The Fireman's Ball

Milos Forman, Czech Republic (Czechoslovakia back then), 1967, bw (8.2*)
I found Fireman’s Ball to be hilarious, it’s like the “fireman’s ball from hell”. A small town fire department decides to have both it's annual ball as well as an 86th birthday celebration for the former fire chief at the same time.

One main attraction is a big group of door prizes, as one's entrance ticket is also a raffle ticket for these. However, as the film progresses, the door prizes slowly go missing one by one. Another big attraction is the annual beauty pageant. Unfortunately there are no beauties, and even those few are unwilling and flee. The elder firemen resort to drafting reluctant participants from the dance floor.

Nothing really goes according to plan in this comedy of errors. There's a hilarious climax that I can't reveal here, but suffice to say it's more irony-laced humor in this early comic classic from Forman. It's not a big-budget major film like his Oscar® winners shot here (Amadeus (1984) and One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (1975)), but it was a nominee for best foreign language film in 1969.

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In the Heat of the Night

Norman Jewison, 1967 (8.4*)
Best Picture (AA)
Though a little dated looking now, when this was released in the 60's the country was involved in race riots, student anti-war demonstrations, and there were many in the country fighting hard against racial prejudice in the courts and in the streets. So this film that deals with racial prejudice in a small Mississippi town was a timely political statement that was rewarded with the Oscar® for best picture, best director for Jewison, and Rod Steiger for best actor as a beer-bellied gum-smacking redneck sheriff.

The story is actually a homicide mystery. Sidney Poitier is a police detective from Philadelphia ("they call me Mister Tibbs!") who happens to be waiting at the train station when a body is found murdered in a small Mississippi town, so he is picked up as a usual racially-motivated suspect. When it turns out that he's a police detective with far more homicide experience than the law enforcement in this sleepy burg, he decides to lend his expertise so no other innocent people get swept up by this over-zealous and extremely reactive sheriff, who has little knowledge of forensic science.

At the time there was buzz about Poitier's character slapping a white man back who slaps him first; nowdays it just seems like a natural response. Also, Steiger's performance now seems more like a caricature than subtle acting warranting an Oscar, while Poitier's performance was actually the more artful one in the film. Still, the story works as a police procedural and mystery if you can get around all the more than obvious political statements and stereotyping about racism in the south.

The film won 17 awards overall, including five Oscars

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The Two of Us

Claude Berri, France, 1967, bw (9.4*)

aka Le vieil homme et l'enfant

Originally: The Old Man and the Boy

One of my favorite French films by my favorite French director, Claude Berri (Jean de Florette/Manon of the Spring), this is a joyous black-and-white classic. In occupied WW2 Paris, a Jewish couple are afraid for their young son's (Alain Cohen) safety so they send him off to the countryside to live with an elderly couple who become surrogate grandparents. Apparently they are unaware of his background, for the old man, Pepe, voices anti-Semitism during radio broadcasts of war news, repeating the propaganda he hears on the radio.

Pepe is wonderfully played by veteran actor Michel Simon, whom Berri coaxed out of retirement for this part (he looks like a French W.C. Fields with the red nose, just look at the dvd cover!), warms up quickly to the lad and becomes his partner in play as its obvious that having the kid around has given him a rejuvenation after a quiet retirement and slow country living.

Berri never makes this a sad or bitter war film, but a happy, joyful celebration of a child with a grandparent. The war, if it exists, is in another realm altogether, without the radio no one would know it was even occurring. Berri's first film is a beautifully shot b&w classic, instantly heartwarming without sentimentality or banality, one of those rare subtle masterpieces.

If you include it in the war or holocaust genres, which is really a stretch, it would be one of the more memorable of either. It's really a children's film, and a film for parents of all ages who love kids, yet children won't understand the reason that Claude is sent away nor for the mystery surrounding his background. All-in-all, this is a must-see treat for all cinephiles. Berri's epic two-parter, Jean de Florette and Manon of the Spring, is my favorite French film and one of my fave epics of all-time.

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Le Samourai

aka The Godson (US)
Jean-Pierre Melville, 1967, France (8.0*)
This is a very stylish film noir (in color) from French master director Jean-Pierre Melville, about a modern 'samourai', a hit man for hire, used by gangsters in Paris. Glamour boy Alain Delon fits this part perfectly, playing trench-coated Jef Costello with his cold blue-eyed stare and seeming indifference to everything, beautiful women as well as killing. This is all done very quietly, with meticulous care, thankfully with no symphonic or rock music score for distraction, just some occasional tasteful jazz, played live at a nightclub.

The film is almost as much a police procedural, with Francois Perier perfectly cast as the police superintendant investigating the murder committed by Costello near the film's beginning. Delon's wife Nathalie becomes his gorgeous alibi, and Cathy Rosier is the jazz singer at the club where the contract is completed. Even the art direction is perfect, notice how each apartment is furnished perfectly for each of the characters, from tasteful elegance to bare essentials only. After Army of Shadows, #291 on our survey, the highest rated of Melville's films at #358; both scored 8.1 at IMDB, as did his Le Circle Rouge.

