Miloš Forman is a filmmaker who’s long been a little easy to take for granted. You’d think that wouldn’t be the case given that he made two all-timer Academy Award winning classics with One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest and Amadeus and was a fairly successful filmmaker for much of his career, but despite that success he never quite became a brand name, which might partly because he never quite let him be pigeonholed into a single clique. He began his career as one of the leading voices of the Czech New Wave, which for many directors would have been enough to solidify a reputation but Forman was only getting warmed up with that phase of his career. One could also potentially lump him in with the “New Hollywood” crowd given that he was there to make one of Hollywood’s most successful counter-culture adjacent films of the 70s, and it would also be a mistake to define him by what appeared to be prestige work-for-hire work in the 80s and 90s. I’ve seen all but six of Forman’s films and I’m pretty sure I’ll be able to take a peak at all three stages of his career with my next project in which I’ll catch up on those six films, which will consist of two of his Czechoslovakian films, a forgotten entry in his New Hollywood phase, two of his 80s efforts, and a late career attempt at a comeback. This should make for a much needed re-consideration of the man and his many nuances.
Black Peter (1964)
Miloš Forman’s debut film was called Black Peter and it’s probably one of the least discussed films in his filmography, being overshadowed by both his Hollywood efforts and also his other two Czechoslovakian films, which are considered international classics and have long held spots in the Criterion Collection. Like most of the Czech New Wave this film is the product of the Prague Spring, a six year span in the middle of the 60s in which Czechoslovakia approached destalinization though a series of reforms that allowed for more creative freedoms than what you’d often see in Eastern Bloc countries during this period but just the same you won’t find any overt politics here as this is actually a very laid back coming of age movie looking at the life of a typical teenager in then contemporary times. I’m not an expert on the Czech New Wave, which I tend to associate with more “out there” movies like Daisies but this film is on the “down to Earth” side of the movement and bears more resemblance to something like Jiří Menzel’s Closely Watched Trains, which was also about a slightly aimless young man but I remember that being a bit more overtly comedic in its observations. This one on the other hand seems to be a bit more interested in just reflecting a fairly universal teenage experience characterized by hanging with friends, squabbling with parents, and being inept at your part time job. One would perhaps be tempted to assume that this was an autobiographical account but it likely isn’t. Forman’s teenage years coincided with World War II and its aftermath and Forman, whose parents were both killed by the gestapo as resistance members during the occupation and who spent his adolescence looking for shelter, and were nothing like Peter’s. In a lot of ways this is instead a depiction of how much easier the younger generation has it, but not in a condecening way and not blind to the personal problems these young people still have. It’s also perhaps ironic, given that Forman’s later career is interpreted as a reaction to the repression he experienced in communist Czechoslovakia, seems to really make the place seem awfully normal (or at least this Prague Spring version of the country) with his first film with much of the “repression” being your typical teen malaise. Overall, this is a perfectly good entrant into the coming of age movie canon but not necessarily one that does anything terribly remarkable outside of documenting the teen experience in this particular time and place and from a director who would go on to greater things, but it’s certainly perfectly well made for what its trying to be and you do see Forman’s early promise.
*** out of Five
Loves of a Blonde (1965)
Black Peter was not a huge success either at home or internationally but it did manage to snag the Golden Leopard at the Locarno Film Festival and this was enough to put him in the good graces of the Czechoslovakian ministry of culture and this gave him a great deal of freedom with his next project. He cashed this clout in to make a film called Loves of a Blonde, which would be inspired by a conversation he had with a young woman he met in a train station who told him about how she’d been lured there by a young man who promised to run away with her but who had actually given her a fake address. This film imagines a similar woman and what her wider life must be like. The movie’s title is a bit misleading; there’s only one “love” involved and while the woman in question does have blonde hair it’s not really a defining feature and she’s not some sort of pinup bombshell, rather she’s this rather down on her luck woman working in a provincial shoe factory. She is quite young however and in a lot of ways this is as much of a coming of age movie as Black Peter is, albeit one that’s about a woman and set in a more rural and impoverished location. The titular blonde, Andula, is a fairly naïve young lady who finds herself having a fling with a jazz pianist who plays a gig in her town but it seems that she believes this to be a more meaningful encounter than he does and decides to take a leap to meet him at his home, which leads to much awkwardness. This is certainly a messier take on adolescence than Black Peter but not necessarily by a whole lot; in some ways Andula’s problems seem to be in some ways a typical messy youthful experience and she seems to have some joy along the way. The sex scene seems to have been pretty enjoyable to her and Forman shoots this (mostly post-coital) scene with a lot of fun and energy. In fact that whole movie is generally funnier and more adventurous with its cinematic style than Black Peter was and feels more like something that would be made during a “new wave” of sorts. The film’s take on Andula’s unfortunate but ultimately somewhat low stakes plight struck quite a chorde; it was a huge hit in Czechoslovakia and also made waves abroad and even garnered a Best Foreign Language nomination from the Academy. These would both be the case with his next film, The Fireman’s Ball (a movie I know I saw ages ago but have hazy memories of) as well, but that movie faced more internal controversy and would also be banned a year after its release in large part because of an invasion by the Warsaw Pact nations which brought an end to the Prague Spring and by extension the Czech New Wave in 1968. It was clear to Forman that his home country would no longer be a place to express himself and that returning there may well lead to his arrest and as such he fled to the West and mostly never looked back.
