbara Stanwyck and Dana Andrews.score 6/10
writers_reign 22 February 2017
Reprint: https://www.imdb.com/review/rw3645765/35522
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