Assignment 17: Theodore

Here is the text of my review, which is going to appear at

www.rottentomatoes.com/m/ball_of_fire/reviews/?type=user&sort= 

as soon as the website approves it. 

Ball of Fire (1941) is a charming comedy about eight Princeton professors, 

happily composing an encyclopedia, who encounter the real world when a 

Mafia boss’s girlfriend uses their library as a hideout. America entered World 

War II less that a year after the making of this movie, so it’s surprising how 

sunny the film is. Even at its most villainous, the Mafia only shoots a few 

chandeliers and tries to stop true love.

The professors may be loosely based on the Institute for Advanced 

Study (IAS) — a research foundation in Princeton that opened in the early 

1930s. In this case, truth is stranger than fiction. While none of the movie’s

 professors can drive (despite their beliefs to the contrary), real-life professor 

John Von Neumann, who helped design the earliest computers, liked to drive 

around Princeton and read a book at the same time. The movie’s physicist, 

Professor Gurkakof, blamed his car accident on the theory of relativity; 

eminent logician Kurt Gödel spent time at the IAS proving that, according

 to relativity, it might be possible to travel back in time by taking long, 

round-trip voyages. In fact, the movie IQ (1994) pokes fun at the IAS more directly.

Despite their quirks, the professors soon prove to be kindly old men 

who welcome a bit of excitement in their lives. The male romantic lead, 

Professor Potts, at first acts like a hidebound grammarian: He knows that the 

statement “two and two is five” is grammatically incorrect, but doesn’t realize 

that “two and two are five” is also wrong. But he soon realizes that words alone

 cannot express his true romantic feelings — an accurate message for this amusing movie.