AMADEUS.

In other words, bollocks with balls?

(OTOH I think viewers who can't figure out that the extremely insane/childish portrait of Mozart is the way that Salieri is telling it and not necessarily an honest vision of the man should just go home)

xpost Alex if you don't accost him with dialogue and then bust out in the shrieky laugh I will be so disappointed.

There is no confirmation on whether Costanze actually called him "Wolfie".

I couldn't find the one of you. :(

wait? are we talking about 'Moulin Rouge' now?

I'll see what I can do. I have accosted Griffin Dunne with lines from "After Hours". I used to live up the street from him (12th Street & University Place, Dunne-stalkers!) and saw him on the street a fair amount. At first, I merely asked him when the film would finally see the light of day as a DVD (he never had an answer). He had the misfortune of seeing me again a few months later, however, after myself and my friend Rob had well crossed the Rubicon separating sobriety from infantile oblivion. Upon spotting him, an avalanche of incongruous one-liners from the film ("Neil, Pepe! I DIDN'T KNOW!!!", "WHAT DO YOU WANT FROM ME? I'M JUST A WORD PROCESSOR FOR CHRIST'S SAKE!", etc.) proceeded to give him serious pause.

It's really not supposed to be a historical film, to begin with. It's about Salieri, as pointed out above, or more accurately, the feelings that Salieri represents in all of us (not necessarily re artistic jealousy, per se - I think we all have at least one overachiever in our past whom we felt didn't deserve their successes). So whether or not this is the real Mozart, a historically fictionalized Mozart, or just someone who has the same name and is really similar in odd ways to the real Mozart...none of this matters - it's not really a Mozart film or even a Salieri film - it's about resentment and mediocrity in the face of genius. Just happens that they chose real people to fit to the characters.

The most interesting thing, I think, about the film is that it really seems to posit the thesis that Mozart's place in the canon of the time was akin to the shock of punk music on the then-contemporary popular music scene, and the lifestyle, sensibility, rebelliousness, and outrageous fashion choices (wigs, especially) of Mozart seem to reflect this. Punk Mozart, hmm.

It is, of course, yet again another possible example of "this film is nowhere near the reality of the situation" but like G said, and a few earlier, that's not what it's supposed to be...

oh yeah, one of my college professors looked EXACTLY and laughed EXACTLY like tom hulce. it was pretty scary.

x-post

Huh? (Exactly[?]...)

i kinda liked amadeus for its over-the-top qualities. and b/c it was the first place where i ever heard the magic flute, which is like my favorite opera of all time.

It may take awhile to top this.

I just read the wiki entry for mozart. Of course Amadeus isn't meant as a faithful biopic, mor of a fleshing out of an urban legend. But this bit intrigued me:

Shaffer's play attracted criticism for portraying Mozart as vulgar and loutish, a characterization felt by many to be unfairly exaggerated, but in fact frequently confirmed by the composer's letters and other memorabilia. For example, Mozart wrote canons on the words "Leck mich am Arsch" ("Lick me in the arse") and "Leck mich am Arsch recht fein schön sauber" ("Lick me in the arse nice and clean") as party pieces for his friends.[citation needed] The Köchel numbers of these canons are 231 and 233.

Citation needed? Someone find me a citation. I so want to believe that Mozart wrote a piece of music entitled "Lick me in the arse."

Also, apparently his letters bear out his reputation as being a bit of a filthy bugger.

The version of this movie I just watched was "the director's cut," and since I've seen the movie probably 20 times since I was roughly ten years old (it's my favorite movie from childhood, oddly enough), the differences were very noticeable. It's about 20 minutes of extra footage, some whole scenes that were not in the theatrical release. I felt many of them were not useful, because they interrupted the flow, but then again I can't judge because the proper flow is only the one I am so familiar with.

