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...when his attention is finally jarred, the musical prayer dies mid- chord, like a recording unplugged...

...Screen I I MOZART & MURDER 'AMADEUS' & 'A SOLDIER'S STORY' M I USIC, APPROPRIATELY, dominates the film Amadeus, redeems its weaknesses, and raises it at last to some i fragic heights...

...he read and studied in his trade, particularly in Bach, no favorite at a time when Baroque seriousness and structure had gone out of style...

...They are convinced the Klan did it...

...Where it does go involves both suspense and surprise beyond the usual materials of the inquiry genre...

...He was fifty-three years old the last time I saw him, full of energy and enthusiasm as usual, and his death came as quite a shock...

...his jealousy, by all accounts, was believable and frighteningly demonic...

...In truth, Mozart was no saint, but often a crude, boisterous South German who could crack vulgar jokes as easily as crank out splendid tunes...

...With a few brief touches -- a bus with black soldiers in the back, signs labeled "whites only," and suspicious natives offended at Davenport's presence --we are reminded of a world that, whatever else remains the same, is thankfully gone...

...In that context, however, he must com- pete against Mozart's music --present as mere tape-recording in the theater...

...A $OLDIER'$5"I"ORYis a spare, literate, and at times powerful version of A Soldier's Play, Charles Fuller's Pulitzer Prize-winner of several years back, Like Peter Schaffer with Amadeus, Fuller has written the screenplay for the movie, and, for the most part, he and director Norman Jewison have avoided the peril of producing a mere filmed piece of theater...

...Salieri appears much less a neoclassical Iago than the medioc- rity he confesses to be...

...To create Amadeus, Peter Schaffer, who wrote both play and film, has freely mixed fact and fiction, perhaps too much so...

...a young priest who hears Salieri's story and has nothing to Offer but deadpan horror...

...TOM O'BRIEN Stage I I PLEASANT DREAMS DIAGNOSTIC, NOT CURATIVE A NYONE WHO remembers the drunken sergeants in Streamers knows that playwright David Rabe can be funny, but the laughter in Stret~mers is laced with an- guish and ugliness...

...Music is the story in Amadeus, or at least the best part of it...

...What emerges is not just whodunit, and that key to detective fiction, a motive, but competing visions of black history and future prospects...

...When Davenport encounters a white captain who has suppressed some evidence about some other white officers and demands, "Tell me what they told you," we have to take a deep breath, as in Sophie's Choice, before another contrived dip into the past...

...Absolute historical accuracy isn't required, of course, but Schaffer has to stretch in too many directions to f ' 19 October 1984:557 press his thesis-like symmetry ot;primitive genius and cerebral failure...

...That Mozart of popular iconography was a fiction, an invention of his widow to upgrade his reputation, and of nineteenth-century music critics to discipline the even wilder bohemians of their time...

...When Salieri's demonic power declines, moreover, Schaf- fer's fictions seem more suspect...

...I felt that if he had died suddenly it was fortunate it was not six months earlier, or a year earlier...

...Although F. Murray Abraham fills the old man's voice with passion, it gradually seems like mere ranting in this context, and far more convincing only when we see him, in his earlier days, plotting Mozart's downfall...

...And from that point of view I felt that his death expressed a good deal of continuity with his monastic life, in the sense that he had resolved some of the tensions about his vocation...

...To this revision, Schaffer has added a tale of murder and spiritual corruption...

...The fact --though considerably exaggerated --involves Mozart's character, who some apparently still conceive of as an eighteenth-century goody-two-shoes who tapped in twofourths time...

...I think all of us who knew him well felt we had lost a brother...

...But Waters's dominance also involves a problem, an over- reliance on flashbacks that wrecks the film's balance in its second half...

...Played by an actor with the fortuitous name of Adolph Caesar, Sergeant Waters esteems the avowed enemy that his troops are so willing to fight, the little corporal in Germany and his plans for racial purification...

...Hulee, who improves with time, and Abraham, a Broadway veteran, are ably assisted in the film by Jeffrey Jones...

...The company plays the murdered man's platoon, a team of baseball players who have never seen a black officer before and who eye Rollins with worshipful gawking -- before he begins to interrogate them, that is...

...Hurlyburly is often a funny play, but in context the funniness is almost unnerving...

...He was wrestling with God, and there was always more to God than he could ever master...

...The film closes with Mozart composing the Dies lrae of the Requiem, or rather, issuing instructions from a deathbed from which he can no longer rise...

...It seems an investigation doomed to go nowhere...

...Although the conclusion lacked the punch its menacing devel- opment promised, A Soldier's Story is the most trenchant study of racism in recent film, providing some.talented black actors with a rare chance to do something more than play the comic fool...

...The music is far more than a mere score, even more than a figurative"extra character...

...The core of the movie becomes the sergeant' s character, and that in turn becomes both its strength and weakness...

...Rollins plays the ramrod-stiff Captain William Davenport, a black lawyer sent to a Louisiana army camp in 1944 to investigate the murder of a black non-corn, Sergeant Vernon Waters...

