The film that solidified the reputation of Milos Forman was 1975's One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest, unsurprisingly, as the film was the winner of five Academy Awards and an immense box-office success. Adapted from the Ken Kesey novel which garnered a cult audience in the during the 1960's counter-culture movement. It speaks of an unlikely rebel in even more unlikely circumstances - a state mental ward - and the ultimate revenge in the shape of a lobotomy, that the system takes against him. Starting out as an almost realistic comedy - parts of it being shot at the Oregon State Hospital - the film escalates into tragic melodrama.
Forman's subsequent project represented a considerable change of pace although it too looked back to the Sixties, in fact to one of the most spectacular theater icons of the decade's next half - the rock musical Hair. Consequently, Forman's 1979 filmic version cannot be considered anything of a success.
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| Rock Me Amadeus |
Forman then for the first time tackled a full-scale period piece in 1981. Ragtime is an astute adaptation of E.L. Doctorow's best-selling novel of the same title, an ambitious panorama of American life in the early years of last century. Dino De Lauretiis, its producer went on record to aver his ten million dollar loss in the making of the film. Nevertheless, Forman returned to Czechoslovakia in 1983 to adapt Peter Shaffer's play about Mozart and Salieri, Amadeus (1984), which proved to be his first critical and commercial hit in a near decade.