SnoopyStyle Millionaire Harry Kendall Thaw (Robert Joy) is enraged when architect Stanford White put a naked statue, modeled from his chorus girl wife Evelyn Nesbit (Elizabeth McGovern), on top of Madison Square Garden. He shoots White in a packed nightclub. He offers a $1 million divorce if Evelyn testifies for him. He is found not guilty by reason of insanity. She had been having an affair with Younger Brother (Brad Dourif) and Harry threatens to sue her for a small settlement. Younger Brother's family lives in comfortable upper class. Sarah (Debbie Allen) abandons her baby in their yard. Mother (Mary Steenburgen) takes them both in. Brash ragtime pianist Coalhouse Walker Jr. claims to be the father. He gets into an ongoing battle with the firemen and cops. Tateh (Mandy Patinkin) leaves his cheating wife and the tenements in New York. He takes his daughter and becomes a director.This is just too epic. Director Miloš Forman expertly films it. It is beautiful looking and jam packed with story. It is packed with too many characters and too many stories. There are maybe two or three full movies and this connects them with thin little threads. The flow is disrupted again and again. Some of characters are not compelling enough and their stories drag. It may be better to divide this epic into solid stand-alone sections.

ElMaruecan82 The 1900's, what the Europeans used to call 'La Belle Epoque', set in the last years of the Industrial revolution, after the invention of the light bulb, the car and cinema and right before the infamous World War I put the world's foot on the twentieth century, and it's not a surprise that the film ends precisely when the war starts, and that many people forgot about this era.The war changed the face of the world so much that we hardly remember the agonizing years of this 'Old Time', and many people would probably think that the film is set during the much more famous 'Prohibition'. "Ragtime" is set in the dawn of the modern world where the most representative elements of the modern world were still experimental, cars, cinema, benign distractions, immigration, America itself was still a distorted structure where everything was still to be constructed. Milos Forman's "Ragtime" is about the spirit of a period, it doesn't feature a lead character, because it's all about a time, a forgotten time, not modern enough to be cinematically appealing, like the war or the prohibition, but not old enough to look exotic as exotic as a Western. Forman handles this period with the perfect nostalgic feeling, never trying to embellish this period whose atmosphere can be painted in a sepia tone. At the end, there's something extremely charming in the gallery of supporting actors who incarnate the excitement of a nation sweeping off all the dust of the Old System and preparing its entrance into the New World. "Ragtime" is about a transition.And to a certain extent, "Ragtime" the film embodies this transitional aspect, lost between much more acclaimed movies from the same director, including two Best Picture winners : "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest" and "Amadeus", two masterpieces that inevitably dwarfs "Ragtime" which, despite its undeniable quality, is not Forman's best. The film is also lost between many nostalgic period films of the 80's, "Once Upon a Time in America" and "Radio Days", far more entertaining material. And I guess Ragtime" is less remembered because on the surface, it has the humble quality of a Sunday TV movie, just as if it didn't take its epic setting into consideration. It starts with a recreation of the famous murder of Stanford White by Thaw, the husband of the young model and actress Evelyn Nesbit, Elizabeth McGovern in her Oscar-nominated role, which leads to the trial of the century. The rest plays like an intricate puzzle where each piece finally assembles at the end, it involves a young Jewish emigrant who becomes a film-maker, an abandoned African-American baby adopted by an upper-class family, and the journey of the baby's father, Coalhouse Walker Jr., played in the film's greatest performance by the late Harold E. Collins Jr. As soon as he makes his entrance, we finally get the answer to the question we all asked during the first hour: where is "Ragtime" leading to? Indeed, as much as the film manages to be enjoyable, I think Milos Forman took his subject with a little bit of overconfidence and mixed up patience with needless length, at the point I want to add a "D" in the beginning of the title. So many long sequences become unnecessary after you've finished the film, and the heart of the story, Walker's desperate attempt to avenge his dignity alone could have made "Ragtime" a classic social commentary, if only for the extraordinary confrontation with the Police Commissioner Rhinelander Waldo, James Cagney in one of his latest roles. I understand that Coalhouse's story was only one of the many tales, Forman wanted to tell us in a sort of ingenuously constructed narrative but this part grab our hearts so much, accelerate the rhythm of the film with such a powerful efficiency that I'm sure, "Ragtime" would have been more remembered if it didn't try to be just a homage. There's no bad scene and each actor shines at one moment or another, but it's Collins' film, and something that Forman handled with perfection, he who knows so much how to portray irreverent characters, Mozart, McMurphy, Kaufman, Flynt etc.There is something extraordinary in Walker's character, a man full of life and energy, loving his son, dedicated to his passion for piano. In a film full of so dull or self-absorbed characters, we know he's the guiding light, the soul, literally the "Ragtime" player. And the film takes a beautiful turn when he's victim of an injustice by a group of volunteer firemen, who harass him before inflicting the ultimate provocation by putting manure in the front seat of his Ford T. Walker tries every legal action to obtain reparation, with no use. Even the other African-Americans refuse to help him. In these times where even the most sincere idealism had its limits, those were "The Birth of the Nation" years. And as we expect it, the man inevitably goes from legality to violence, and it's hard not to feel empathy for his idealism, in a heart-breaking scene, he addresses God asking him why he filled his heart with so much rage and passion. Coalhouse represents the emotional core of the fight for freedom and we know that the country would be built thank to the struggles of the likes of Coalhouse, a mix of violence, rage and passion for noblest purposes.In this journey, many characters find the purpose of their lives, a young man joins Coalhouse's gang, a dedicated mother becomes infatuated with the filmmaker, the film is all about people finding their place in a new uncertain world. The last shot of Houdini suspended in the air while people learn about the war, is an illustration of this end of a dream, where people will wake up to the harsh reality … and some dream about brighter and more tolerant future.Everything was yet to be built in that time, in "Ragtime".