One extra scene is particularly interesting, though... when Constanze brings Salieri the original copies of Mozart's work without Mozart knowing, so that he can be considered for a job. You know the scene. In this version, the scene goes on longer, and after he drops the papers on the floor, she approaches him, and he collects himself and sternly demands that she come back later that night and -- he makes it quite clear -- sleep with him. (This is to be his revenge for Mozart sleeping with the opera singer that he was in love with.) If she will do this, he will get Mozart the job. "That is the price," he says. She comes back later, as Salieri is (of course) praying, undresses in front of him (yes, there is tittay), he gets a little freaked, then calls in the servant to have this naked woman thrown out of his house. It's incredibly cruel.

This scene lends two things to the movie that it didn't have before for me: first, that Salieri is not just bad and weak and wrongheaded, but actually evil. You can't sympathize with him even a little bit after this scene. Second, it explains the next-to-last scene, when Constanze comes home to find Salieri with Mozart, and immediately hates him and tries to throw him out. In the original, she has no reason to hate him that much. In this one, it makes perfect sense.

So why was that scene cut? I believe it's useful, albeit very unpleasant.

tittay, as you said.

no, it's more than that. I think it was cut for one or all of three reasons:

1) time.
2) it's hard enough to spend time indie of Salieri's head without this scene, and it's occurs not even halfway through the film. Making him too nasty too early on could turn audiences off.
3) it makes brutally explicit parts of Salieri that are already implicit in the theatrical cut. His lust? Made clear while he's watching his student the opera singer. His cruelty and manipulation? Made clear in his every interaction with Mozart.

So maybe what I'm saying is that I thought the scene was useful, but I could be wrong about that.

Worst added scene: in the dressing room of the opera singer that Mozart slept with. She just found out he's engaged, he didn't tell her that, she's fucking pissed off. All of that happens in the original version, she hits him with her boquet of flowers and storms off, and you cut directly to Salieri's voice-over saying, "That's when I knew... he HAD her." Perfectly clear and economical. This version puts a whole other scene after the flowers in her dressing room, with all the major players in the conflict coming in at once and being awfully uncomfortable. It's farce that isn't funny. And then after all this hemming and hawing over something crashingly obvious, that Mozart slept with the girl, THEM we get the voice-over, "And that's when I knew..." Really? It took you that long to figure that out?

xpost Time was definitely one thing - the producers were afraid that it would hurt the movie's box-office chances if it went on too long.

And I can't remember where I read about this originally but it did have something to do with the ratings system at the time - I think that brief scene would have changed the movie from a PG straight to R because the PG-13 label hadn't been introduced yet. or something like that.

I hadn't even considered the rating. Surely that was a part of it. Still, plenty of Forman's movies have nudity; I don't know why he should have cared about this one in particular. Ragtime had nudity and still got a PG rating!

German is the proper language for ass licking.

(That just came up in a phone conversation, and I decided it's the quote of the day.)

Yeah, that's pretty far out.

i haven't seen this since our music teacher showed us this in second grade. she kept trying to fast-forward through the questionable parts, but she'd be all the way over at her desk drinking coffee, and now the bloody salieri scissors scenes etc are all that I remember about it.

I just read the wiki entry for mozart. Of course Amadeus isn't meant as a faithful biopic, mor of a fleshing out of an urban legend. But this bit intrigued me:

Shaffer's play attracted criticism for portraying Mozart as vulgar and loutish, a characterization felt by many to be unfairly exaggerated, but in fact frequently confirmed by the composer's letters and other memorabilia. For example, Mozart wrote canons on the words "Leck mich am Arsch" ("Lick me in the arse") and "Leck mich am Arsch recht fein schön sauber" ("Lick me in the arse nice and clean") as party pieces for his friends.[citation needed] The Köchel numbers of these canons are 231 and 233.

Citation needed? Someone find me a citation. I so want to believe that Mozart wrote a piece of music entitled "Lick me in the arse."

Also, apparently his letters bear out his reputation as being a bit of a filthy bugger.

