A Film Canon

This comic take on Snow White replaces the dwarves with a group of professors working on an encyclopedia, transforms the maiden into Katherine 'Sugarpuss' O'Shea (Barbara Stanwyck), a burlesque dancer on the run from the law, and, most memorably, translates her wisdom from domestics to linguistics, as she provides head professor Bertram Potts (Gary Cooper) with a repository of American slang, as well as an unsolicited lesson in body language; or, rather, the nexus between the two, exuding that cerebral sexuality of which Stanwyck is peculiarly capable, and explaining her ability to penetrate the mind of a man who, before encountering her, thought that "the only thing I could care for deeply...was a well-constructed sentence." As this might suggest, a great deal of the humour arises from the incongruity between the fairy-tale and everyday worlds, and, more specifically, between caricaturisation and characterisation, clearest in the standoff between a pair of realistically drawn gangsters and the seven professors, each of whom has been defined in terms of a single accent or interest, which are now brought to bear upon their escape. From this perspective, Cooper's relatively one-dimensional screen persona means that he never really experiences the conversion from caricature to character that Stanwyck's presence is supposed to catalyse, his final rejection of a boxing manual in favour of impulsive fighting feeling like a mere afterthought, rather than a critical moment in the narrative. That said, screenwriters Charles Brackett and Billy Wilder arguably anticipate this in their organisation of the central academic session around the word 'corny', which Sugarpuss aims at Potts, then elaborates: loose-toothed, old-fashioned, over-sentimental.