Pun Salad

A 1941 screwball comedy directed by Howard Hawks, from a Billy Wilder screenplay, with Gary Cooper and Barbara Stanwyck. The main question: how could I have waited so long to watch it?

Cooper plays Professor Bertram Potts, the youngest member of a gang of eight scholars diligently working on a multi-year encyclopedia project. The project is funded, it's explained, by a benefactor who was outraged that the Encyclopedia Brittanica failed to properly credit his invention of the electric toaster. They live a monastic existence in a Manhattan brownstone. Potts is writing an article about slang, but a chance visit from a garbageman makes him realize that his grasp of the subject is woefully out of date.

So Potts goes out into early-40's New York, soaking up the colorful language of the street, poolhall, subway, and ballpark. He winds up at a nightclub, where the star performer is one Sugarpuss O'Shea (Miss Stanwyck). Potts wants Sugarpuss badly—for research purposes, of course! She's reluctant, but (as it turns out) the DA is after her to testify against her mob boss boyfriend. So she decides to hide out with the encyclopedists, with hilarious results.

There are a lot of things to like here. Nobody played brassy bad girl roles (with or without the optional "heart of gold" accessory) better than Barbara Stanwyck. Coop's pretty good at light comedy too. The dialogue is clever, and must have been considered pretty racy for 1941. The supporting cast contains lots of actors any old-movie fan will recognize, and they're all great here: Dana Andrews, in a rare comic role as the mob boss; Dan Duryea and Ralph Peters as his bumbling henchmen; Charles Lane as an officious lawyer; Henry Travers (Clarence himself), S. Z. Sakall (Carl himself), and Richard Haydn (the Caterpillar himself) as professors. And more.

And also Gene Krupa and his band. Whoa.