-- kenan

I don't have the citation for you kenan, but I read the same thing somewhere a few years ago. He was famously scatological, both in the titles he gave some of his pieces and in his letters to his mother, which are peppered with references to shitting. He once earned a kick in the pants from the Prince-Archbishop of Salzburg when resigning from his position under the latter's employ that sent him tumbling down a flight of stairs. He was an avid gambler, which may have been connected to his ongoing financial problems. Judging by the tone and content of his letters, his father clearly considered him to be irresponsible at times. Although his letters to his father are very respectful, in letters to others he is often playful and highly satirical, especially when depicting characters in high office. So, there is some evidence (not much, perhaps) that he was not averse to occasional rock star antics and was, if not exactly punk, a bit of a loose cannon at times.

To know for sure we'd have to go back to the 18th century, which at best is an exercise in compiling bits of anecdotes.

has anyone read 1791: mozart's last year?

i have it but haven't gotten into it enough yet and now i don't know when i will have the time. it claims to go into his financial troubles and all the crazy that happened that year, though.

xpost to myself

And I mean "at best" literally... history of the fuzzy past is much better and more enlightening when it's filtered through stories that have archetypal elements. This is one of the big strengths of the movie Amadeus.

The biggest evidence of Mozart's love for scatological humour, puns and wordplay is in his letters to his cousin Maria Anna, who he had a bit of a crush on and possibly developed a relationship with. This article here makes a pretty strong argument that this version of Mozart doesn't contradict the image of the same person who wrote all this gorgeous music and adds that this type of playfulness was much more common among the upper classes in Salzburg than one would think and almost especially in the Mozart home. so you know, it might not be entirely surprising to find that he was pretty obsessed with bowel movements.

http://www.andante.com/article/article.cfm?id=17722

http://www.blogsmithmedia.com/www.tmz.com/media/2008/03/0311_tom_hulce_reveal_wi.jpg

looks like a cross between tim allen & kenny rogers

http://i.imdb.com/Photos/Ss/0304669/KX46_TW-16.jpg

this is a terrible film. any scene between mozart-wife is embarrassing sub 'days of our lives' melodrama. she calls him 'wolfie' ffs.

She actually did.

in a noo yawk accent?

Unlikely.

If it's not in the language they originally spoke, who cares if she has a New York accent? You still have to imagine the English they speak is really German. I think the worst thing is when some movies make actors speak English with an accent based on the language they are supposed to speak, as if that somehow made it more realistic.

it was more the amateur dramatics/soap approach taken, it could have passed as a school play, taking out the sets and f murray abrahams.

MY F MURRAY ABRAHAMS LET ME SHOW YOU THEM

From 2 minutes 5s in

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DblI8__uslk&feature=related

watched this with my daughter over the weekend, holds up well.

Think it best belongs on the stage where the actors can do the required shameless hamming w/out giving you a headache. (ie I saw Ian McKellen do it on Broadway in '81... well suited.)

the two leads are definitely very hammy, could have easily gone off the rails

The original Broadway Mozart was... Tim Curry.

Abraham is fine, Hulce isn't, and Jeffrey Jones steals the movie whenever he gets a scene.

Well. There it is.

the scenes w/Jones and his "cabinet" are by far my favorite (and actually the fat Italian guy is my favorite of all of them)

too bad about the kiddie fiddling tho :(

<div class="tenor-gif-embed" data-postid="4956823" data-share-method="host" data-width="100%" data-aspect-ratio="1.3565217391304347"><a href="https://tenor.com/view/smile-amadeus-gif-4956823";>Smile Amadeus GIF</a> from <a href="https://tenor.com/search/smile-gifs";>Smile GIFs</a></div><script type="text/javascript" async src="https://tenor.com/embed.js";></script>

oops

Jeffrey Jones steals the movie whenever he gets a scene.

Scusi, Patrick Hines?

