1984: Amadeus

Screenplay by Peter Shaffer
Adapted from the play Amadeus by Peter Shaffer

Salieri has an inherent love and appreciation for music, and desires nothing more than to compose great music to glorify God (and himself). To his dismay and bewilderment, however, Salieri finds that God has chosen to bestow incomparable talent not on the righteous Salieri, but on a vulgar, frivolous, silly little man named Mozart. Mad with jealousy, Salieri sets out to ruin, and perhaps even kill, his rival.

This is unquestionably one of the best stage-to-screen adaptations I've blogged about thus far. Peter Shaffer clearly has a profound understanding of the differences between these two media, and was not too devoted to his script to make several necessary changes. Perhaps the most immediately apparent change is the framing of the story. In both versions, an older Salieri narrates the story, but in the play he speaks directly to the audience, shattering the fourth wall. By contrast, in the film, Salieri tells the story to a priest in an insane asylum. To facilitate this change, Salieri's attempted suicide, which comes at the end of the play, is moved to the beginning of the film. The play employs a great theatrical method of drawing the audience in that would have been either too creepy or too hokey on film, and Shaffer evidently recognized that. In a similar vein, the play has two characters called the Venticelli, who facilitate the story and help indicate the passing of time by gossiping and carrying information between major characters. Since the film was able to use a lot more actors and a lot more sets, it could show the audience more than the play could, so the Venticelli became unnecessary, and thus were eliminated.

The movie added a lot of scenes that weren't in the play, and changed the details of most scenes it kept, but still managed to remain true to the original story (how historically accurate either version is, I'll leave to the Mozart experts to evaluate). The characters are all remarkably consistent, despite many changes to the specifics of their stories. For example, in the film, Salieri hires a maid to spy on the Mozarts, which isn't something he does in the play, but it's definitely something the Salieri of the play could have conceivably done. The movie does seem significantly longer, although by reading the play rather than watching it I didn't get a very good sense of how long the music lasted during the concert scenes. When I blogged about this movie's Best Picture win, I complained about the length, but also noted that there wasn't much that could have been cut out. After reading the play, I can see how it could have been shorter, but I honestly can't fault anything that was added for the film. It's a brilliantly crafted story, and if it seems a bit slow, it's never boring. I don't think I'd watched it since that blog, and I'm not sad I had an excuse to watch it again.

I hope, though I highly doubt, that I'll feel the same way about the next film, another very long Best Picture winner, Out of Africa, which I did not particularly enjoy when I watched it before. Enough time has passed that I wouldn't necessarily mind having to re-watch it, but it was adapted from three different books, none of which is particularly short, so it may be quite a while before you hear from me again.