The Firemen's Ball (1967)

Milos Forman: "In the totalitarian system that I lived in the pressure was ideological . . . On the other hand, here in the West, ideological pressure doesn't exist at all, at all. But there is a commercial pressure, because a film is a very expensive undertaking and everybody who puts money into it wants money back."

But isn't commercial pressure ideological precisely because of its non-ideological pretense?

Isn't the allegory of rampant thievery applied to 1960s Communist Czechoslovakia equally applicable to contemporary Wall Street? Instead of the poor stealing from the poor the rich steals from the rich.

And which is the greater crime: pilfering a head cheese for future jellied meat treat or plundering a national treasury to furnish Montana ranch manor, South France coastal villa , 6 car garage of Hollywood Hills home, W Hotel beach front Fort Lauderdale condo and Upper East Side penthouse overlooking 40,000 shelter scramblers, dragging dirt stiffened clothes in punctured plastic bags through streets of outer boroughs? Poor schmucks.