Amadeus (1984)

USA / France / Czechoslovakia / Italy, 160 minutes

Director: Milos Forman

Writers: Peter Shaffer, Zdenek Mahler

Photography: Miroslav Ondricek

Music: Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart

Editors: Michael Chandler, Nena Danevic

Cast: F. Murray Abraham, Tom Hulce, Elizabeth Berridge, Simon Callow, Roy Dotrice, Christine Ebersole, Jeffrey Jones, Cynthia Nixon

There is no break or intermission or anything like that in Amadeus—it's longer than 2001: A Space Odyssey, but by 1984 long movies rarely offered breaks anymore and I'd like to know why. But I had to flip my DVD over at about the 1:50 mark and I took the opportunity to make some popcorn and tidy up a little. Note that I watched the theatrical cut, because that's what I had on hand (director Milos Forman's 2002 edit is some 20 minutes longer). I noticed that in the first half of Amadeus Mozart was presented as a rock star more like 1999 Prince, brilliant, child-like, sexual, high on his own genius, and unshakably confident. In the second half, which is literally darker even if you're only talking about the lighting, Mozart has become more like such grizzled veterans just off their peaks as the Stones, Neil Young, David Bowie, or maybe Justin Bieber.

Giving in to these glammy rock star dynamics turns out to be as good a way as any for me into this one. Biopics don't interest me as a general rule, let alone about geniuses of the distant past, but I love Forman as a general rule so those two things balance out. But the focus on opera, while obviously well done and with tons of production value, tends to tilt it the other way for me. Then its obvious source as a stage production plus frankly the bonanza of a lot of Oscar hoopla (11 nominations, eight wins, including Best Picture), with all the follow-on generalized overrating (#84 on the IMDb big list), make me inclined toward suspicion. Tom Hulce as Mozart is unconvincing at best beyond a memorably irritating cackle. He's better in Fearless, possibly because it's a smaller role. But in the end, OK sure, all that genius—Mozart, Forman, Twyla Tharp again on choreography, Cynthia Nixon in a small part—weighs in and eventually you just have to give in. The movie is long but rarely less than entertaining.

One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (1975)

USA, 133 minutes
Director: Milos Forman
Writers: Lawrence Hauben, Bo Goldman, Ken Kesey, Dale Wasserman
Photography: Haskell Wexler
Music: Jack Nitzsche
Editors: Sheldon Kahn, Lynzee Klingman
Cast: Jack Nicholson, Louise Fletcher, Will Sampson, Brad Dourif, William Redfield, Christopher Lloyd, Danny DeVito, Scatman Carothers, Sydney Lassick, Michael Berryman

Full disclosure, as a Ken Kesey fanboy I have mostly followed his lead on this movie adaptation of his first novel, though I did see it all the way through when it was new. Kesey was involved in the early stages of making it but reportedly never even looked at it after he left over creative differences. As a result I pushed it to the side and missed how supremely popular it has remained. Its present ranking at #114 on the big list at They Shoot Pictures, Don't They?—the highest it's ever been there, in fact, and the reason I'm writing about it—only begins to suggest the levels of affection that exist for it. A better gauge might be IMDb's always intriguing popularity contest of a best movies list, where The Shawshank Redemption has long ruled all. One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest sits at #16 there—pretty high! But the single reason, I'm convinced, for its enduring popularity, was the Oscars sweep, taking the so-called grand slam that year (Best Picture, Best Actor, Best Actress, Best Director, and Best [adapted in this case] Screenplay), the first movie to do so since 1934's It Happened One Night, and one of only three with 1991's The Silence of the Lambs.

Winning a bunch of Oscars is not the reason to like a movie but you know how people are. I will note in passing that I do like It Happened One Night. And getting over myself enough to look again at Cuckoo's Nest reveals a number of outstanding features. It has numerous good and/or interesting performances, not just Jack Nicholson and Louise Fletcher (though Nicholson and Fletcher are the best), including Brad Dourif and Christopher Lloyd in their first roles, William Redfield, and Danny DeVito apparently with hair. Cinematographer Haskell Wexler's credits include In the Heat of the Night, The Conversation, and Coming Home, and he shot this in rich '70s color and luminous style. But the many grave errors of the picture's narrative are still there, romanticizing mental illness as poetical (note the dancing nut) or, even worse, as a metaphor for politics. It sees individualism as such a virtue that it makes a hero of a preening, self-serving ass who is most believable when he's out for himself alone, and least believable when his lip trembles and he appears to care.

Hair (1979)

USA / West Germany, 121 minutes
Director: Milos Forman
Writers: Gerome Ragni, James Rado, Michael Weller
Photography: Richard C. Kratina, Miroslav Ondricek, Jean Talvin
Music: Galt MacDermot
Editors: Alan Heim, Lynzee Klingman, Stanley Warnow
Cast: John Savage, Treat Williams, Beverly D'Angelo, Annie Golden, Dorsey Wright, Cheryl Barnes, Don Dacus, Renn Woods, Miles Chapin, Melba Moore, Ronnie Dyson, Stylistics

The original Broadway stage production of Hair in the late '60s seemed—by reputation, as I've never seen that version—to be a project mainly concerned with flouting convention, also known as something like "shocking the straights." As live theater, it was thus filled with nudity, sexuality, drugs, flag and other disrespect, not really rock 'n' roll but some good songs, and, of course, long-haired hippies everywhere you look. But produced as a movie 10 years later, on the eve of the election of Ronald Reagan, it is something rather different.

For one thing, it has a great director at the helm in Milos Forman, fresh off the commercial triumph of One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, who had wanted to adapt Hair for years. Then somebody, presumably screenwriter Michael Weller, made up a story—a good story. It's still very much a musical, with pretty much all the same songs (and the incidental vulgarities), but now it has a certain narrative force with an allegorical tale of the hippie milieu. There's a young boy from Oklahoma, Claude Bukowski (John Savage), who is off to do his duty in Vietnam, but along the way he runs into a band of hippies headed up by George Berger (Treat Williams), which tries to get him to see their ways, because they love him.