‘Amadeus,’ Back in Theaters, Is a Perfect Film

Classical music lovers can debate for hours over which Mozart melody has made the biggest impact. Maybe the first movement of the “Jupiter” symphony, perhaps the Queen of the Night aria from The Magic Flute, or what about the “Eine kleine Nachtmusik” serenade? Those who know the great 18th-century Austrian composer only through the movies have an easier time of it—the sound they’ll remember best may not be music after all but the whinnying, immature, and disobedient laugh heard throughout Milos Forman’s masterpiece Amadeus.

Amadeus, commonly accepted to mean “beloved by God,” was not technically part of Mozart’s name. (He was baptized as Joannes Chrysostomus Wolfgangus Theophilus Mozart, with Theophilus having a similar translation.) After his death, however, the moniker stuck as a way to venerate him. It’s perfect for the title of this movie, in which rival composer Antonio Salieri allows his jealousy over Mozart’s genius to build into a personal war against God. But expanding on some fudged truth is also in keeping with the spirit of the entire project, as the movie’s central conflict is almost entirely made up. (Even better, then, that the original trailer featured the tagline “Everything you’ve heard is true.”)

Based on a Tony-winning play by Peter Shaffer (inspired by a short 1830 play written by Alexander Pushkin, itself inspired by gossip that Salieri was somehow to blame for Mozart’s early death), Amadeus is celebrating its 40th anniversary this year. As such, a new 4K restoration is screening in specialty theaters across North America in advance of a new Blu-ray release. This, plus an eventual availability on streaming, is the first time the version that people originally saw back in 1984 will be available in years. (More on that in a bit.) An upcoming British television miniseries based on Shaffer’s play is in production currently, but we’re skeptical it will have the same magic.

The film’s story is told in flashback, with an old, institutionalized Salieri (played by F. Murray Abraham) “confessing” how he murdered Mozart (Tom Hulce). We are then witness to how Salieri, court composer to Emperor Joseph II (Jeffrey Jones), has his world turned upside down when Mozart bursts onto the scene. His musical instincts are on a level no mortal can comprehend and clearly, Salieri feels, handed down directly from above. But while Mozart’s work is divine, his demeanor is coarse and bratty, which turns Salieri’s understandable envy into an existential rage.

As the winner of eight Academy Awards, including best picture, best director, and best actor for Abraham’s Salieri, Amadeus’s legacy is secure, but any excuse to get more people to see this perfect film is a good one. I can personally report that not one, not two, but three millennial friends of mine came to this movie kind of dragging their feet, watching it only out of an obligation to check every Oscar winner off their list. Each one of them was blown away with just how funny and poignant and entertaining it was.

“I thought this would be boring, not bitchy!” one pal beamed after a recent screening I hosted with Paul Zaentz at New York’s Paris Theater. That energetic spark is evident in the script but catches fire in the movie thanks to its director. Forman’s resumé is one of the best from the 20th century, but Amadeus is something special, not just because it is about a maverick artist who has to do things his way (a recurring theme in both Forman’s life and work) but because the expatriate who fled communist-era Czechoslovakia to follow his calling was able to shoot the movie in Prague and Kromeriz. As Mozart cackled in the face of propriety, so Forman was able to poke his thumb in the eyes of those who had previously censored him.

Forman was born in the town of Caslav in 1932. Both of his parents died in Nazi concentration camps. He attended a school for war orphans where he befriended future filmmaker Ivan Passer and playwright-turned-politician Vaclav Havel. He began working on documentary crews and eventually made short films of his own that blended fact and fiction, getting better material from non-actors than trained professionals. His first feature, Black Peter (1964), focused on a timid teenager, and its follow-up, Loves of a Blonde (1965), was a similarly naturalistic look at awkward romance. Its deadpan, somewhat bleak style ran counter to the splashy films coming out of Italy and France at the time. Both films are early entries to what became known as the Czech New Wave, leading to Forman’s first bona fide masterpiece, The Firemen’s Ball (1967).

While The Firemen’s Ball—Forman’s first film in color—was understood to be a grand metaphor for the inefficiency of the political system at the time, one doesn’t have to know a damn thing about Eastern Bloc history to respect it as an iconoclastic farce not dissimilar from something like South Park. It was immediately banned in Czechoslovakia, but it and Loves of a Blonde were both nominated for best foreign language film at the Oscars.

