TV REVIEW : An Affectionate Profile of Milos Forman

The hourlong profile of Czech-born director Milos Forman that is part of the PBS “American Masters” series (KCET Channel 28 tonight at 8) is urbane and affectionate. It contains clips from his droll Czech films and his major American ones: “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest,” “Amadeus,” “Hair,” “Ragtime” and “Valmont”--the latter while it was still being shot.

Unsurprisingly, you do not hear a discouraging word from any of Forman’s stars or from such associates as his cinematographer, his longtime screenwriter or his agent, something of a legend himself. If the program also works as a behind-the-scenes promotional trailer for “Valmont,” well, it’s an intriguing project to eavesdrop upon.

The only drawback to such a generous viewpoint is that it doesn’t probe very deeply--if at all. There might have been a chance of that, since the film maker is Forman’s own mentor at the Czech film school in the 1950s, Vojtech Jasny, but if there was any notion of revealing the drive that kept Forman going during his lean early years in the United States, it’s long since abandoned.

Born in 1932, Forman tells a haunting story about his last view of his teacher-father who, like his mother, perished at the hands of the Nazis in World War II. The 8-year-old Milos was called out of class one day because his father had--unexpectedly--come to see him. Putting his hand on his son’s head and giving him a message to tell his mother that he loved her, his father left, flanked by the two men in long brown leather coats who had accompanied him. The boy cheerfully ran home to pass on the loving message, oblivious of the meaning of the scene. A year later, his mother too was seized.

As Forman elaborates on the influences that formed his early droll Czech successes “Loves of a Blonde” and “Fireman’s Ball,” the film provides clips from those treasures. Later, when Forman explains that his first American film, “Taking Off” was a flop, carrying as it did the young director’s hopes of big American success, you hope for some critical balance, someone knowledgeable recruited to point out that it was only a flop financially , but that it was well-loved critically and almost a cult film now. In fact, some of its stylistic innovations are used to this day: “Taking Off’s” delicious audition sequence was duplicated in no less recent a success than “The Fabulous Baker Boys.” But the mainstream--box-office--view is the only one given any weight.

In written articles about those early days, Forman himself has detailed his awful period after “Taking Off,” but you won’t learn about them here. He seems to float from success to success with the ease of Danielle Steele moving from tome to tome. Even the piquant sentence by his agent, Robbie Lanz, underlining the fact that Forman had completely assimilated himself into the United States, in the process jettisoning a nationality, a language and a family, goes uninvestigated. That could hardly have been a move without consequence, psychic or otherwise, but we get only a wealth of anecdote to bury the pain--if indeed there was any.

The most penetrating view of Forman at work, even rivaling the one of his distinguished co-screenwriter, Jean-Claude Carriere, comes from character actor Vincent Schiavelli, part of the Forman repertory family since his role as the dope-smoking instructor in “Taking Off.” Having worked repeatedly with Forman, Schiavelli observes that his talent with actors is that the director “puts himself at the center of conflict of a scene.” Therefore, in “Valmont,” he is restrained, gentle and elegant. But in “Cuckoo’s Nest,” his comments were pointed, unsettling, couched in language that matched the film’s; he would begin a criticism with “You’re crazy!” “He really put everything off-center and put everyone ill-at-ease; he became Big Nurse at the hospital.”

Wreathed in cigar smoke in his handsome library, in anecdote after anecdote that he is happy to tell on himself, Forman emerges as a deceptively open man, cultured and wide-ranging. Since these glimpses of his working life are so tantalizing, it’s no wonder we want to do more than scratch the uncomplicated surface this film provides of an obviously complicated personality.