A Song Is Born

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Picture is a remake of Goldwyn's Ball of Fire (1941) starring Gary Cooper and Barbara Stanwyck. Most of Goldwyn's production crew worked on both films, including director, cameraman and editor. Charles Brackett and Billy Wilder screenplayed Ball from an original story, From A to Z, by Wilder and Thomas Monroe, but there's no screenplay credit given on Song.

Picture is a remake of Goldwyn’s Ball of Fire (1941) starring Gary Cooper and Barbara Stanwyck. Most of Goldwyn’s production crew worked on both films, including director, cameraman and editor. Charles Brackett and Billy Wilder screenplayed Ball from an original story, From A to Z, by Wilder and Thomas Monroe, but there’s no screenplay credit given on Song.

While Ball dealt with a group of stodgy old professors writing a new dictionary and the way a burlesque stripper tossed a bombshell into their work, Song presents a similar group of professors, only this time they’re compiling a history of music and the stripper is a nitery thrush. When Danny Kaye is working with them before the cameras, in fact, the picture is standout entertainment. Last half of the picture, though, in which they get a semi-brushoff as Kaye becomes involved with a group of gangsters, drags by comparison.

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Kaye himself does his usual neat thesping job as the youngest of the bachelor pendants, who gets his first intro to feminine wiles at the hands of a worldlywise nitery singer, played engagingly by Virginia Mayo.

Script makes good use of the various musicians involved. They’re spotlighted neatly at the beginning, as Kaye tours various Broadway niteries to get an idea of swing and jazz, which is completely unknown to the professorial group.

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A Song Is Born

  • Production: RKO/Goldwyn. Director Howard Hawks; Producer Samuel Goldwyn; Screenplay Harry Tugent; Camera Gregg Toland; Editor Daniel Mandell; Music Emil Newman, Hugo Friedhofer (dir); Art Director George Jenkins, Perry Ferguson
  • Crew: (Color) Available on VHS. Extract of a review from 1948. Running time: 112 MIN.
  • With: Danny Kaye Virginia Mayo Benny Goodman Hugh Herbert Steve Cochran Louis Armstrong

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