Tag Archives: Vienna

Amadeus (1984)

05 Friday Apr 2019

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D: Miloš Forman / 160m

Cast: F. Murray Abraham, Tom Hulce, Elizabeth Berridge, Roy Dotrice, Simon Callow, Christine Ebersole, Jeffrey Jones, Charles Kay

At the court of the Holy Roman Emperor Joseph II (Jones), the lead composer is Antonio Salieri (Abraham). He is well regarded by his peers, and has the favour of the Emperor, but when Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (Hulce) arrives to perform at the request of his employer, Salieri is forced to acknowledge Mozart’s superior ability. Mozart’s gift for music prompts the Emperor to commission an opera from him, and this in turn prompts the onset of a violent jealousy in Salieri that leads him to try and undermine Mozart’s position within the court. With his own compositions falling out of favour with the Emperor, Salieri finds himself even more determined to ruin Mozart’s reputation. He hires a young woman to work as Mozart’s maid and spy on him. When she alerts Salieri to a new work that Mozart is working on, he finds that it’s an opera based on The Marriage of Figaro, which the Emperor has forbidden. Salieri reveals this to the Emperor, but Mozart manages to avoid censure, an outcome that pushes Salieri into using the recent death of Mozart’s father (Dotrice) as a means of finally regaining his original position at the Emperor’s court…

A movie about obsession, jealousy, and the uncomfortable realisation of one’s own mediocrity in the face of undeniable genius, Amadeus is a breathtaking spectacle, a transformative piece that takes an unsubstantiated rumour from the lives of Mozart and Salieri, and spins a web of intrigue and deception around Mozart’s untimely death. Adapted by Peter Shaffer from his original stage play, and brought to mesmerising life by Miloš Forman, it’s a movie that brims with unbridled passions, from Mozart’s immersive approach to his music, to the stylistic excesses of the Emperor’s court. Mozart himself is presented as an enfant terrible in adult form, giggling uncontrollably as much from nervousness as exhilaration, and challenging the conservative musical conventions that have provided Salieri and his ilk with their success. As if his grandiose behaviour wasn’t enough, he’s also – actually – incredibly gifted, something that Salieri cannot fathom: how can God have done this, how could He have given such a gift to Mozart and left Salieri with the same passion but without the means to express it as effectively. Salieri’s battle with God over this becomes its own obsession, and informs his actions throughout.

Shaffer builds the one-sided rivalry between Salieri and Mozart and uses it to explore the nature of thwarted ambition. Salieri’s need to be seen to be superior to Mozart consumes him, and while Mozart’s own lifestyle consumes him at the same time, Shaffer highlights the desperation that drives Salieri on to a darker place than even he could have predicted. Abraham is quite simply superb as the tortured composer, a man aware of his limitations but compelled by those same limitations to contemplate murder for personal gain. Hulce is just as good as the potty-mouthed genius who transcribed whole pieces of music without the need for any corrections; as his physical health deteriorates, Hulce shows us a Mozart whose commitment to his music over-rides his own sense of self-preservation. Both performances are powerful, emotive, and finely judged, and form the backbone of a movie that never falters in its appreciation of the one thing both characters agree on: the sublime nature of Mozart’s music. Inevitably, the soundtrack is filled with astutely chosen examples of Mozart’s work (even his playing of Salieri’s march is really an excerpt from Mozart’s own work The Marriage of Figaro), and it’s all played out against a backdrop of naturally lit interiors and ravishing production design, all of it enhanced by Miroslav Ondrícek’s detailed cinematography.

Rating: 9/10 – from Salieri’s first anguished cry of “Mozart!” to his absolving mediocrities everywhere, Amadeus is an ambitiously mounted movie that succeeds in breathing potent life into a minor footnote in classical music history; devastating in places, but with a streak of scandalous humour to offset the darker nature of the movie’s second half, this is hugely impressive on so many levels, and possibly Forman’s finest work.

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Bombshell (2017)

15 Tuesday May 2018

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aka Bombshell: The Hedy Lamarr Story

D: Alexandra Dean / 88m

With Hedy Lamarr, Anthony Loder, Denise Loder-Deluca, Fleming Meeks, Robert Osborne, Wendy Colton, Diane Kruger, Stephen Michael Shearer, Jimmy Loder, Jeanine Basinger, Peter Bogdanovich

In recent years, Hedy Lamarr and her life and work have been the subject of a critical reappraisal, from her role as an actress in Hollywood, to her other work as an inventor. This duality has been examined and explored through plays and photographic exhibitions, and her influence has extended as far as being the inspiration for Anne Hathaway’s portrayal of Catwoman in The Dark Knight Rises (2012). Bombshell charts Lamarr’s life from her childhood growing up in Vienna (as Hedy Kiesler), through to her early movie career and the production that brought her both fame and notoriety, Extase (1933), in which she appeared nude. Her family’s Jewish background put them at risk from the Nazis and so she fled Vienna to Paris where she met Louis B. Mayer, the head of MGM. She began her Hollywood career soon after, but she made a more lasting contribution through her work as an inventor, coming up with a system – in conjunction with composer George Antheil – called frequency hopping, something that stopped torpedoes from being tracked or jammed.

This occurred during World War II, and up until this stage, Bombshell is something of a standard biopic, charting Lamarr’s rise as an actress, and highlighting the Viennese background that propelled her, unexpectedly, to international stardom. Lamarr’s determination to succeed is also highlighted, as is her belief in herself and her abilities. But it’s the invention of frequency hopping – and its eventual use by the US Navy – that proves to be most intriguing. The documentary tells a story of bad luck and bad timing as Lamarr’s work proves too difficult to be adapted during the war, and when it is finally adopted in the early Sixties it’s too late for Lamarr to capitalise on its use financially. By this time her acting career has come to an end, and she has begun to withdraw from public life, becoming something of a recluse. Her children from her marriage to John Loder, Anthony and Denise, tell a story of ill-advised plastic surgery – footage of Lamarr in her later years shows just how much it was a bad idea – family estrangement (another son, Jimmy, believed he was adopted and chose to be brought up by someone else), and arrests for shoplifting.

Bombshell brings all these strands and aspects of Lamarr’s life together in a cogent and deftly considered way thanks to a mix of recent interviews, archival footage and photography, and recordings made by journalist Fleming Meeks in 1990 when he interviewed Lamarr, but which he thought were lost. The movie gains depth and a large degree of poignancy from the way in which Lamarr’s life played out in such a sad way in her later years, and the bittersweet emphasis on her beauty (knowing where it will lead) adds pathos as well. In the end, and despite the setbacks in both her careers (only a handful of her movies have stood the test of time), Lamarr’s story is one of huge promise that was only moderately and temporarily realised. Making her feature debut, Dean assembles the highs and lows of Lamarr’s life – married six times, highly regarded for her beauty if not her brains, more interesting away from acting – and paints a compelling portrait of a woman who was perhaps born two or three decades too soon. Ultimately it’s a sad tale because of its outcome, but thanks to Dean and the participation of Lamarr’s family, it’s also a celebration of an extraordinary woman who was much, much more than just a great beauty.

Rating: 8/10 – with an honesty about its subject that is sincere and affecting, Bombshell is a fascinating look at Hedy Lamarr the person, rather than just the actress or the inventor; a biography that examines much of her life in detail, and with a sympathetic approach, it’s an absorbing tale that does Lamarr justice in a way that, in many ways, she wasn’t granted while she was alive.