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.

OVP: Ragtime (1981)

Film: Ragtime (1981)
Stars: James Cagney, Brad Dourif, James Olson, Mary Steenburgen, Howard E. Rollins, Jr., Elizabeth McGovern, Donald O'Connor, Pat O'Brien, Mandy Patinkin, Debbie Allen, Norman Mailer...as well as very early performances in small roles from the likes of future stars Jeff Daniels, Fran Drescher, & Samuel L. Jackson
Director: Milos Forman
Oscar History: 8 nominations (Best Supporting Actor-Howard E. Rollins, Jr., Supporting Actress-Elizabeth McGovern, Adapted Screenplay, Cinematography, Art Direction, Costume Design, Original Score, Original Song-"One More Hour")
Snap Judgment Ranking: 2/5 stars

There are very few films remaining that have been nominated for 8+ Oscars that I haven't seen (the stats are harder to find than you'd think).  It's an even shorter list if you don't count movies that weren't cited for Best Picture...in fact, it's now a list that doesn't exist at all.  Only five films have received over eight nominations for the Academy Awards at the Oscars without a Best Picture citation, and with today's review I've seen them all: They Shoot Horses, Don't They (the only one to get 9 nods), Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Dreamgirls, The Dark Knight, and 1981's Ragtime.  Based on the celebrated novel by EL Doctorow, this movie is a gigantic, all-star extravaganza linking together historical figures with fictional characters so unknown they don't have names, and kudos have to go out to the casting director for putting a number of future superstars onto the call sheet.  But the question is-why did a movie get this kind of adoration but (despite having a very prestigious source material & director), didn't get a nod for Best Picture?  Let's take a look, shall we?

(Spoilers Ahead) I have never read Doctorow's novel (shame on me, I know), so I don't know if this is faithful or not, but the movie is largely a tangled historical web that eventually settles on one storyline in the back-half of the movie.  Essentially we have a lot of figures, some real-life (McGovern as famed model Evelyn Nesbit, Cagney as Fire Commissioner Rhinelander Waldo), and other characters, major characters in the film, who don't actually get names (Dourif plays "younger brother" while Steenburgen plays "Mother").  The film shows racism, as well as classism at the turn of the century, with newsreels featuring figures such as Harry Houdini, Teddy Roosevelt, and Stanford White (played by Mailer in the movie) to give us a sense of time (and its passage), while checking in on the lives of the main characters in the movie.  The back-half of the film, however, focuses almost exclusively on Coalhouse Walker (Rollins), a fictional figure who is a black man who has made something of a career for himself as a musician, but will not forgive a group of firefighters who destroyed his car while he was driving down-the-road.

The movie's focus on Coalhouse was probably inevitable, but arguably the wrong decision for the movie as it's more interesting in the first half of the movie.  The vignette-style stories almost have a Terrence Malick "figure out the plot" kind of coherence to them.  It's not remotely as arbitrary or abstract as Malick, but I quite liked the idea that we were getting a series of short stories rather than one larger narrative, but the Coalhouse plot, which ties together all of the loose figures in the film, almost feels anti-climactic compared to the looseness to Forman's approach to the movie.  It seems impossible that an anthology tale would have been greenlit in 1981, but it's where the movie works best.  When it focuses on Coalhouse it becomes more predictable, and more reliant on the actual figures at-hand, and the acting is a bit over-the-place here.

McGovern & Rollins got the Oscar nominations, and they do have the showiest parts (though it was Steenburgen who scored at the Globes, and it was Randy Newman's score that most deserved the AMPAS recognition), but Ragtime is a movie that doesn't really allow for standouts in the traditional sense, and I left wanting more from both actors.  McGovern plays Evelyn Nesbit as somehow a dope and a brainy girl, someone who knows how to manipulate every situation but doesn't always know that she's doing it (a girl too pretty to lose), but it only sometimes works when McGovern makes Nesbit in on the joke.  One wonders if this nomination was in part due to McGovern's shocking display of nudity about a third of the way into the picture, where she nonchalantly sits on a 100-year-old couch with her breasts on full-display.  It's better than the meek-and-mild Steenburgen (who adds little to her character) or Patinkin's overbearing director, but it's an ingenue part that probably needed a more seasoned actress to make it work.

Rollins grounds his character a bit more, but honestly I left this performance with something to be desired as well.  His righteous anger is warranted, but you can't quite compromise the man we initially meet who quickly becomes a doomed vigilante within Rollins work.  He seems to only know how to reason in Shakespearean speech, so often out-of-place with the rest of the cast's more naturalistic performances, and you don't leave understanding enough of his motives.  The Academy could have done worse here (considering it was the sentimental 80's, a nomination instead for Cagney's humorous but one-dimensional fire commissioner could so easily have been cited instead), but I left the performance wishing for more, and glad that ultimately the Oscars picked John Gielgud in Arthur, a more fully-realized creation.