Welcome to Screen Gems, our weekend dive into queer and queer-adjacent titles of the past that deserve a watch or a rewatch.
The Towering: Amadeus
Director Milos Forman’s Oscar-gobbling biopic of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart lands on just about every critical list of the Best Movies Ever Made. It has good reason: it may just be a perfect movie. Out gay actor Tom Hulce stars in the title role as the ever-horny, ever-flirtatious composer of some of the most iconic music ever. The film takes the unusual step of retelling Mozart’s life through the eyes of one of his chief rivals, Antonio Salieri (F. Murry Abraham), a scheming fellow composer who views Mozart with acidic envy. Salieri recognizes Mozart’s brilliance, and also realizes that he will never write music of the same quality. He then hatches a horrible scheme to murder Mozart and humiliate God himself, who has bestowed on the vulgar Mozart true brilliance and rewarded the pious Salieri with mediocrity.
Hulce and Abraham give two of the screen’s greatest performances in the leading roles, courtesy of Forman’s subtle direction, and gay screenwriter Peter Schaffer’s magnificent screenplay. Besides the movie’s lush 19th-century visuals, it also features a score by Mozart (go figure). Riveting and acted to the extreme by Hulce and Abraham (who won an Oscar over his co-star), Amadeus is just about as good as movies get.
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ingyaom
Mozart’s friend Schikaneder (who wrote the story for the Magic Flute) was played by another gay actor: Simon Callow – who played Mozart in the original British version of the play.
dhmonarch89
How could you not mention his laugh? I don’t think Hulce was out at the time he made this, though.
Cato
I grew up down the street from Tom Hulce – his mom and my dad both worked for the local school district and an elementary school is named for her. He was a bit older than me, but a neighbor used to party with him and said the laugh in Amadeus is his real laugh.
sanfranca1
It’s not on Netflix.
michaelmt1009
It does not show up anywhere on Netflix and on Amazon Prime you have to rent it.
ptb2016
Tom Hulce should have won the Oscar not F.Murray Abraham. Though he wasn’t out at the time most in the business knew Tom is gay and I think homo phobia may have robbed Tom of the award.
mz.sam
Actor gay or not the film was beautiful to watch, interertsting bio-storyline, but Hulce’s performance was oddly ridiculous. Saw it theatre first run and once is enough.
Kangol2
I’m glad @mz.sam noted Hulce’s performance, which I found utterly over the top. He transforms Mozart into a clown or caricature. I was never sure whether Forman urged him to go this route or this was of his own devising. Also, was Hulce out at the time the film debuted? Was this widely known by the public, let alone most of Hollywood? That said, the film over all is really enjoyable.
Joshooeerr
The Mozart of the play is written to be silly and outrageous and childish – so in that respect Hulce’s performance is not over the top; it’s merely delivering precisely what the writer called for.
Henreid
Quoted from the article above:
“Besides the movie’s lush 19th-century visuals…”
Actually, the film’s setting is in the 18th-century. Mozart died in 1791.
Despite the fact that the movie’s plot is a complete fabrication (Salieri was an accomplished and well-respected composer, and he was not an insanely jealous rival of Mozart — in fact, he gave musical instruction to Mozart’s son, Franz Xaver) I still enjoy watching the film and it gives me a huge amount of pleasure. I also feel that Mozart’s personality as portrayed in “Amadeus” is a little silly and adolescent, and doesn’t capture his true complexity as a highly perceptive man of his era. Even so, I think the movie can be appreciated for what it is, a richly entertaining fantasy.
JessPH
Great movie. One of the greatest biopics of all time sans the historical inaccuracy about Salieri.