Film is a visual medium, but if there was anyone who could make an audience feel the scales tip more toward the written word, it is writer/director Billy Wilder. And of all the amazing motion pictures Wilder created or contributed to in his career from the 1930s to the 1980s, there is perhaps no greater example of his linguistic brilliance than the delirious screwball comedy BALL OF FIRE (1941), a supreme example of the pre-war Hollywood studio system firing on all cylinders and a fabulously satisfying entertainment in which much of the humor is based on the different ways a single language can be used by different people to the point of hindering, rather than facilitating, communication.