Amadeus - The Original Theatrical Cut
There it is...
The Seven Best
I’ve got about a hundred and fifty candidates for this Best Movies series. Still making some tough choices on which films make the final cut.
When I look at the list of films, there are seven that stand out as the true elite. The best of the best. Depending on the day of the week, I could argue each one of them as the greatest film ever made.
Amadeus is one of the #SevenBest movies I’ve ever seen.
Amadeus
To behold Miloš Forman’s Amadeus is to experience cinema soaring like Mozart’s music, its visuals dancing and sounds resonating with immaculate form.
In the middle of the film, when the character of Salieri reads sheets of Mozart’s compositions, he hears symphonies in his head and his soul alights. As much as Salieri comes to despise his rival, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, he cannot deny the truth to which he bears witness. He drops the sheets of music to the floor, overcome with emotion. Mozart’s wife mistakes this as a gesture of disrespect and asks: “Is it not good?”
Salieri shall betray his competitor. He shall betray God. But what he cannot betray—his true religion—is the music itself. To that, he maintains a sacred devotion. It is a secret passion, but in this one fleeting moment Mozart’s wife sees Salieiri at his most vulnerable. His very essence disrobed of envy and shorn of malice.
“It is miraculous,” he replies.
It is one of many moments where F. Murray Abraham excels in portraying the turmoil within, his character’s ability to comprehend the divine majesty of Mozart’s genius, coupled with his awareness that he will never apprehend that same spark for his own musical creations.
This chasm between what Salieri sees as the immanence of God’s voice in Mozart and the apparent lack of same in himself becomes his grounds to justify the murder of a demigod.
Mozart becomes merely an indirect victim of Salieri’s wrath—it is God who he intends to punish.
The framing device of the film is a discussion—nay, confession—from Salieri to Father Vogler, played by Richard Frank. Early in the film, the father unwittingly lays the predicate for Salieri to give a full confession, with a clichéd bit of theology:
Antonio Salieri: Leave me alone.
Father Vogler: I cannot leave alone a soul in pain.
Antonio Salieri: Do you know who I am?
Father Vogler: It makes no difference. All men are equal in God's eyes.
Antonio Salieri: [leans in mockingly] Are they?
The energy with which F. Murray Abraham delivers that last line is extraordinary - a palpable sense of glee - as he has found the perfect vessel to prosecute his case against God. You can just sense Salieri salivating at the opportunity disabuse this church functionary of his belief about the equality of Man before God. Or perhaps even make this man question his faith in God altogether, the same as Salieri has done.
Salieri taps a few notes on the piano, and the father brightens with recognition. Oh yes! That piece of music! He remembers hearing it before. How delightful. He’s pleased to be in the company of such a gifted composer.
But the father is mistaken. Salieri did not write the piece.
“That. Was Mozart.” Salieri intones, with a wistfulness equal parts admiration and damnation.
And with those three words we are launched into a tour of Mozart’s life in an all-encompassing cinematic experience propelled by the very music the man created. The original cut runs 161 minutes, but feels like 90. Every sequence, scene, and shot from Amadeus the movie feels as perfect as the movements, measures, and notes from Mozart the musician.
My favorite scene is the introduction of Amadeus to Holy Roman Emperor Joseph II, where Salieri gifts the visitor a march in his honor. The scene brilliantly illustrates creative genius - contrasting the work of a lesser composer by showing Amadeus not only being able to recreate it from memory after just one hearing, but also extemporizing and breathing new life into it. Composing his own variation of Salieri’s march on the fly, Wolfgang enters a state of flow - his head weaving along with the rhythm, feeling such creative ecstasy he exhales one of his iconic falsetto laughs. His vulgar guffaws and giggles are the only sour notes created by Mozart that grate on Salieri’s ears. Amadeus’s riff on Salieri’s new composition emerges spontaneously as creative bliss but is viewed by the lesser composer as a cruel form of mockery.
That moment, and so many others, have given me joy as I’ve rewatched the film an uncountable number of times. And yet, for a couple of decades I did not watch the film at all.
Once Blu-ray and HD technology became the standard of home movie-watching, a terrible crime happened to Amadeus: the studio released an extended version, adding twenty minutes to what was already a masterpiece. They called it a “Director’s Cut” but it was not the preferred version of the film by director Miloš Forman.
I feel about the original cut of Amadeus the same as Salieri thought of Mozart’s music:
Displace one note and there would be diminishment. Displace one phrase and the structure would fall.
The studio not only displaced one note, they displaced the entire film. Previously it had been edited in a way that married sound and image to perfection. The studio’s extended edition added bloat and underlined some themes so heavily that they became overbearing. Many of the best combinations of motion picture and classical music from the original version became lost and butchered in the process.
Or, to quote Emperor Joseph II, the extended edition simply had:
“Too many notes.”
The studio decided to shelve the original cut, in favor of the extended edition. So for about twenty years, while other films got to be experienced with the best picture and sound technology available, Amadeus was stuck in the past, with its best version existing only via old-school DVD.
Today, that cinematic crime is rectified. The original theatrical cut is now available in a glorious 4K remastering, which recently was shown in a small theatrical run, which I was privileged enough to see at the River Oaks Theater in Houston.
It was like seeing a best friend you haven’t seen in forever - but when you reunite, you immediately appreciate everything you recognize and loved in them from the beginning.
Tom Hulce’s performance as Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart is a hurricane of maniacal obsessions, childish outbursts, minor vulgarities, dark brooding, and whimsical delights. At times, when the camera observes Hulce portraying the act of composition, he gives us the vicarious thrill of being a fly on the wall at moments of true creative genius - his mind afire with the music, his eyes fixed, not always on the parchment upon which he scribbles his notes - but staring into a distance, at some unknowable place, the source of his inspiration, a place of wonder and mystery hidden from the mortal plane.
F. Murray Abraham’s performance as Antonio Salieri is a vortex of envy, spite, and delicious self-awareness. Apparently unencumbered by the heavy makeup effects that transformed Abraham into the elderly Salieri for the film’s framing scenes, his emotional power is devastating. His loss of faith, his amusement at what he views as Father Vogler’s naiveté, his melancholy, his malevolence, are all evident. But most visceral is his unbroken love of music. In the moments he allows himself to recall Mozart’s music, he is lifted, weightless, smiling, and enraptured. The paradox of his performance is that he shows the full range of a soul in turmoil over the guilt of his actions, yet is remarkably at peace with his place in the world - naming himself the Patron Saint of Mediocrities.
Upon my first rewatch of the film in about twenty years, I was struck by Richard Frank’s supporting performance as Father Vogler. In the beginning, he establishes a professional distance toward Salieri as he goes through his duties as a padre, checking in on this rambling old man. He’s even foolish enough to patronize this old man, in a way that younger people tend to do with the elderly, dismissive and sort-of bemused. But as Salieri’s tale unfolds, Father Vogler is drawn in - at first merely intrigued, but then, at the very end - completely shattered. After one conversation with this dangerous old man, the padre’s worldview is shook - and Richard Frank manages to capture it in a single muted facial expression that somehow captures the entire emotional spectrum of Salieri’s tale - a teary-eyed, mouth-agape recognition of human tragedy.
In that moment, he is all of us. His wordless expression says it all: holy fuck, what a story.
Holy fuck, what a movie.