...and assorted imperial musicians, who alternately snicker or dodder in clich6d fash- ion as they menace or feel threatened by "the creature...

...In the film, the rivalry seems a one-sided battle...

...Caesar gives a harsh, mean performance, thoroughly believable, dis- gusting, and, at last, pitiable...

...All Rollins is given to do is to cry by a window...

...In the movie, however, it seems warmed over...

...one aches for someone to articulate the irony that Waters's racism implies or to express some creative sense of the relationship between history and the future...

...Nevertheless, I left Amadeus moved...

...Such interiorization of the score in Amadeus makes the music not background, but in- scape...

...But as Davenport interviews the platoon about their attitude toward Sergeant Waters, he discovers not only oppression but tensions among the oppressed...

...Mozart was wild, to be sure, but not great despite his nature...

...Davenport relates to the story as a lawyer and soldier but not as a black, leaving an emotional gap at the close...

...we listen to Salieri as he recalls the rivalry thirty years later in a lunatic asylum after a suicide attempt...

...the mannerisms that make Sgt...

...But they become bulky and overlong...

...Voca me ," Hulce repeats, as if beseech- ing God to call him...

...he wants to make inferior blacks suffer and fail, and then, when they fall behind, to gloat that "there's one less fool for the race to be ashamed of...

...when we first see him, he's pinioning a buxom lass beneath a banquet table...

...Tom Hulce, who plays Mozart in Amadeus, is cast to shock...

...The events are worth tears, to be sure, but they deserve more...

...Voca me," he gasps, urging Salieri, whom he trusts, to write in some soft soprano voices to counterpoint the harsh percussion and trumpet notes of the "confutatis maledictis" phrase...

...White antagonism to blacks is everywhere evident...

...At first the flashbacks work to heighten the mystery and suspense, and keep the relationships clear...

...they are also obviously predictable...

...The Sergeant's tale is so absorbing that we are bound to lose some interest in the captain, but this is worsened when the screenplay leaves little for Rollins to do but discover the murderer, then go home...

...He had faced the deep conflicts he had been struggling with for an extended period, and he had worked them through...

...The contemplative life encounters each of us at the point where we are most fully ourselves, but also uncertain of who we really are...

...Rooney a comic caricature in Act I kill him in Act II...

...Far less successful are other supporting members of the cast: principally a shrill Elizabeth Berridge as Mozart's wife Constanze...

...At one moment, for example, the latter picks up one of Mozart's unblotted sheets, the tune flourishes, and Salieri begins to cry...

...The movie combines the talents of HowardRollins, Jr., who stole the show in a supporting role in Ragtime, and the Negro Ensemble Company, which manned Fuller's stage presentation...

...He fixes on the somber, dedicated An- tonio Salieri, court composer for the Hapsburgs, as a medioc- rity who'becomes so consumed by jealousy that he contrives to destroy what he calls "the creature...

...Waters's main purpose in life, we discover in flashback, is not military but racial...

...They make full opportunity...

...Although we hear much of this music set against exquisite Prague backgrounds, or watch its perform- ance in the very Tyl theater where Mozart first conducted Don Giovanni, we experience it most powerfully when it is set in the minds of Mozart and his rival Saiieri...

...It's always a challenge...

...In the play --which I did not see --Salieri apparently dominated...

...an invention to express a powerful theme is one thing, a contrivance to express a banal- ity another...

...It was powerful, far more expressive of spiritual truth than Salieri's complaints about God's fairness...

...Appropriately, perhaps, Hulce's last movie was Animal House...

...I think that was why it stayed alive for Merton...

...The play is sprinkled with witty lines--verbal exercises in aggression, self-deprecation, incongruity--and with Commonweal: 558...

...he has a callow, almost vacuous face and a nervous high-pitched giggle...

...Later Mozart is seen composing the somber opening bars of the Requiem, so absorbed that he cannot hear loud knocking on the door...

...The flashbacks, moreover, tend to bury Davenport as a focus of attention...

...Salieri rails at God's injustice...

...Waters, in short, is no Uncle Tom but a harsh disciple of Darwin, claiming that the only way for blacks to rival whites is to exterminate any vestige of a "lazy, shiftless" past...

...their white commanding officers, suspecting something similar, want Davenport to gohome...

...As the emperor, Jones provides some unexpected comic relief by his awkward geniality, his love of music but atrocious playing, and his affectionate references to "my sister Antoinette" offin France...

...Salieri, of course, might have been jealous of Mozart, but there is no evidence that he plotted against him...

...he observes Mozart's obscenities and wonders how "the creature" can write "as though taking down dictation" from on high...

...Salieri himself has observed all the proprieties but composes mere drivel...

...But on the other hand, death came at a good time for him...

...From the first, director Milos Forman, aided by conductor Neville Mar- riner, coordinates his images with Mozart's lesser known serenades, then piano concertos, and finally the operas that so revolutionized wooden heroic traditions ("Who would you rather hear," Mozart asks Emperor Joseph II, "your hairdres- ser or Hercules...