(thank you, Victor Creed!) 

Imagine this as a movie idea today: Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs with Snow being an extremely talented exotic dancer type and those dwarfs a bunch of stuffy but eager to learn elderly eggheads she ends up hanging out with to teach them all the things they didn’t know. Once you get your eyeballs above the obvious jiggle-tease material and plentiful opportunities for modern day humor sixteen writers working together come up with, the results would probably be pretty darn terrible.

I can see the trailer now: two minutes, thirty eight or so of slow-mo cleavage shots and some special guest cameo coot rattling off one-liners, plus someone getting hit in the nether regions with a golf, basket or other ball, maybe a nice pratfall, a fart joke, a fat girl joke and some annoying music on that soundtrack that doesn’t even fit. Yeah, that’s not a movie I’d want to see at all. Fortunately, Howard Hawks’ 1941 film Ball of Fire takes the Snow White and thanks to a wonderfully funny and sassy Barbara Stanwyck helping loosen up those old guys (and an even stuffier Gary Cooper), a great script and plenty of screwball humor, it still holds up today as a total riot.

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