The Firemen's Ball (1967)

I wanted to like this one. I genuinely did. Milos Forman, Czech New Wave, sharp political satire, a film that reportedly rattled the communist establishment enough to be banned after the Prague Spring. On paper, that's exactly my kind of thing. In practice, The Firemen's Ball is one of the most tedious seventy-odd minutes I've spent watching a film in recent memory.

The premise is simple enough: a small-town fire brigade throws its annual ball, and everything goes wrong. The raffle descends into chaos, the beauty contest falls apart, petty squabbles break out among indistinguishable officials, and a house actually catches fire while the firemen are busy bickering. In theory, it's a neat little microcosm of collective incompetence and bureaucratic absurdity, a portrait of a system that fails at even the most basic tasks. You can see what Forman was going for. The trouble is, seeing what a film is going for and actually enjoying it are two very different things.

There isn't a single character here worth caring about. It's a sea of squabbling, interchangeable faces, and the film gives you no foothold, no one to follow, no emotional thread to hold onto. Scene after scene consists of low-stakes arguments that go nowhere and resolve nothing. The humour, if you want to call it that, is so dry and so rooted in a very specific cultural and political moment that it simply doesn't travel well across time or geography. What might have felt subversively funny to a Czechoslovak audience in 1967, watching their own bureaucracy lampooned on screen, lands as inert and airless to a modern viewer coming to it cold.

Visually, there's nothing to compensate either. It's shot in a flat, documentary style that never generates the intimacy or urgency that approach demands. It looks functional. Fine. Unremarkable. Compare it to something like Daisies, made just a year earlier in the same Czech New Wave tradition, and the contrast is stark. That film crackles with energy, invention and genuine anarchic spirit. This one just sort of sits there.

I keep coming back to the Forman problem. Because I think if you come to this film having seen One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, as most people will, the whiplash is severe. That film thrives on big, vivid personalities and enormous emotional stakes. You feel every moment of it. The Firemen's Ball has none of that. It's hollow where Cuckoo's Nest is full. And I know it's not entirely fair to hold an early work up against a later masterpiece, but when the director himself is the reason you sat down to watch something, the comparison is unavoidable.

The runtime is just over seventy minutes, which should be nothing. A tight little film. Instead it feels interminable. Every minute stretches. Every repeated joke lands with a thud. By the time the ball collapses entirely, I wasn't amused, I wasn't provoked, I wasn't even mildly irritated in the way good satire can irritate you. I was just bored.

Look, I understand the historical importance. I understand why film scholars and Czech cinema enthusiasts hold it in high regard. Context matters, and stripped of context, a lot of politically daring art loses its charge. I accept that. But context isn't enough to make a film entertaining, and my job here is to tell you honestly what it's like to actually watch it. And what it's like is a slog. Not funny, not engaging, not even interesting to look at. Historically notable, certainly. As an evening's viewing, painfully, stubbornly boring.

One star.

Rating: ★  | Year: 1967  | Watched: 2026-04-19

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Related on Movies With Macca

More from Miloš Forman: One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (1975)
More from Czechoslovakia: Fantastic Planet (1973) · Men Without Wings (1946) · Daisies (1966) · The Pied Piper (1986)
More from the 1960s: Viy (1967) · Persona (1966) · Carnival of Souls (1962) · Daisies (1966)
More comedy: The Eagle (1925) · The General (1926) · Americana (2023) · The Naked Gun: From the Files of Police Squad! (1988)