This film came out during one of the greatest years in film history. It won the Academy Award for Best Picture that year, and in my opinion, it is the best film of that decade. I have written about the film before on my retrospective blog “30 Years On“. It is doubtful that any of you reading this will be unfamiliar with the film, but if that is the case let me briefly sum the story up. Antonio Salieri the court composer, develops a degree of envy of Mozart that leads him to plot a complicated revenge. 

F. Murray Abraham was a character actor who was given the keys to a fantastic part, and he floors it all the way to a well deserved Academy Award for Best Actor. Salieri has charm, and guile and anger that he channels at all the right times. Abraham has a great range, and is the most duplicitous friend a great composer could have. Abraham makes us both pity and hate Salieri at the same time. The scenes that I find most effecting however, are not the plot driven moments, but the character points, especially the sequences where he waxes about the music. His own compositions are not worthy, as he discovers when comparing himself to Mozart. When he describes listening to Mozart’s Operas, he is carried away with envy and passion. 

The best moments of the film occur at the climax, fittingly soaking up the talent of his rival and grateful to be a participant in writing it down. The fact that Salieri plans to steal the Requiem that is emotionally draining Mozart, is almost irrelevant to the moments of intense joy he experiences in seeing how Mozart works and participating in just a little bit. Both Abraham and Tom Hulce, who played Mozart, were nominated for the acting honors and this scene earned them both a place in history. This past weekend, CBS Sunday Morning had a little piece on the actor who played Mozart’s alleged assassin. You can watch it here:

My only reservation about last night’s screening is that it was the so called “Director’s Cut”, which is a 2002 revision. I’d seen the material on a a Laserdisc Special Edition from 1995. There, Director Miloš Forman explained why the material was left out, it mostly had to do with time. Figuring with a DVD release, that time was not an issue, they went back to the original script. I don’t think it works as well in a theater. I think the right choice was made when the film originally came out in 1984. While there are a few moments that are enhancements (a longer version of the Opera Don Giovanni for instance), most of the time it feels like padding and the narrative is undermined a little. I’d still say it was better than any other film of the decade, except for the original version. 

What makes the film more memorable and powerful than the play is the way that music can be integrated into the story. We see segments of the Operas, we hear key pieces used for dramatic purpose in the score. The mix of aural and visual is simply superb in this film. The opportunity to see “Amadeus” on the big screen does not come up as frequently as those for “Lawrence of Arabia”, if it did, you would see far more entries on this site.