**** out of Five
Taking Off (1971)
Miloš Forman already had an eye on leaving Czechoslovakia before the Prague Spring ended but his exit became particularly pressing when the Warsaw Pact nations invaded while he was away negotiating his first American project, a position that would have put in him potential criminal jeopardy for being out of the country without permission. As such he opted not to return and instead went straight to Hollywood and fortunately for him the studios were very much in the market for outside the box thinkers who could tap into the youth market as part of the emerging New Hollywood. Hollywood’s interest in Forman would pay off in a big way later in the decade when he made the Oscar winning triumph One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest but his first Hollywood movie went a lot less smoothly with Taking Off a critical and commercial disappointment which is close to forgotten today in part because music licensing issues have kept it somewhat out of circulation. The film is meant to be a comedy poking fun at the generation gap by focusing on upper class parents who respond to their kids becoming hippies in the most cringe ways possible. Specifically it focuses on a couple played by Buck Henry and Lynn Carlin who begin panicking when they come home to find their daughter isn’t there and start making crazy assumptions about what nutty hippie shenanigans she must be up to. In reality she’s at an audition for some sort of talent show and the film frequently cuts to various hippie performances at this audition throughout the movie including a performance by a 23 year old Kathy Bates. Eventually these parents spiral into attending a sort of support group for parents of “missing” children where they’re encouraged to try smoking weed for strictly educational purposes to humorous effect.
Between this and his later adaptation of Hair I get the impression that Forman thought that hippies and their freedom loving ways were really goovy and viewed their movement as positive, especially coming out of a repressive society that he was always pushing back against in his own way. However, he was also pushing forty when he made this and had two children and I think he was more of an outside observer of hippies than someone who really belonged amongst them and relates more to the “square” parents here and feels a lot more comfortable depicting them. Outside of the (rather strange) audition material the actual hippies are by contrast mostly viewed through the eyes of the parents whether it’s the mostly silent daughter of the central couple or another girl that the Buck Henry character finds himself narcing on in another sequence. The eventual conclusion the film comes to is ultimately a fairly healthy one: that once these parents stop being hysterical about sex and drugs and instead try to talk to their children rationally like human beings they can form a much healthier connection with them. Makes sense, but like, that also seems like a fairly obvious point which maybe shouldn’t have required two hours of farce in order to get to. On the other hand maybe this was a bit more relavatory in 1971 when this kind of gentle parenting was more of a new thing? I’m not sure. This is plainly very much a product of its time that’s commenting on a very specific cultural moment and it approaches this in a more direct and perhaps minor way than a lot of other New Hollywood films. This is plainly minor Forman, especially in terms of this era of Forman, but it’s an interesting enough watch just the same.
*** out of Five
Ragtime (1981)
After Miloš Forman triumphed with the high grossing and Oscar winning hit One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest he cashed in his clout making a big screen adaptation of the musical Hair and I’d say that was probably a misfire. 1979 was the wrong time and place to make such a film: the optimistic hippie vibe was dead and gone in the post-Watergate 70s and people also weren’t nostalgic for it yet either. That movie could have easily been Forman’s entry into the ranks of New Hollywood disasters in the late 70s like New York, New York and Heaven’s Gate but it was kind of saved by the name recognition of the IP and ended up doing okay at the box office. Unfortunately Forman’s humbling experience ended up just getting moved out a couple years as his 1981 effort Ragtime has a lot of the hallmarks of “Late New Hollywood Hubris” despite being made a few years after the end of the 1970s. The film was an adaptation of the popular 1975 novel of the same name by E.L. Doctorow which has been described as “historiographic metafiction,” which is to say it tells a fictional story but in a way that mixes in real historical figures and concocts fake historical events. This same novel would be adapted into a Broadway musical in the 90s but this is more of a straight adaptation and the musical genre in the title is only a minor element of the story. The film is set in New York around the turn of the century and looks at a number of characters in the area including a millionaire who murders an architect for placing a nude statue of his chorus girl wife, another millionaire who takes in a black infant who’s been abandoned on his property, the father of that infant who arrives looking for it, as well as various other city officials.
