The Firemen's Ball

The annual ball held by the volunteer fire brigade in a small Czechoslovak town is meant to honour the retiring chief, an eighty-six-year-old who is to receive a golden axe for his long service. The committee has arranged music and dancing, a raffle and a beauty contest, but almost nothing goes according to plan. The prize draw is robbed, the search for suitable contestants proves difficult, and a genuine fire breaks out in the town during the festivities.

Miloš Forman directed and co-wrote the film with Jaroslav Papoušek and Ivan Passer. It is the earliest of the ten features listed in his directing career here, made in Czechoslovakia before the later American productions that followed it. Jan Vostrčil leads the cast as the head of the committee, alongside Josef Šebánek, František Debelka, Josef Valnoha, Ladislav Adam and Vratislav Čermák as fellow committee members; thirty-two performers are credited in all. Carlo Ponti and Rudolf Hájek produced the Italian-Czechoslovak co-production, which runs 73 minutes.

Reception has been solid rather than overwhelming. On IMDb the rating sits at 7.3 from about thirteen thousand votes, while on TMDB it is 7.1 from a few hundred, showing a smaller audience reaching the same broad verdict. A critics' rating of 7.9 from thirty-two reviews puts professional assessment somewhat above the general public's, so the film has held its standing over the decades since its 1967 release.