The great director Miloš Forman has died at age 86. Forman directed only 14 features over his forty-year career, but four are masterpieces or near-masterpieces – One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, Amadeus, The People vs Larry Flynt and Man on the Moon. That’s a remarkable batting average, especially when you add in such fine Forman films as Hair, Ragtime and Valmont.
Forman came of age in Communist Czechoslovakia, and the prevalent thread in his films was the challenging, even mocking, of authority. There’s no better example than Nurse Rached in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. Nurse Rached is every bit the tyrant as any jack-booted fascist dictator, but Forman chose to have little-known actress Louise Fletcher play Rached as soft-spoken, always-composed and superficially benevolent, which made Nurse Rached’s fiats even more emasculating an soul-crushing. Fletcher won an Oscar for her performance.
In Amadeus, Jeffrey Jones’ performance as the all-powerful but dim Emperor Joseph II punctured the idea of the divine right of kings. And, of course, Forman also made movies about Andy Kaufman and Larry Flynt, two outsiders who reveled in defying conventions.
Forman was also a master of casting. Not any director would have thought of casting Fletcher and Will Sampson in Cuckoo’s Nest or Jones, F. Murray Abraham and Tom Hulce in Amadeus. Not to mention Woody Harrelson in The People vs Larry Flynt. All turned out to be inspired choices.
I particularly love Forman’s final Czech movie before coming to Hollywood, The Fireman’s Ball from 1967. It’s a comedy of errors set during the annual ball of a small town fire brigade. It’s an obligatory occasion, and everyone is just going through the motions. No one is willing or able to do what they are supposed to be doing, whether it is protecting the raffle prizes or even putting out fires. The film eviscerated the moral bankruptcy of the Communist society and was predictably suppressed by the regime.
The Fireman’s Ball (which is also sometimes listed as The Firemen’s Ball) can be streamed from Amazon Prime and rented on DVD from Netflix. It’s only one hour, thirteen minutes long, and it’s a hoot.