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How To Succeed in Business Without Really Trying

David Swift, 1967 (8.4*)
Window cleaner Robert Morse, in a career-making musical comedy role, buys a book with shortcut methods to get ahead in the business world and applies them with hilarious success. One of the pointers is to create a name with an initial, so he comes up with J. Pierpont Finch, and joins the poorly run multinational Worldwide Wicket Co.

He starts in the mailroom, then uses the book’s tips to quickly rise to vice president in charge of advertising, and falls for secretary Rosemary Pilkington (Michele Lee). Frank Loesser wrote the songs, Bob Fosse choreographed the dances in this screwball satire of corporate capitalism. Silly, fun entertainment

The Coen Brothers did their own variation of this as The Hudsucker Proxy, without the music, as Tim Robbins is promoted from the mailroom to CEO to drive the stock price down so the board could take over all the shares cheaply.

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In Cold Blood

Richard Brooks, 1967, bw (8.8*)
Journalistic filming of Truman Capote’s Pulitzer-winning non-fiction book about the ruthless killing of the Clutter family of Kansas by two burglers, who had heard in prison that the family had a safe in the house. Director Brooks has made this chilling account more realistic and frightening by the use of flashbacks in the killers words, and a slightly grainy ‘newsreel’ look, also by building up to the actual crime, which is mostly shot by flashlight. One of the more spine-tingling crime re-enactments on film.

A later film, Capote (which won an acting Oscar for Philip Seymour Hoffman), examines this period in Capote’s life, when he was torn between researching his book, justice for the Clutters, and sympathy for the killers, who were awaiting execution.

The killers are excellently portrayed by Scott Wilson (from In the Heat of the Night), and tv's Robert Black (a former Little Rascal), in their best performances of their careers. This is a must-see for all true crime fans, more eerie than any Hitchcock film, in fact, it's almost too realistic to recommend.

Quote: That Mr. Clutter was a real nice gentleman, right up until I slit his throat.

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The Avengers

[Our 300th review]
a.k.a. "The Original Avengers", "Emma Peel Megaset"
British TV, 1964-67, 51 episodes, bw & color (8.5*)
This famous tongue-in-cheek British series poked fun at the 007 genre and others, such as cheap SciFi and kung-fu, and did so with a style and panache that's still enjoyable today as long as you don't take it seriously. British super-agent John Steed, played as a charming bowler-wearing sophisticate by Patrick MacNee, starred and was teamed with a series of athletic actresses. The gorgeous Diana Rigg came into the series from the Royal Shakespeare Company about 1964 as Mrs. Emma Peel ('M' appeal, get it?) when it was still black and white, replacing Honor Blackman who ironically left to do the 007 film Goldfinger. In one episode, Steed receives a Christmas card from her character, Cathy Gale, and when Emma asks where it's from Steed comments "Fort Knox.. can't ever figure why she'd be there".

Emma's married, but her pilot-explorer husband has been missing for years after a jungle flight, so she and Steed maintain a platonic but chemistry-charged relationship that often includes ennuendo and roundabout flirtations in typical British style, as the most they ever shared was a bottle of champagne; she is supposedly an amateur sleuth helping Steed for the commonwealth. Rigg's first 2 years in b&w are probably better written, and we see her in black a lot, leather bodysuits and the like, but the color ones from her last year are a little better made and Rigg is even more gorgeous. She eventually left after three seasons and 51 episodes (shown in the U.S. as four, from 64-67; now on 17 dvd's), and her last episode is appropriately called The Forget-Me-Knot, which also introduced her successor, Linda Thorson, as well as a hilarious visual with a Steed double. The Avengers before and after Diana Rigg pale by comparison; she and MacNee brought a cool chemisty never matched by a crime-fighting duo before or since; well, tv anyway - after all, there was the Thin Man film series.

Note: in The Superlative Seven (title spoof of The Magnificent Seven), both Donald Sutherland and Charlotte Rampling were guest stars in a plot borrowed from Agatha Christie's And Then There Were None.
Self-Reference: in the color episode Return of the Cybernauts, Emma is watching tv, which is showing the bw episode The Cybernauts from two seasons earlier.

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Oliver!

Dir: Carol Reed, 1967 (8.2*)
Best Picture (AA)

Somehow, making a musical based on Charles Dickens' Oliver Twist seemed like a bad idea to me, but then they pretty much pulled it off. A dark, scruffy drama, with a little music to cheer up the young orphans. If only Mark Lester as Oliver could sing! Not sure how they picked him for the part, certainly not on musical or acting ability. However, fellow pickpocket Jack Wild, the Artful Dodger, actually won an Oscar for Supporting Actor, and later starred in a tv show called "H.R. Puff’n’stuff" – no kidding! Ron Moody got an Oscar nomination as Fagin, leader of the gang of street urchins. Alan Bates was pretty evil as heartless Bill Sykes. The music is just average (lots of scales), but the art direction and direction more than compensate. Six Oscars (one honorary)

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