📽 1941: Ball of Fire (also known as The Professor and the Burlesque Queen) starring Barbara Stanwyck and Gary Cooper with Oscar Homolka, S. Z. Sakall, Henry Travers, Richard Haydn, Dana Andrews, Kathleen Howard, Mary Feild and Dan Duryea
• A group of professors, all bachelors except for one widower, have lived together for some years in a New York City residence, compiling an encyclopedia of all human knowledge. The youngest, Professor Bertram Potts (Cooper), is a grammarian who is researching modern American slang. The professors are accustomed to working in relative seclusion, at a leisurely pace, with a prim housekeeper, Miss Bragg (Howard) keeping watch over them. Their impatient financial backer, Miss Totten (Feild), suddenly demands that they finish their work soon.
When a slang-using garbage man comes in asking the professors' assistance for a quiz, Bertram realizes he is far behind the latest uses of slangs and ventures out to do some independent research and becomes interested in the slang vocabulary of nightclub performer Katherine "Sugarpuss" O'Shea (Stanwyck). She is reluctant to assist him until she suddenly needs a place to hide from the police, who want to question her about her boyfriend, mob boss Joe Lilac (Andrews) (Samuel Goldwyn Productions/RKO Radio Pictures)
