[In the following review of Turnaround, Hislop underscores the recurring theme of betrayal in Forman's life and body of work.]

Off-screen at least, betrayal in Hollywood has all the sinfulness of a quick costume change—it's just business. “Turnaround” is a Hollywood term for a shift in loyalty, when a project is transferred from one studio to another, but, for Milos Forman, betrayal is no casual business. Its moral consequences and historical nuances permeate this subtle, witty autobiography, written with the Czech novelist Jan Novak, as it does his films. Forman, now a patriotic American, has directed two of the most Oscar-blessed films in Hollywood's history—One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (betrayal of human spirit and trust in a mental institution) and Amadeus (Salieri's betrayal of Mozart). The emotional and literary force of Turnaround, however, is not in its later amusing American film anecdotes but in Forman's Czechoslovakian recollections, as a child under Nazi occupation, then as a struggling filmmaker under Communist rule. There, Forman experienced betrayal to trump the melodrama of any on-screen Hollywood treachery.

Both of Forman's parents died in concentration camps after being betrayed by a member of the Gestapo who, before the war, was a night-watchman at their family hotel. His father died without betraying his comrades in the Resistance. Years later, a former Auschwitz prisoner wrote to Forman that his mother's dying wish was for him to know that his real father was a Jewish architect who had also worked on the hotel. (Forman tracked down the man to Ecuador and received a postcard, sending “regards.”)

Forman prints in full the letter to a newspaper of a casual school friend, the son of a purged Communist official: “Dear Comrade, I ask for the highest penalty for my father—the penalty of death. …” He tells the story of a Czech factory girl who acted in his Czech film, Loves of a Blonde (a poignant, spare study of love's betrayals). Betrayed by her lover on the shoot, she became a prostitute but went to gaol and tried to commit suicide rather than inform on her clients.

Western help for Forman's Czech film career only added to his experience of betrayal. Carlo Ponti assured Forman, who risked imprisonment for “economic damages to the state,” that he would not withdraw his investment from the delightfully comic Firemen's Ball (betrayal of society by its self-appointed guardians), but did so. (Claude Berri and François Truffaut organized a rescue fund to buy the film.)

There is also a sense of betrayal in Forman's account of how the first cameraman on Cuckoo's Nest criticized him behind his back; how Dino De Laurentiis made him cut twenty minutes from his film of E. L. Doctorow's Ragtime (betrayal of moral principles to right injustice); even in how Christopher Hampton failed to meet him to discuss filming Les Liaisons Dangereuses, thus leading to two films of this study of betrayal par excellence. Forman's version, Valmont, was a commercial flop.

The tone of Turnaround, however, is not crudely moralizing but teasingly ironic. Absurdity and horror, laughter and betrayal, were linked in the land of Kafka and Schweik even before Communism bound them together. As Forman says, their history has forced the Czechs to have “an ironic nothing-is-sacred sense of self-preservational humour”; a Czech, unlike Coalhouse Walker Jr in Ragtime, would have jokingly cleared up the mess left in his car, rather than demand satisfaction. When a professor at the Prague Film Academy was forced to organize a condemnation of Forman's intellectual decadence, he held it in a luxurious restaurant. And during the shooting of Amadeus in Prague, Forman's driver cheerfully admitted that he was a police informer.

In his prologue, Forman describes how his elation on the night he won an Oscar for Amadeus was followed by a depression which made him think of the Czech joke about the adulterer hiding in a closet full of perfumes so sweet-smelling that, on release, he called for excrement. Forman does not offer a sweet-smelling view of life, but splatters himself with some of the dirt.

Forman confesses that the loss of his hen-eating dog was the most traumatic moment of his trauma-filled childhood. He berates himself for not protecting a school-mate from bullies, even for cheating at chess, though he insists that he never betrayed Vaclav Havel for being “immoral with himself” at school: “Not only have I never informed on anybody in my life, I was being immoral with myself too.” He was thrown out of school for pissing in a shower on the son of a central committee member—the son did not notice but a master did. Forman lost his virginity to an instructor in “socialist modelling” who conveniently failed to tell a pupil with Moravian eyes about a rendezvous with Forman. Later, Forman made amends, but the girl became pregnant, had an abortion and never wanted to see him again.

Mental breakdown only added to Forman's sense of ironic absurdity when he encountered an asylum inmate who thought he was married to Forman's (first) wife, the actress Jana Brejchova. When he had another breakdown in the States, his old school-friend, the director, Ivan Passer, “cured” him by going to a shrink pretending to be Forman.

Though there are other colourful descriptions of Forman's early career in America, the emotional grip of the narrative slackens and the sense of the man fades as the detailed loves, infidelities and passions of his Czech youth give way to the odd mention of a girlfriend among the anecdotes. There is a picture of a stunning blonde leaning on Forman's shoulder with the caption “Many a tough task rests on a director's shoulders.”

Perhaps this results from Forman's putting a Hollywood career before his family. His second wife, Vera, went back with their twin sons to her career in Czechoslovakia in 1968 after escaping with Claude Berri in Truffaut's car. Forman admits that vanity as well as politics prevented his own return.

But while Forman found success in America, it was at the expense of his Czech production methods, which, born of his dislike of the theatrical and operatic, used improvisation and mixed non-actors with actors to re-create the pain and casual absurdities of everyday life. After his first American and “last Czech film,” the underrated and under-shown Taking Off (a comedy about family betrayal), his work in America has become increasingly historical and theatrical—at times operatic. Even Hair (betrayal of country out of moral and cultural conviction), oddly a favourite of Forman's, and Cuckoo's Nest were set in the past.

After the failure of Valmont, Forman tried to return to his earlier cinematic ways. His last project, set in Japan, collapsed just before shooting was due to begin because the Sumo Association thought that it betrayed the dignity of sumo—an unfortunate irony, but one which should not prevent Forman from rediscovering, like Robert Altman, critical and commercial success by first returning to a less lavish way of making films.