In the minority on Milos

Milos Forman, the Czechoslovakian filmmaker who died yesterday at the age of 86 following a short illness, will be regarded by most for three films he made between 1975 and 1984 — One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, Hair and Amadeus. These, however, are not my favorite Forman films.

These three have something in common and it’s that commonality that has always bothered me. All three were stage productions before Foreman committed them to the big screen and I have always preferred the stage versions of these works over the cinematic ones. I thought the stage production of Cuckoo’s Nest had a bite that was missing from Forman’s version, which tried too hard, I thought, for sentimentality.

It’s interesting to note that the part of Randle Patrick McMurphy (played by Jack Nicholson in Forman’s movie) was played by Kirk Douglas when the play premiered on Broadway in 1963. Douglas retained the rights to make a movie of the play for almost a decade, but when he was unsuccessful in his attempts, he gave the film rights to his son, Michael, who managed to hire Forman on the cheap because the director’s previous film, Taking Off, had been a major commercial bomb. Michael wanted to recast his father in the lead role, but Kirk, by that time, was considered too old for it, so it went to Nicholson. The play had an off-Broadway revival in 1971 with Danny DeVito playing Martini, the role he also played in the film.

There was much to like about Foreman’s Amadeus, most notably the performance of F. Murray Abraham, but I absolutely despised Thomas Hulce in the title role and Elizabeth Berridge as his wife irritated me no end. (In the stage production I saw in 1980, those two parts were played by Tim Curry and Jane Seymour.) The less said of how badly the original stage musical version of Hair was butchered on film the better.

That’s not to say I didn’t appreciate Foreman. I’m only saying my favorite Forman films came at the beginning of his career: Loves of a Blonde (1965), an Oscar-nominee for best foreign language film; The Fireman’s Ball (1967), a satire on East European communism that was banned for many years in Forman’s home country; and even his first American film, the aforementioned Taking Off (1971) about a suburban couple whose teenage daughter runs away from home, a film that was panned by most critics.

I also harbored a certain respect for his efforts to film Ragtime, a novel that, when I read it, thought would be impossible to adapt to film, and The People vs. Larry Flynt.