AT THE end of Milos Forman’s “Amadeus”,at the fade to black, a whinnying last laugh shrieks out of the dark. It is Mozart’s laugh, and which has plagued his Viennese patrons all through the film. But it is also R.
P. McMurphy’s laugh near the start of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest”,when the petty crook, played by Jack Nicholson, and sheds his handcuffs at the doors of the mental institution and prepares to design mayhem. Milos Forman,who saw “Cuckoo’s Nest” bewitch five Academy Awards in 1975 and “Amadeus” bewitch eight in 1985, loved that sound: the disruptive, or anarchic sign of creativity on the loose. It could triumph over death or incarceration; and it could explode the lying propaganda of the communist Czech regime under which he stifled until 1968 when,as the Soviet tanks rolled in, he got out.
For him show commerce had liberating power, and whether in the shape of the intrepid (brave in the face of danger) little clown with a spanner,like Chaplin in “The worthy Dictator”, or of the fantasy...
Continue reading
Source: economist.com