Structurally, this is kind of an odd movie. It ultimately culminates around a storyline where the father of the aforementioned infant gets into a feud with a racist volunteer fire chief which escalates to heights that border on being a race war, but it takes a long time to get to that and spends a whole lot of time on other storylines which ultimately feel a bit tangential to that and there’s something a bit unbalanced about it all; it kind of wants to be more of an ensemble piece but can’t really commit to that because certain storylines are just significantly more eventful than others and take up a lot more screen time to the point where you wonder why they felt this needed such a wide tapestry. As far as the racial politics of all this, well, it kind of fits in well with the tradition of movies about race made by well-intentioned white boomers who don’t really know what they’re talking about. The film frankly seems to rather underestimate how all-encompassing the racism of this time and place are and includes so many “good” whites that the fire chief comes off like an exception rather than the rule. I don’t believe for a second that this guy would have been taken this off-guard by the slight that sets him off, as if he hadn’t been dealing with shit like that his whole life. It might have worked better if he’s been treated to an onslaught of hate throughout the film with that just being the straw that broke the camel’s back but instead he comes off as kind of irrationally over-reacting when otherwise surrounded by fairly tolerant people.
It should also be noted that this was something of a wildly ambitious mega-production which reportedly cost upwards of $32 million to make. To put that in perspective The Empire Strikes Back also cost $30 million and Raiders of the Lost Ark cost $20 million and Gandhi cost $22 million. You can certainly see some of that on the screen with a lot of pretty elaborate sets and costumes but this also isn’t necessarily a trying to show off how “epic” it is at all times so it isn’t quite a “spectacle.” Also, while the film managed to get James Cagney out of retirement in a rather notable coup (he’s fine in it), it doesn’t otherwise have what you’d call an “all star” cast at least in terms of the fame at the time of the people involved so in some ways you have a movie that needed to be a blockbuster to justify its budget but was actually kind of un-commercial in a number of ways and it ultimately paid for that. It would be a mistake to paint this as being some sort of humongous disaster because it wasn’t exactly; it got fairly respectful reviews and managed to earn eight Oscar nominations and if they were doing ten nominees in Best Picture at the time it likely would have been among them. It didn’t win any of those Oscars though and was generally viewed as a movie that “wasn’t quite there.” As for the box office, it reportedly made about $20 million of its $30 million back, which is bad but not Heaven’s Gate territory, so Forman kind of “got away” with this one which is fortunate because it meant the studios trusted him with another $20 million budget to make Amadeus three years later. However, I don’t think time has been too kind to this movie, in fact for a production of this size it feels downright forgotten and given that its racial politics haven’t aged tremendously I don’t think that’s going to change anytime soon, but having said all that I do think it’s still interesting as a product of its time and Forman does do enough from a production standpoint to make this hard to be too mad at.
*** out of Five
Valmont (1989)
After the surprise box office and award season triumph of Amadeus Miloš Forman was back on top and had a lot of freedom to pick his next project and he chose… poorly. His next movie would be Valmont, a film set amongst the 18th century French aristocracy and concerns a libertine named Vicomte de Valmont who is challenged by wealthy widow to seduce and deflower the virginal fiancé of her lover leading to a great deal of intrigue. Does this plot sound familiar? That’s because this is an adaptation of the 1782 novel “Les Liaisons Dangereuses” which was of course also the same source for Stephen Frear’s Dangerous Liasons, which came out one year before Valmont to much success and completely overshadowed Forman’s film. So we’ve got a Dante’s Peak/Volcano situation but with a specific 18th Century French novel rather than a vague concept like “volcanos,” how did that happen? Well the reason this source material was on the mind likely had a lot to do with the fact that in 1985 a Christopher Hampton penned stage adaptation of the novel opened on the West End and later Broadway with Alan Rickman playing Valmont to much success. Frears’ Dangerous Liasons was a licensed adaptation of this stage version while Forman’s Valmont was a direct adaptation from the novel but I have my doubts that he would have thought to make this movie at this time without the stage version and I doubt he was blameless in creating this cinematic game of chicken and he really probably should have flinched rather than go through with this because even if he’d managed to finish his movie first I have my doubts that this would have worked out in his favor.