Ah. Ha.

abraham's hamming in this is v skilled i think. maybe i wish his performance in the later scenes (deathbed etc) let the rotted, cackling narrator of the framing device show thru a little more-- but in general his funny unctuousness is well+eerily paired w his (also funny) hellish agony at being able to appreciate mozart. "broad drama" is a tricky thing to do this well.

grazie, signore

it is miraculous

Talking of which it is his 80th birthday today

I meant to show this movie to my partner but I guess now only the (wildly inferior) director's cut is available?

Too...brute for singing.

The original cut is on the original, flipper DVD from '97. They might be scarce now.

I'm sure this is documented somewhere, but there must be some sort of contractual reason that the extended version is now the only one available in basically any in-print version.

Well. There it is.

Ah maybe this explains why I couldn't make it through when I tried a couple years ago

As mentioned upthread only the 3 hour cut is available on digital outlets and I’m two hours in, I’ll probably finish it tomorrow but I might not.

Idk I think I’m with deems on this one

A movie about F Murray Abraham’s anger at God should have a lot more pathos than this does!

Emperor Joseph II mvp.

Overall I think Interview with the Vampire is better.

Director's cut of this is shit.

It’s been a long time since I torrented anything, maybe would’ve been the right move here.

he’s still getting absolutely torched pic.twitter.com/3EuFoTSwty

— Graham 2: Cruise Control (@GrahamC47) November 29, 2023

Saw this for the first time ever today; no longer in the running for the most famous movie I'd never seen. (Not an accident, never wanted to see it, but it was a rep screening close by, so why not.)

F. Murray Abraham is very good. I liked the scene where Mozart and Salieri wrote music together. And the ending did resonate with me: immediately started thinking of lots of mediocrities who outlived their betters. Tom Hulce's giggle was unbearable--terrible decision to keep that up for two hours. The only other Best Picture nominee that year I've seen is Places in the Heart, ages ago. Let's call that one a wash. Quick scan of all the AA nominees in 1984 suggests it was a lousy year for studio movies.

If it was a rep screening, I presume you saw the original theatrical edit. The extended version has its fans, but I'm not among them.

_does_ the extended version have its fans? most people i know prefer the original theatrical edit!

It has fans with paid-up Mr.Skin subscriptions.

It was the director's cut, announced in the opening credits. I don't have anything to compare it to, but I assume it's longer--didn't realize it'd be almost three hours, although I should have, being a big prestige film.

That cut is ~20 mins longer, mostly because of the return visit Stanzi makes to Salieri later in the evening.

the mozart-salieri feud is more or less made up, of course, by pushkin in 1830 but elaborated by playwright peter shaffer in the 1970s -- but it does have at least a slim basis in another feud, or duel really: emperor joseph ii invited mozart and muzio clementi to play for him without telling either of them about the other, and then staged an impromptu competition. everyone* enjoyed the show and the emperor very sensibly declared it a tie. impressed by his younger rival, clementi returned to england where he already lived and worked, very successfully writing tons of pedagogical music for beginners (who may still encounter his elegantly simple and very pleasant sonatinas, the last relics of what was once quite a presence in music), and also running a piano manufacturing firm before dying in evesham of all places

*everyone except mozart that is, who was afterwards privately (and typically catty) about clementi (“a charlatan, like all italians”). he later irritated his one-time rival by stealing a theme from the sonata that clementi had played on the night of the face-off, and using it in the overture to the magic flute lol

Reading MOzarts letters makes him seem like a more intelligent person than the genius-who-is-an-ass the movie portrays

Amadeus is most fun when Jeffrey Jones presides over his imperial court of twits and every reaction shot of F. Murray Abraham glowering at Tom Hulce.

Hulce was better as the ne'er-do-well son of Jason Robards in Parenthood; he's Mozart without talent.

