Magnum opus: "Amadeus"

All the right notes, in almost exactly the right order. It was just over forty years ago when Milos Forman's Amadeus landed among us as one of those fully formed masterpieces, and maybe it needed to be this complete in order to cut through: this was, after all, a film going against the grain of its junky, post-E.T., post-Raiders moment. It was literally classical, and yet it proved as crowdpleasing as any of the Mozart concertos that will draw standing ovations at the Proms in the weeks ahead. It was the handiwork of that Old Hollywood greybeard Saul Zaentz, one of several producers tapping the stageplays of Peter Shaffer for prestige purposes. Most loftily of all, it was about art, and the ways we come about it: some, like F. Murray Abraham's Salieri, grinding the gears, going through the motions, swearing off anything that resembles compromise to try and protect the modest skill they have, others - more flamboyant, instinctive creatives like Tom Hulce's Mozart, a tittering goofball seemingly ported over from one of the era's teen movies - pulling down inspiration from the heavens, making the complex seem easy, and using the time that frees to chase wine, women and anything else that catches their eye. Shaffer's generosity lay in showing how Mozart, too, had his issues, and in making the grudgeful, scheming, villainous antagonist more sympathetic than he might have been for those of us who will have many more days like Salieri than we ever will as Mozart: a dandified embodiment of imposter syndrome, someone who does everything asked of him in the pursuit of art and still can't pluck down anything to rival his lauded contemporary.

Forman, in turn, mounted a period piece that wasn't a stuffed shirt like Chariots of Fire or Gandhi, that found the life beneath these elaborate hats and hairpieces, and kept undercutting its own heady pomp and circumstance. In movie form, Amadeus remains largely a chamber piece, but those chambers become analogues for the busy hearts and minds of its characters, and the music brings everything to the surface anew; we're watching human beings, not well-posed mannequins. To some degree, Shaffer and Forman treat classical music like sport, as a pursuit you graft at day in day out, even on those days you aren't performing publicly. For Mozart-Salieri, read Borg-McEnroe, Senna-Prost or Pogačar-Vingegaard: the generational talent against the doughty tryhards left exasperated in their wake. We must pick a side to cheer, then, but even this proves pleasurably complicated. Abraham, in what was arguably the highpoint of a long and generally distinguished career, juggles two jobs with great skill. He's not just interpreting an understandably piqued soul, baffled as to why the same small handful of semibreves won't sit up for him the way they do for Mozart, but set to interpreting the very same music that irks him so; the best scenes are those in which the actor unpicks Mozart's genius, his layering of music, as well as any critic has done on the page. (If God speaks through Mozart, Shaffer surely speaks through Salieri.) Yet Hulce is too darned likable to be dismissed as a mere upstart or brat: here is an intruder from the New World set against the patrician Brits cast as courtiers, yes, but also someone who embodies new ways of thinking and doing, and the composer's gift for metabolising what more conventional ears hear as too many notes. The film's sole flaw is that it makes opera seem more fun than any real-world opera has ever been in the history of creation (we get four minutes of it, not four hours, which helps) but otherwise it stands up, and stands alone: all the film's success inspired, as far as I can tell, was Falco's Eurohit "Rock Me Amadeus", pink periwigs and all. (If not sport, then Forman was surely channelling the dress-me-up spirit of New Wave pop.) For almost three hours, Shaffer and Forman combined the best aspects of their antagonists' varied MOs: Amadeus is a film that worked very hard to seem as effortless as it does.

A 4K restoration of Amadeus is currently playing in selected cinemas, and is available on Blu-ray via Warner Bros.