I should probably note that while I have seen Dangerous Liasons it’s been ages and my memories of it are a bit hazy so I’m not in much of a position to do a deep dive comparing the two and what they changed. That said I do remember enough to know that the tone here is a bit different. Dangerous Liaisons generally seemed a bit more interested in the wider society of decadence that it was set in where this one seems to be a bit more personal and focused on the characters as individuals. That probably accounts for the one major change I do remember, which was the ending. Frears’ film, like the novel, and even like the later modernized teen adaptation Cruel Intentions end with all the sordid details of what happened in the story being exposed to the public and kind of blowing up the society that in question but that doesn’t happen here and instead the survivors are kind of left to stew in the situation. In fact the movie generally seems to be a bit more sympathetic towards its central protagonist (and title character) despite the fact that it’s about his attempts to deflower a fifteen year old for sordid reasons. That’s not to say that Forman condones his actions but notice that he casts Colin Firth in the role rather than someone like John Malkovich who can be a bit more convincingly sleazy. The focus is more on Valmont’s obsession with the Marquise de Merteuil to the point of being willing to do damnedable things in order to bed her rather than his role in a more sordid societal web. I… don’t think that’s the more interesting take, or at least it’s not the more entertaining. This actually cost quite a bit more to make than the Frears movie despite having a less buzzy cast and obviously grossed substantially less while also getting worse reviews. It was just a fail any way you cut it and Forman was lucky to bounce back from it in the 90s to some extent because he really squandered a lot of goodwill with this.
**1/2 out of Five
Goya’s Ghosts (2007)
Miloš Forman mostly bounced back from the failure of Valmont pretty well and had a pretty successful 1990s. Neither The People Vs. Larry Flynt nor Man on the Moon reached the critical highs of something like One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest but they were both mostly viewed a decent award season also-rans which have their fans. For whatever reason though it seems Forman had a falling out with Hollywood during the 2000s however and during that decade he would only make one last movie and he’d make it in Europe, albeit in English and with top level talent in front of the camera. That film is Goya’s Ghosts, which I remember being released to very little fanfare in the summer of 2007 and if Forman’s name wasn’t on it I question whether it would have even gotten that, but that’s not to say the movie is completely worthless. The Goya of the title is of course the famed Spanish painter Francisco Goya, who is played here by Stellan Skarsgård, though this is not strictly a biopic so much as it’s a fictional historical drama in which Goya is one character. In fact I highly suspect that this movie was sold to investors as something which would do for Goya what Amadeus did for Mozart, spin a drama around years of interaction between a master artist and another character, in this case a fictional clergyman named Lorenzo Casamares (played by Javier Bardem) with ties to the Spanish inquisition and later the French revolution after Napoleon conquers Spain. The thing is, Casamares is no Salieri. He’s got interesting elements to him on paper but not interesting enough to carry a movie and he’s not a clear counterpart to Goya like Salieri was for to Mozart. In fact Goya feels a little tangential to a lot of this stuff; the idea seems to be that the film will illustrate the politics that inspired the painter but he’s largely an observer rather than a participant in it all and he’s not even a point-of-view character for much of the film so it all seems a bit odd. I’ll also say that this maybe lacks some of that production excellence that characterized Amadeus; there are decent sets and costumes to be found but Forman’s compositions feel a bit lazier and he doesn’t seem to work as effectively with cinematographer Javier Aguirresarobe as he did with longtime collaborator Miroslav Ondříček (who retired around 2001). Ultimately the Amadeus comparisons with this film aren’t entirely fair and this film would probably seem a bit more impressive if it wasn’t the end point of a legendary filmmaker, but it’s definitely a mediocrity to go out on in a lot of ways.
**1/2 out of Five
Conclusion
Forman would live another eleven years after the release of Goya’s Ghosts but didn’t make any more films and seemed to keep a pretty low profile during those years. Having finished seeing his entire filmography what are my takeaways. Well, I’m very glad to have seen Loves of a Blonde, that one’s certainly a gem and I’d love to see Criterion finally get that a blu-ray/4K release and it also made me want to revisit The Fireman’s Ball, which I saw a very long time ago and barely remember. A boxed set of those Forman’s three Czech films would be very cool. As for the rest of what I watched… obviously these are lesser works but all of them are interesting in their ways. Taking Off is quite the time capsule of its era, Ragtime is an admirably ambitious swing, Valmont is an interesting case of “twin films” comparison, and for its flaws Goya’s Ghost is still a thematically fitting final film given his pet themes of repression and revolution. I’ll also say that watching these lesser works from throughout Forman’s career has given me more appreciation of his wider career, which is one that’s often been easy to take for granted. He wasn’t the most prolific filmmaker but I don’t think any of his movies were total failures and when you have stuff like One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest and Amadeus under your belt it’s real easy to cut some slack for the occasional Valmont.
The Movie Vampire 