OVP: The Firemen's Ball (1967)

Film: The Firemen's Ball (1967)

Stars: Jan Vostrcil, Josef Sebanek, Josef Valnoha, Jan Stockl

Director: Milos Forman

Oscar History: 1 nomination (Best Foreign Language Film-Czechoslovakia...worth noting that while this was released in 1967, it was nominated at the 1968 Oscars, hence the tag below but the year above)

Snap Judgment Ranking: 2/5 stars

Looking at movies from a distance is sometimes hard.  One of the stranger things about the cinema, particularly world cinema, is that you have to consider what is revolutionary in one part of the planet is not so in others, and as a result you have to remember that curve when you're considering the movie.  The Firemen's Ball is chief amongst these.  In 1967, Milos Forman was an emerging name in European cinema, and was the country's most important director in its "New Wave" having been nominated for an Oscar two years earlier for Loves of a Blonde.  However, this film nearly destroyed his career (and almost landed him in jail), and without some research for a modern audience, it's hard to understand why.  I'll get to that below, and as to why this is a movie I struggle to be able to properly review.

(Spoilers Ahead) The movie takes place over one day, and with the exception of Stockl's fire chief, the characters are pretty much meant to be interchangeable.  Essentially Stockl's fire chief is retiring from the volunteer fire brigade, and is also dying of cancer (and potentially has not been told that he is dying).  The men attempt to put on a raffle & a beauty pageant during the giant shindig for his going-away, but both go awry, with the raffle items being stolen from the table by patrons walking by, and the beauty pageant a bust as none of the girls look like the women in their "Miss America" style photo, nor are they all that interested in winning the prize (save for one woman who comfortably exposes herself to a group of horny older men).  When a fire breaks out, we find that the firetruck is stuck in the snow, and the entire community watch a local man's home burn down.  Instead of giving him money, though, they give him raffle tickets to items that the citizens have stolen, leaving him destitute.  The firemen essentially wash their hands of the situation, as none of them is personally aggrieved, and pretend like the fiasco of an evening never happened.

The Firemen's Ball is meant as a comedy, or at least a dark comedy, and it plays that way, bordering into the sex comedy realm of the late 1970's/early 1980's.  Sex comedies always age poorly (even the good ones), and this one is gross like most of them are of this era.  The women are exploited by perverted old men, some of whom are literally their fathers, and the slapstick set-pieces lose their appeal pretty much after the man hanging from the rafters sets a banner on fire in the first five minutes.  As a result, I didn't like the movie, and in a normal scenario I'd say that I was bordering on actively disliking it.  The comedy aged badly, and the ending with the poor old man is confusing as it feels like it's being played for laughs even though he's essentially homeless with no active hope.

But I need to give the film its respect, as it was controversial at the time and nearly ended Forman's promising career.  While it wasn't initially banned in Czechoslovakia (it played in theaters & television), it was eventually as it was seen as an indictment of the Communist system, and the follies that result from entrusting a group of men with the simplest of tasks.  Forman nearly landed in jail when his producing partner Carlo Ponti pulled out his funding (thus meaning there wasn't enough money to back the film), and was only saved from such a sentence when filmmakers Francois Truffaut & Claude Berri bought the international rights to the film, which won acclaim abroad.  Forman would never make another film in Czech, and would not much later be making two Best Picture winners (One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest and Amadeus), but while this film was revolutionary at the time, it reads today as no more than a mere curiosity.