Miloš Forman celebrated the non-conformist, lionising the likes of Randle McMurphy, Larry Flynt, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, and others who just couldn’t be bothered to give a damn about convention. But what made the director’s films great was that he also showed the toll that kind of iconoclasm takes on revolutionaries.
It was something that he knew firsthand. Forman, who died on April 14 at the age of 86, spent his formative years in Communist-dominated Czechoslovakia. He made a name for himself with 1967’s The Fireman’s Ball, a satire of small-town grift that also, by proxy, lampooned the corruption of the East European Communist system.