What makes it different from others?

Plot so thin, it passes unnoticed.

A Masterpiece!

One of those movie experiences that is so good it makes you realize you've been grading everything else on a curve.

Billy Wilder clearly had a penchant for fairy stories and having fashioned Cinderella into Midnight he turned his attention to Snow White And The Seven Dwarfs a couple of years later and came up with Ball Of Fire in which the seven dwarfs were compiling a dictionary of Slang. Ball of Fire appeared in 1941 and Howard Hawks remade it seven years later with the dwarfs now engaged in compiling a history of Jazz complete with musical examples. For reasons mostly unfathomable Benny Goodman was given a speaking part as one of the Professors whilst the actors are supplemented by the likes of Charlie Barnet, Louis Armstrong, Tommy Dorsey, Mel Powell, Lionel Hampton and Buck and Bubbles. Whilst light years short of Wilder's script this does have the merit of the real jazz musicians to compensate for the acting of Danny Kaye, Virginia Mayo and Steve Cochran, woefully inadequate replacements for Gary Cooper, Barbara Stanwyck and Dana Andrews.

Saw this a couple of times when I was a kid in the late 70'ies and then again recently... it still holds up very well - mainly because of the fantastic display of all the jazz greats... but it is also downright sexy at times. People who complain that this is a remake doesn't get it. It is a totally different movie when it is about music instead of slang. Actually I am somewhat baffled that this has not been remade again with various rock musicians instead of the jazz displayed in this one. It would be a cheap hit movie I guarantee it... - but you have to pick some musicians who can tone down the "rock" ego. Lets see: Tom Hanks as the professor, Scarlett Johansson as the girl. One of the other professors should be a guitarist proficient in both classical, jazz and rock guitar such as Vai, Sattriani or Malmsten.

Someone said Danny Kaye was a bit subdued for this film, yes, I think Hawks reigned him in a bit. What is surprising is that Kaye does NOT do any of his regular vocal onslaughts: And this film basically a musical too- Well not really a musical, but having music in it. "Wonder Man" was also not a musical, but Kaye does his usual vocal debauchery in it. In this film, we just have his comedic talents, which are just as good to watch.This film is an almost frame by frame remake of "Ball of Fire" - And so, fans of "Ball of Fire" who compare the two will see how well this is done, even with the major thematic changes made. Some would call this a musical, but it is not really. It is just a film that happens to have music in it. And the music is good, because it it not your usual music written for musicals, with bellowing singers and 150 dancers on a stage set the size of a small aircraft carrier, it is actually something that you can envision happening in a small room in an institution which is pretty much what happens in this film... No big stage productions or fantasy sequences, just plain kick-arse JAZZ.Some of the really funny gags from the original are missing: Mostly the ones that are based on 1941 Slang. What was important to the story, was kept in, and surprisingly it still fit.What makes this one of the most interesting films ever made is the assemblage of Jazz Greats, including the incredible Louis Armstrong.The song "A Song is Born" is about the best song in any "musical" I have heard.

I'm truly dating myself but back in the swing days there was a bandleader named Sammy Kaye who used that as his band's slogan. Otherwise my title would have been the tag line for this film.It was only seven years earlier that the original film, Ball of Fire also came from the Sam Goldwyn Studio. In that one Gary Cooper was one of several professors who were putting together an encyclopedia. His specialty was linguistics and he selected Barbara Stanwyck to help in learn new slang terms.Here it's a musical encyclopedia and Virginia Mayo stumbles into the lives of the sheltered professors putting this history together. They've led such a cloistered existence that the whole jazz era has passed them by. So Kaye in the Cooper role and another professor played by Benny Goodman with Mayo get some of the best to help them along.A Song is Born is a pleasant although a previous reviewer is correct in saying that Danny Kaye is far more subdued than usual in this film. But anytime you can get Benny Goodman, Tommy Dorsey, Louis Armstrong, Charlie Barnet, and Mel Powell together for a jam session, the film automatically becomes worthwhile.This is for every fan of jazz in the world.