In 1967 Milos Foreman was a young promising director from the Czech new wave cinema movement. He had already completed two feature films and his second, “Loves of a Blond”, was nominated as best foreign language film at the 1965 Oscars. For his next feature, Foreman and his scriptwriters isolated themselves in a small hotel at a tiny Bohemian town. While there, and in the middle of a bad case of writer’s block, they found themselves at an annual party hosted by the local volunteer fire Department. Their experience at this party, inspired them to write the screenplay for, “The Firemen’s Ball”.
The plot, as much as there is one, is very simplistic. The movie begins as a small-town volunteer fire department is in the final preparations of their annual ball. In this particular year, they have finally agreed to honor their previous chairman who is retired and dying of cancer. They purchase a small ceremonial fire ax as a gift for the former chairman and decide to hold a beauty contest, with the winner of the contest given the honor of presenting the gift. The planning and organization of the festivities is run by a committee made up of the firefighters, and with no clear person in charge. Right at the start, things start to fall apart, and the movie depicts a series of disasters that occur just at the beginning and throughout the entire party. As the party begins, the committee realize that they have no participants for their beauty competition and go about looking for the prettiest girls at the event, trying to unsuccessfully convince them to participate. In the end only the unattractive and overweight care to be part of the competition. Right at the peak of all the fun, a fire breaks out at a local farmhouse and these so-called firefighters show how inept they are at even putting out a fire. Lottery tickets are sold, so that prizes consisting of various types of food could be won. This is iron curtain Czechoslovakia that rationed food to its populace, making it no surprise that all the prized food gets stolen. Even the honorary gift is not safe.
The movie is known as being an allegory to the communist regimes that were running the Czech Republic at the time. The committee consists of seemingly equal members who have no clear defining path on how to get to where they need to go. The lack of a boss leads to every decision requiring a meeting. This committee hints at being a representation of the hopelessly bureaucratic communist Government running Czechoslovakia at the time. Foreman at the time denied the satirical element of the film, so as not to agitate the Government. He has since admitted to this inner meaning in his movie.
While interesting, the political commentary is not what stood out for me. This is a comedy, and a very funny one at that. I laughed as almost everything that could go wrong, goes wrong for the helpless firemen, right from the beginning. There is a lot of physical comedy here and one scene that involves a decorator losing his ladder while decorating the ceiling, reminded me of buster Keaton. There is also the constant stealing of food that should have been expected and was not limited to just the guests. At one point, one of the firemen announces that he will turn off all the lights, to allow the thieves an opportunity to return the food. The result of this black-out is not what was expected and extremely funny. A large portion of the movie deals with the firemen’s attempt at finding pretty women to participate in the beauty contest. The pretty ones escape the first chance they get, resulting in not what I would call a contest of beauty.
Only a few of the cast members are professional actors, with the rest made up of people who live in the town where the movie is based and was being filmed at. Foreman succeeds in getting very natural performances from these people. Often the reactions of these non-professional actors to some of the shenanigans looked completely real, which only added to the humor.
The Czech Government at the time felt Foreman’s movie was disrespectful to its subjects and made it impossible for him to continue working behind the Iron Curtain. For this reason, “The Firemen’s Ball”, forced Foreman to escape to the West, where he had great success. What is sometimes forgotten is that the movie is also a splendid comedy and a whole lot of fun to watch.
1001 Movies before you die 