Word: amadeus
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...retain the play's intellectual breadth and formal audacity without betraying the movie medium's demand for matter of fact naturalism. And he persuaded Shaffer, who had been disappointed by film adaptations of his plays, including The Royal Hunt of the Sun and Equus, to write the Amadeus screenplay, reshaping Amadeus from a madman's memory play to a more realistic musical biography. Recalls Shaffer: "It was like having the same child twice...
...Amadeus the film dramatizes nearly all the major events in the last decade of Mozart's 35 years. His music, which in the play served only as an allusive ostinato, seizes center screen with significant excerpts from four Mozart operas, several concerti and the Requiem. As seen through the dealer's eye of the movie camera, Salieri looks like a sullen midget next to a Mozart monument; he is Judas to Mozart's Jesus, James Earl Ray to his Martin Luther King Jr., Bob Uecker to his Babe Ruth. Explains Shaffer: "Salieri had to give way just...
...Forman, returning to his native Czechoslovakia for his first film there since 1968, Amadeus marks a sure step forward in dramatic and visual storytelling. Defeated by his two previous challenges-turning the Love Generation Hair into a Viet Nam elegy and compressing the epic misanthropy of E.L. Doctorow's novel Ragtime-the director has come to some sensitive compromises with narrative reality. Mozart sings the music of God, Salieri schemes and screams in tragic register, and the film keeps humming merrily along with them both...
...This Amadeus dares to pose the riddle of genius in the form of a traditional celebrity bio pic. In 1781 Mozart (Tom Hulce), once the put-upon prodigy of musical Europe, comes at the age of 26 to the Viennese court of Hapsburg Emperor Joseph II (played with a sly, thin smile and a delicious air of cagey indecisiveness by Jeffrey Jones). There the man of the moment is Antonio Salieri (F. Murray Abraham): court composer, consummate technician and politician, Emperor's favorite, a musical lion of Vienna. Most important, he knows his place, as an educated servant among...
...Salieri is a loser from Loserville; and Mozart, he's the guy who wrote Elvira Madigan, and his first name is Mostly, isn't it? The film's $18 million budget may be less than is spent on many a teenpic flop, but it still makes Amadeus a ricochet roll of the dice; the film will have to bring in more than $40 million at the box office just to break even...