Amadeus.

TOTAL ECLIPSE, however, overtakes what is now billed grandiosely as Peter Shaffer's Amadeus, as if anyone else would be rash enough to claim it. Bad as the play was (though a huge success--what is the world coming to?), Shaffer's screenplay, written under the supervision of and directed by Milos' Forman, is immeasurably worse. This preposterous story contrives that Salieri--outraged that, despite a vow of chastity and service to God, he is gifted with only a middling talent, while the misnamed Amadeus, a licentious and scurrilous boy all his life, should be blessed with the most easefully copious genius of all--vows hatred for God and destruction to Mozart. Since, despite the baseless legend about the lesser man's poisoning his great rival, the facts cannot be easily squared with anything more than Salieri's animosity toward Mozart, it is Shaffer who is the real poisoner of the well of truth with a tale whose implausibility is matched only by its vulgarity. One does, however, discern yet another chapter in Shaffer's continuous lament over his own mediocrity and inability to break with convention--themes that cropped up in The Royal Hunt of the Sun and Equus as well.

For the movie version of Amadeus, additional characters had to be dragged in--the allegedly despotic Leopold Mozart; the insufferable mother-in-law, Frau Weber; the spying maid, Lorl; and Schikaneder with his chicanery--while existing ones had to be beefed up. As a result, the new characters remain rushed and superficial, whereas Constanze becomes the stereotypical loving but nagging wife, a cliche from which the play's foreshortening dubiously sayed her. The new scenes are often crass scatology, as when Mozart sticks out his behind at Archbishop Colloredo, or when he ends a pastiche of Salieri's music improvised at a revel by simulating a loud breaking of wind right into the elder composer's face. The play's crude Freudianizing, whereby the Commendatore is really Mozart's dead father, has been retained and grossly hammered in:

"Wolfgang has actually summoned up his own father to accuse his son before the whole world" and "How that bitter old man was still possessing his son even from beyond the grave." And it has been expanded, by having Frau Weber's stridulous yammerings at her son-in-law turn into the coloratura aria of the Queen of the Night!

Forman has directed with his usual heavy-handed competence. That Leopold Mozart should wear by way of costume a domino with a grave mark before and a grinning one behind is effective when he makes a sudden turn, but he turns once too often; what is inexcusable is to have the man in grey who comes to commission a requiem from Mozart similarly accoutered. Or take the crosscutting between Mozart's dying and the homeward journey by stagecoach of Constanze and her children to the music of the Requiem: loud passages, the coach rattling through the night; soft passages, Wolfgang expiring or children looking forlorn. Particularly cheap is the conceit--new in the movie version--tht the moribund Mozart dictated the Requiem to Salieri, who wrote it down in a prolonged ecstasy of love-hate. Here we are treated to an elementary music-appreciation lesson in dialogue form: "Identical? --Of course, the instruments doubling the voices. --I don't understand. . . . Yes, yes, yes! I understand. Yes! Yes!" Salieri turns into an orgasmic Molly Bloom even as Mozart turns into an idiot requiring the Latin text to be translated for him by Salieri so that the great unwashed in the movie audience should be able to follow--which they won't anyway.

Most appalling is the ending, with Salieri dying illogically in a lunatic asylum. Here madmen more horrific than in Marat/Sade are hideously chained or caged along the walls of a corridor down which Salieri is being wheeled. "Mediocrities everywhere, I absolve you," he mutters. At least in the play this referred to the audience; in the movie, even that simplistic irony becomes an abject copout. Miroslav Ondricek's cinematography is splendid as usual, the Czech backgrounds are inspiritingly baroque (though the great innovator Josef Svoboda was the wrong choice for designing old-style operatic scenery), but the acting is routine or worse (Tom Hulce as Mozart), save for the sensitively muted Leopold of Roy Dotrice. Boo and O, Weh!