sissoed I saw Ragtime back in the early 80s and it made a powerful impression. But seeing it again some 25 years later reveals a few weaknesses. The sequences with Elizabeth McGovern as Evelyn Nesbit are as effective as ever, but other sequences don't hold up as well. For example, Coalhouse Walker is introduced as a poor movie-theater pianist who gets a job as a member of a band, which gives him enough income to marry the woman whom he got pregnant. Yet in short order, he has a fancy car, and then after his humiliation by the bigoted Irish firemen, suddenly he has a gang of violent henchmen, and then he has an expensive supply of rifles, pistols, and dynamite. His gang and his armaments just appear; in reality there is no way a mere band piano player, however talented, would have these. And the scenario for his wife's fatal injury -- yelling in the midst of a presidential campaign crowd to get the vice-President's attention -- isn't convincing; police officers wouldn't fatally beat a slightly- built, well-dressed African-American woman just because she was shouting in the midst of a noisy crowd gathered around a campaigning politician. The film could easily have found a more plausible scenario in which police would over-react and hurt her fatally. Thus, the provocation that leads Coalhouse to conduct his reign of terror -- horse manure on his car, followed by official indifference, followed by his wife being fatally injured by police -- isn't the kind of action that would motivate a gang to unite around him. It is not all that hard to imagine a more convincing set-up for Coalhouse's rampage, so it is puzzling why the film seems to go out of its way to develop an implausible set-up. The extraordinary performance by Rollins in the role does a lot to correct this implausibility, but it is tantalizing to think of just how powerful a performance it could have been had the story been stronger. One strength of the film is that all of the characters are morally complex. Tateh, the immigrant who becomes a movie director, is outraged when he catches his wife cheating on him, but later, he is quite willing to romance a woman whom he knows is married and tempt her to leave her husband. The 'father' character is priggish and formal, yet shows himself the most truly courageous and idealistic person in the film.The 'mother' character is presented as the most moral person, caring for the abandoned baby and his mother despite their being African-American (a big issue for most whites in 1906) -- positions which her husband always supports, although after initial hesitation -- yet she leaves him without a qualm to go off with the movie director. One minor factual tid-bit for those who are interested: in the film, Evelyn Nesbit's husband Thaw is outraged because it is thought that a nude statue of the Greek goddess Diana the hunter ("Diana of the Tower") that adorns the top of Madison Square Garden is Evelyn's body as the model; Thaw finds it humiliating that all of New York can gawk at his wife's nakedness. While this works very well as drama, sadly, factually is it wrong. Nesbit was born in 1884 and never came to New York until 1901. The first version of the statue (18 feet high) went up on the top of the tower in 1891, but was too large; a second version, more lithe and fleet (13 feet high), went up in 1893. Evelyn was 7 when the first version went up, 9 when the second, and when she arrived in New York the second version had already been up for 8 years. The model for the body was Julia 'Dudie" Baird, a well-known artist model born in 1872 -- 12 years older than Nesbit. The model for the face was a different woman, Davida, also active in New York modeling circles, who was the sculptor's mistress.

Robert J. Maxwell Very neat production that captures the essence of New York City and its upper-middle-class suburbs in the early years of the 20th century.The performances are uniformly good. On the first viewing, Jimmy Cagney disappoints. We are, after all, used to seeing him as a bouncing semi-psychotic, even in his last film, "One, Two, Three." Here, in his age, he hardly movies, content to wave a finger or slowly swivel in his desk chair or nod his head. A second viewing gets you past that kind of sadness. He's still Jimmy Cagney, with that ironic/comic voice and that mustache like a pair of russet turned-up handlebars.The rest of the cast can't be faulted either. Howard Rollins, Jr., as the degraded black victim exemplifies a certain kind of pent-up dignity and pride. Rollins' pride, like Coriolanus', can be a weakness when it becomes unyielding. It can lead to escalation and become lethal. Whether or not he should have swallowed the insults and jokes is arguable in this case but I think if I'd been in his position I'd have swept the turds off the car seat and driven away leaving behind a thick cloud of curses against the Irish. His character may be misguided but Rollins isn't. He handles it extremely well, and it's a demanding part.James Olsen is stiff, formal, and courageous. Elizabeth McGovern is very amusing as Evelyn Nesbitt, a pixillated airhead who reads numbers better when they're preceded by dollar signs. But then everyone is quite good.I haven't read Doctorow's novel but I gather that it was necessarily compressed and that several sub-stories were left out. I can understand why. As it is, some of the threads seem to dribble away. Did Tatah become a famous director? Did Nesbitt become a star? Why did Olsen's wife, Mary Steenbergen, run off with Mandy Potamkin? What happened to Rollins' baby? Well, we can't expect too much. In order to do justice to ANY of the stories, the film has to resemble a brief encyclopedia entry on a subject like, say, the French Revolution. Robespierre walks on stage, bows, and leaves.The ending is a sad one. We've grown to like and admire Colehouse Walker, Rollins' character. And the escape of his accomplices, which we probably applaud, foreshadow the urban unrest and racial conflicts which were let loose on us in the 1960s. Of course it's a plausible argument that if the system had worked perfectly in 1910, we might not have had the 1960s.The score by Randy Newman is first rate. He plays a good piano.Well worth seeing.