THE SPLINTERED HUMANISTS

IN this age of so-called humanism and humanist ideals. the mass media sometimes present a strangely splintered, even distorted reflection of humanity.
The most amusing of the new movies is a tiny Czechoslovak farce, The Firemen's Ball ("IJ," Gala Royal), which was chosen to Open the London Film Festival. About nothing more esoteric than the annual party held by the fire service in a small Czech village, it includes such familiar junketings as a raffle and a local beauty contest, which might have ornamented an early Ealing studio comedy. It carries a "U" certificate (quite something nowadays) and is directed by Milos Forman,
His previous successes, Peter and Pavia and A Blonde in Love, have an endearing, gentle ordinariness, rather like the Italian "neo-realist" cornedies which captivated the filmgoing world immediately after the war.
"The Firemen's Ball" is quite different in texture. It is tougher, more robust and bucolic in humour, and remorseless in the detachment of its observation of human foibles.
It reveals old men's clumsy awkwardness, greed and repressed lechery. It shows us lumping girls each dreaming of emulating "Miss World" and stout wives trying to keep an eye on their husbands.
Everybody is greedy to capture a prize—by ticket or by theft. Together they add up to a crowd of grotesques in a forbiddingly drab setting.
All this is as funny as early slapstick. Whether there is more to it than that seems a matter for disagreement. On television, Forman resolutely parried the interviewer with insistence that he had not made a political satire. only a human comedy.
Certainly it is not at all obvious satire. Final judgment on Forman's intention must depend on nuances of dialogue which we could hardly expect
to percolate through sub-titles. But it seems to me possible that his fertile human comedy is set in a background of that bleak uniformity, bullying officialdom, tyranny, petty or monstrous, which seems to us to overshadow the Communist Empire. It is still very funny, nevertheless.
A frivolous comedy with a disarming appearance of agreeable lightness is The Bliss of Mrs. Blossom ("A," Paramount). Thanks to the presence of such pleasant personalities as Richard Attenborough, Shirley MacLaine and James Booth, plus the light and charming decor of fantastickating suburbia, and to a screenplay by Alec Coppel and Denis Norden, the illusion of gay entertainment is kept afloat.
All this in spite of such letdowns as a woefully uncomic cop (Freddie Jones) with William Rushton totally wasted as his assistant.
In the end the story turns out to have no substance except the triangle "design for living" of the heroine who lives at the same time with her husband and a lover she keeps hidden in the attic; and the dedication of her husband to manufacturing the ideal brassiere.
The scrapbook system of compilation may make history even more difficult for future generations to unravel. In the Year of the Pig (ICA Cinema, The Mall-Club) tries by more than usually intelligent juxtaposition of existing news material and commentary to cover the course of the Vietnam war. More than anything, it seems to me to confirm the early Soviet film-makers' discovery that good editing (they called it montage) would make the camera appear to say whatever they wanted.
A wholly different kind of compilation has been used to make Love—in Our Time ("X," ABC, Fulham Road and Edgware Road).
Six couples of the many who answered TV director Elkan Allan's advertisement are introduced to re-enact their own "love stories" in illustration of contemporary customs and attitudes to sex, with the vaunted new freedoms and permissiveness.
Evidently this is not a film to be recommended to Catholic readers as entertainment, though as a social document it has a hideous kind of horrific authenticity. One possibly unforeseen effect of using so many non-professional actors is to make them singularly devoid of the customary glamour which perhaps may after all be only make-up deep.
Horror films have always seemed to me inhuman-, and Corruption ("X," New Victoria), is no exception.