winner and the audience cheers. A siren sounds because the house of an old man, Mr. Havelka, is on fire. Everyone uses the opportunity to leave the town hall without paying for their drinks. With their fire engine stuck in the snow, the firefighters manage to save some furniture and animals from the house, but they are unable to do anything about the fire with only a few shovelsful of snow. A table is borrowed from Havelka and used to sell more alcohol to the crowd that is watching the fire. To help Havelka, who has lost almost everything, people donate their raffle tickets. However, nearly all of the prizes have been stolen during the ball, leaving only a few low-value items. The firefighters announce they will turn off the lights to give the thieves an opportunity to return the prizes. In the darkness all of the remaining items are also stolen, and when the lights come back on, Josef is caught returning the head cheese his wife stole. The firefighters' committee retreats to discuss how to save the reputation of the department. They return to a now-empty hall, where only their retired chairman remains. The committee presents him the gift box and he gives a heartfelt speech thanking them, but when the box is opened, it turns out that the axe itself has also been stolen. The next morning, outside in the snow, Havelka lies down in his bed next to the fireman set on guard beside the ruins of his home. Cast Background After the success of Loves of a Blonde (1965), Forman, along with fellow screenwriters Ivan Passer and Jaroslav Papoušek, could not concentrate on their follow-up screenplay and so went to the small north Bohemian town of Vrchlabí to hole up in a hotel and concentrate on writing. "One evening, to amuse ourselves, we went to a real firemen's ball" Forman recalls. "What we saw was such a nightmare that we couldn't stop talking about it. So we abandoned what we were writing on to start this script." The movie was shot in a typical local Palace of Culture, "Na střelnici" in Vrchlabí. Most of the actors were not professional actors (e.g. Josef Šebánek, Milada Ježková). To shoot the natural sound of their voices it was necessary to have silence on-set, so during the actors' dialogue scenes the band merely pretended to play and the dancing