The Firemen's Ball

The Firemen's Ball (aka Hoří, má panenko) (Milos Forman, 1967) A local fire department in a small Czechoslovakian town holds a ball at the town hall every year. But, this year's fete will be different: the 86 year old chief (Jan Stöckl) of the fire brigade has retired—he has been diagnosed with cancer but not informed of it by his doctor because it's...thought a bad idea by the Communist Party.

 

Anyway, the brigade decides to honor their former Chief with their version of a gold watch—a ceremonial axe. Suddenly, the ball is a big deal as the committee makes more and more elaborate plans for the fete, which will include the entire community. There'll be a raffle, for instance, a talent contest, and...for some reason...a beauty contest. Well, the organizes are all middle aged men, so... Soon, there are tables full of potential prizes for the winners.

What the committee isn't saying is that the Chief has cancer. But, they're not going to mention it. The Chief's doctor can't even mention it, as the government won't allow it. It's against the law. "That's why nobody trusts doctors..." says one of the committee members. Already the comic/tragic illogic of Communist autocratic/bureaucratic thinking begins to rear its ironic head.

The ball is built of good intentions constructed by Murphy's Law: an early example is the hanging of an elaborate banner depicting the brigade fighting an alarming fire. It starts out fine with one of the volunteers on a high ladder hanging the thing from the rafters, then—just for an artistic touch—smudging the edges with smoke. Then, the banner catches fire and starts spreading and the guy hanging it loses control of the ladder, and the fellow on the floor supervising has long since left the hall, and the guy hanging the thing is literally hanging on for dear life while the thing burns...for the firemen's ball.

Then, the night of the thing, the committee is quite proud of the turn-out, and of the table full of prizes. The booze is flowing and the committee and is quite pleased with itself and start ogling attendees who might be good "material" for the upcoming beauty contest. As women are approached to participate, lips curl, decline and exits sought. This becomes a concern for the men, even though one of the attendees buys drinks for the committee to pick his daughter for the contest. Seven women are tapped and shuffled into a back-room where the committee gives them the once over and even encourage the girls to strip so they can judge better.

Meanwhile, it starts to become noticeable that some of the prizes are starting to go missing on the raffle table and that, the big crowd is covering up a lot of pilfering. The committee tries to get to the bottom of it, but doesn't want to blame anybody for the missing items, leading to this exchange:

Committee Member: The lottery has been stolen.
Joska, Committee Member: Gentlemen, there is one fact: if the people stole it, they cannot win it.
Committee Member: Don't talk like that, Joska. What about those people who bought the tickets honestly and didn't steal anything?
Joska, Committee Member: They should have stolen.

It's the sort of logic that's made me stop watching the Sunday News shows.

Finally, the absurdity reaches fever-pitch until it combusts and puts one in mind of Catch-22, or the satirical 1960's work of Richard Lester, or Month Python (but without the silliness). Forman's loose photography and the casting of locals only gives the situation more verisimilitude and dead-pan laughs. And it stings. So much so that, by the end, it becomes readily apparent that, for all the management and oversight, the fire department can't even get its basic job done for all the attention paid to the bureaucratic details rather than the job at hand.

 

It is a scathing, funny look at the Communist system in miniature, where Party is more important than people, and where fraud, entitlement, and procedure leads to chaos...almost according to plan.

 

Although we're alarmingly close to the Communist way of doing things, at last we still have the opportunity to toss out the demagogues every once in awhile...despite their continuing efforts to take our rights and democracy away.

 

Vote. And keep voting. 

Olde Review: Closely Watched Trains

This was part of a series of reviews of the ASUW Film series back in the '70's. Except for some punctuation, I haven't changed anything from the way it was presented, giving the snarky, clueless kid I was back in the '70's a break. Any stray thoughts and updates I've included with the inevitable asterisked post-scripts.


This Friday's films in 130 Kane Hall at 7:30pm are Closely Watched Trains and Lacombe, Lucien.

Closely Watched Trains aka "Ostre sledované vlaky" (Jirí Menzel, 1966) Closely Watched Trains is a wry, sometimes hysterical Czech film by Jiri Menzel, a person you've probably never heard of and have already forgotten.* It tells the story of Miloš Hrma, an insignificant young man in the scope of WWII, whose father was retired at 48 and now spends his day lying around and keeping track of the comings and goings of the train. Another relative was a hypnotist and a couple years back, he tried his skills on an advancing Nazi tanke-gruppe and was promptly crushed to a pulp (I am telling you this because there is no way in Hell that you'll be able to read the sub-titles in the opening minutes).** These are only two examples of Menzel's comedy-of-errors style of telling his story.

Menzel takes little incidents of the story of Miloš's work-a-day situation standing at the train platform—a job he wanted "just so he could strut on the platform." And his stories are sometimes hilariously satirical (for an example, there is an hysterical look at a town Nazi explaining the war situation and in a blase manner explaining that withdrawals from the American forces are such wonderful tactical maneuvers). Sometimes (most of the time), the stories are very ribald; one of the sub-plots is Miloš's constant failure with women, which, in context with the habits of a fellow platform-strutter, makes him turn to a suicide attempt in a dilapidated hotel. The hotel is being worked over by a fellow with a pile-driver. In this scene what is going to happen—how the two will intersect—is very apparent, but the sequence's effect is that it displaces the humor of the situation (which passed with the audience's first realization of what, inevitably, will happen) with suspense. Will it happen before Miloš is dead? It's an effective sequence because it anticipates viewer reaction and changes it to the further effect of the film.

In the last half-hour, Miloš is used like a pawn in a chess game in an attempt to head off a Nazi munitions train. It's outcome is consistent with the rest of the film, but there is no sense of real tragedy at the end, more an explosion of fulfillment. You may find Closely Watched Trains a very entertaining film.

Just a reminder (he said, slapping his forehead with his palm) I wrote this back in February 1977, and, although sorely tempted, I didn't change anything besides punctuation (and had to get fairly creative with that!). Closely Watched Trains won the Oscar for Best Foreign Film in 1968, and is one of three films I remember most fondly from the Winter ASUW series—the other two being Hari-Kiri and Il Posto—Trains probably because it's crack comic timing reminded me of my beloved Warner Brothers cartoons, with a dash (a mad dash!) of Buster Keaton thrown in for good measure. And the comedy came from character, not from out of the blue.

This review is more than thirty years old, but it's heartening—in fact, a bit miraculous—that Jiri Menzel is still making movies, his last being I Served the King of England, which was also about young professionals learning their craft to uproarious results.

* This was near the end of the series and I was getting a bit punchy by this time, but that's no excuse for insulting the audience that one is trying to "encourage" to go see a film.

** As I recall they were "white-on-white" and virtually indecipherable. Criterion has put out the DVD of Closely Watched Trains and they're more scrupulous in their translations and making sure that they're legible. Criterion is a great DVD publisher.