Second MVP:

https://i.imgur.com/Z7JJ7FM.gif

SLAM DANCE (1987) erasure

Also: Amadeus is by far the most fun Best Picture Oscar winner of that dreary decade.

otm re:Jones, he's such perfect casting for that part

Another awesome F. Murry AbraHAM moment: calling Geraldine Page the Greatest Actress in the English Language at the '85 Oscars, causing Anne Bancroft to roll her eyes before remembering she's on camera.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fySIsudfmuI

I mostly remember this film as the first prestige picture I ever saw that contained fart jokes.

(p.s. - Hi, clem!)

I think it was between this and Jarman's Caravaggio that fed my teenager head with the idea that decadent artistes are extremely cool.

I love this movie and love Hulce in it and never understood why people razzed him abt it

It was the laugh I couldn't take; it made me cringe the first time, and from there just got worse. (If it's supposed to make you cringe, that doesn't make it any more bearable.) He had some pretty good quieter moments towards the end, and as a conductor--not really knowing anything about what he's supposed to look like--he seemed credible to me, probably more so than Bradley Cooper.

Of course the laugh is meant to be irritating - it’s pretty much the most overt expression of the major themes of ‘genius sometimes comes in repugnant packages’ - or ‘genius is vulgar’ - or ‘genius is no excuse for bad taste’.

I think the film would have benefitted greatly if they'd come up with something other than a jarring affectation repeated 30 times to get that across.

i mean its certainly a theme one can pick for a movie but why anyone would willingly sit through that movie remains a mystery

I thought the hahahahas were a nice contrast to the souped-up orchestrations and staging of Mozart’s music, the film made the character more annoying and his work more dazzling. Did this film kill Hulce’s career? I don’t think I’ve seen him in anything else

Career as producer
Among Hulce's major projects are the six-hour, two-evening stage adaptation of John Irving's The Cider House Rules; and Talking Heads, a festival of Alan Bennett's one-man plays that won six Obie Awards, a Drama Desk Award, a special Outer Critics Circle Award, and a New York Drama Critics' Circle Award for Best Foreign Play. He also headed 10 Million Miles, a musical project by Keith Bunin and Grammy Award-nominated singer-songwriter Patty Griffin, that premiered in Spring 2007 at the Atlantic Theater Company.

Hulce was a lead producer of the Broadway hit Spring Awakening, which won eight Tony Awards in 2007, including one for Best Musical.

that seems alright!

after a long and successful stage career and a few select movie roles - sounds like he retired as early and as much as possible from movies tbh

It has been claimed that the concept for Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart's bizarre laugh was taken from "references in letters written about him by two women who met him", that describe him as laughing in "an infectious giddy" which sounds "like metal scraping glass". No citations have ever been provided for these letters, however. There is no indication as to who wrote them, to whom or when. And in the absence of further citations, these claims of historical evidence for Mozart's laugh should be regarded as dubious at best. Robert L. Marshall, writing in "Film as Musicology: Amadeus" (The Musical Quarterly, Vol.18/2, 1997, p.177) says that there is "absolutely no historical evidence for this idiosyncrasy. We simply have no contemporary testimony at all as to how Mozart sounded when he laughed." Marshall goes on to explain that the laugh is a dramatic device, representing the mocking laughter of the gods, as Salieri states in the script.

could those letters have been written by....francis bacon?

interesting, gyac.

I thought Tom Hulce's portrayal of Mozart in the film was surprising and delightful, it added an unexpected element to the story, and I agree with fgti it really highlighted the music in relation to the character

its good

https://www.gutenberg.org/files/5307/5307-h/5307-h.htm

" I am apt to lose confidence in myself. The days when, standing on a stool, I sang Oragna fiaguta fa, and at the end kissed the tip of your nose, are indeed gone by; but still, have my reverence, love, and obedience towards yourself ever failed on that account? I say no more. As for your reproach about the little singer in Munich [see No. 62], I must confess that I was an ass to write such a complete falsehood. She does not as yet know even what singing means."

It’s a fun movie and I watched it multiple times but Mozart was never so annoying.

In real life