Bringing the highbrow to the status-hungry middle in the same way as those "Bach's Greatest Hits" collections and the awful faux-llies of Andrew Lloyd Webber, Milos Forman's bawdy, jittery adaptation of Peter Shaffer's fanciful play "Amadeus" is not so much about Mozart as it is about genius and its burden on the mediocre. Mozart (Tom Hulce) is an adolescent boor touched by the hand of God. Emperor Joseph's (Jeffrey Jones) court composer Salieri (F. Murray Abraham) becomes obsessed and desperately jealous of Mozart's gift, leading him to the madhouse and confessions of murder. Amadeus works because of Forman's gift for the seedy (and portraying asylums--he directed One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, after all) and because of Abraham's deeply-felt performance.

Though it never elevates itself beyond its theatrical limitations, its cleverness as an adaptation is almost unparalleled in the annals of stage-to-cinema translation. Restored now to a three-hour "director's cut," Amadeus unfortunately suffers from its additions, reminding of the Coen Brothers' ill-conceived recut of Blood Simple in that regard: extended opera sequences push the now R-rated film from deliriously structured melodrama towards Topsy-Turvy, while a scene detailing wife Stanze's (Elizabeth Berridge) humiliation at the hands of Salieri feels unnecessary and mistimed.

Unlike Coppola/Murch's Apocalypse Now Redux, Peter Shaffer's Amadeus: Director's Cut hasn't benefited from a remixing and complete re-editing. Rather, the additions feel choppy and obviously inserted, giving the film a lack of fluidity fatal to our rapturous suspension of disbelief. A line spoken by Tom Hulce's Mozart encapsulates the greatest irony of this version of Amadeus: "I don't rewrite what's perfect." This is not to say that the Amadeus that won eight Academy Awards in 1984 was perfect, merely that the urge to revisit old successes in an attempt to "improve" upon them is a risky venture at best. Here's hoping Ridley Scott's long-awaited final final cut of Blade Runner falls on the side of Touch of Evil and not Star Wars: The Special Edition; maybe he should get Walter Murch on the horn.-Walter Chaw

2.30:1 DVD capture: Amadeus

As good as Warner's DVD of Peter Shaffer's Amadeus: Director's Cut is, it's a wasted opportunity that the two-disc set doesn't utilize seamless branching technology to make simultaneously available the original theatrical version, which is already on DVD but in a decidedly inferior presentation interrupted by a side-break. Both renditions of Amadeus have their strengths, and it would be a shame for the one that received the Oscar for Best Picture to disappear into the ether.

Letterboxed at approximately 2.30:1 and enhanced for 16x9 displays, the three-hour Director's Cut features shallow contrast that, along with some softness to the image, seems intrinsic to cinematographer Miroslav Ondricek's lighting schemes and anamorphic lenses circa the mid-eighties, respectively. One can at least say that the film has never looked this good on home video. I was a bit less enthralled by the 5.1 Dolby Digital audio, representative not of a remix per se because Amadeus played select cities in six-track sound during its 1984 theatrical release. The music never quite takes flight--its concert hall ambience is unconvincing at best; the lone sequence to tax your system is the "Leopold's Ghost" opera (pictured above). (Aside: footage exclusive to the Director's Cut is indicated with an asterisk in the chapter menu.) The track itself has been recorded loud.

Milos Forman and screenwriter Shaffer have laid down a fresh yakker for the Director's Cut that drifts from screen-specificity on more than one occasion. Talking to each other as if no one else is listening, the two reminisce about the political strife in Forman's native Czechoslovakia at the time of the shoot, the probably-apocryphal origin of the "too many notes" scene (Forman proudly boasts that it was immortalized in Microsoft's Cinemania program), the challenge of adapting Shaffer's play, and much, much more. It's a long track but far from a drag.

A list of awards won by Amadeus plus cast and crew filmographies round out Disc A while Disc B hosts Bill Jersey's compelling, hour-long The Making of "Amadeus" (in 1.85:1 anamorphic widescreen), a documentary that finds almost everybody involved in the production contributing his or her two cents. Shock of shocks, F. Murray Abraham comes off as arrogant, Elizabeth Berridge ditzy, and a beefed-up Tom Hulce a quick study--there was little casting against type, in other words. It's also interesting to see the 'Michael Jackson' incident in which a performer's feather cap caught fire live and in person after hearing Forman and Shaffer discuss it in their commentary. The film's theatrical trailer from 1984 caps off the second platter.-Bill Chambers

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