Forman was in France raising funds for his next project during the Soviet invasion of Prague in August 1968. He was fired from his Czech production company and ended up emigrating to the United States. His first Hollywood film was the 1971 counterculture farce Taking Off (in which square, bourgeois parents try to get groovy with their kids, to embarrassing effect), which led to one of the most influential movies of the 1970s, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.

After the anti-authoritarian Cuckoo’s Nest—which won five Oscars, including best picture, best director, best actor for Jack Nicholson, and best actress for Louise Fletcher—came his adaptations of the musical Hair (1979) and E.L. Doctorow’s novel Ragtime (1981). With that all under his belt and his hands on the rights to Schaffer’s hot play Amadeus, Forman went back to Prague in triumph.

Amadeus is set mostly in Vienna; still, Prague, which was generally left intact after World War II, certainly looks good on camera. And Prague was also an important city for Mozart. He made two lengthy visits there and found a very welcoming audience. Indeed, he wrote Don Giovanni with the intention of premiering the opera in Prague, which he did at the Estates Theatre in 1787. And it was at the Estates Theatre where Forman filmed many of the movie’s best scenes—ones of Mozart conducting opera, filmed with the alacrity and exuberance normally reserved for an action-adventure sequence. (The use of pyrotechnics in the Don Giovanni scenes caused a lot of worry on set, what with the old theater’s interior being mostly wood.)

Shooting a Hollywood movie behind the Iron Curtain naturally had some hardships. (Fruit and fresh vegetables, rarities at the time, needed to be trucked in from West Germany.) Given Forman’s background, the eyes of the state were on them. During that recent New York screening, Zaentz, who worked as a production coordinator on the project and is also the nephew of film producer Saul Zaentz, said secret police were essentially hands-off, except for one time. During off-hours, some members of the crew would hang out and watch VHS tapes of Hollywood movies and were unaware that some of those titles had been banned. The company was soon requested to keep to only approved films.

Perhaps more poignant was when they were shooting on the Fourth of July during one of the opera scenes. The Czech crew surprised Forman and the actors during one take. Expecting to hear the music of Mozart play back from a PA system, some well-wishers instead cued up “The Star-Spangled Banner” while others unfurled an enormous American flag. Everyone stood up and sang along, except, according to Forman, the 30 or so secret police who had been dispersed among the extras.

One can easily read the moment as a victory for Forman. Alas, Mozart’s fate was a little different. Though no one knows for sure why he died at the young age of 35—other than the fact that every case of the sniffles had graver implications back in 1791—the movie shows how Mozart’s queasiness with authority shaped him as a hand-to-mouth freelancer and how his lack of a permanent position and persistent money woes were bad for his health. After Amadeus, Forman continued to make movies about troubled-yet-visionary mavericks: Andy Kaufman in Man on the Moon (1999), Francisco Goya in Goya’s Ghosts (2006), and, um, Larry Flynt in The People vs. Larry Flynt (1996).

As for the Salieri yarn? There’s no historical evidence to suggest that the two composers weren’t just colleagues. (It’s true that Mozart did have a paranoid streak and maybe did think that “the Italians” at court had it in for him.) Salieri certainly did not live in chastity out of some pledge to God in exchange for musical inspiration. Indeed, he had eight children. He was also plenty famous at the time of his death and, later in life, was a tutor to Mozart’s youngest son. Nevertheless, no one should let reality get in the way of watching this incredible movie.

This 40th anniversary rerelease is especially exciting for old-school Amadeus-heads as it restores the 160-minute theatrical cut. All one can find out there now is the “director’s cut,” which is 20 minutes longer. As Zaentz explained to me, that version came out in 2002 during the first DVD wave, when home-video distributors were loading up packages with deleted scenes. Rather than have isolated bonus chapters, Forman decided to just release the longer version instead, though never really considered it the definitive cut. However, over time it became the only version in circulation.

While the longer version has a few splendid moments (some backstage zings with Christine Ebersole as Caterina Cavalieri), it also contains one scene that I am happy to see once again excised. In it, Salieri goes a wee bit too far and humiliates Mozart’s wife, Constanze (Elizabeth Berridge). It’s important for Salieri to be a scheming twerp but also someone who still holds your sympathy. The controversial scene only found in the director’s cut pushes him too far into the role of villain.

So sometimes edits are important! It is said that Mozart never revised, that he took dictation from God. As with so much else about the man, the truth is a little different.