Ragtime

I end my retrospective on Milos Forman with my favorite of his films, 1981's Ragtime, based on one of my favorite novels, by E.L. Doctorow. When I saw the film for the first time, I was somewhat anxious, as anytime a movie is made out of one your favorite books or plays you tend to expect the worst. I think Forman and screenwriter Michael Weller did fantastic work. Although a great deal of credit goes to Randy Newman, whose score is so evocative and haunting that I bought the soundtrack album.

The novel is a sprawling look at America in the first decade of the twentieth century. The film streamlines that into basically two stories: that of Coalhouse Walker Jr., a black piano player who comes up against prejudice, and the saga of a typical upper-middle-class family, whose lives are turned upside down when they and Walker intersect.

As a side plot, there is the sensation of rich kid Harry Thaw's shooting of architect Stanford White, over Thaw's wife, ex-chorine Evelyn Nesbit, who was once White's teenage mistress. There are real characters mixed in with the fictional--Harry Houdini, Rhinelander Waldo (who was actually a fire commissioner, not a police commissioner), and Booker T. Washington. Emma Goldman was left on the cutting room floor.

I've seen this film several times and it never ages for me, as we're still talking about some of the same issues. Walker (Howard E. Rollins), is rich for a black man, with his own Model T. He has fathered a child with a young woman (Debbie Allen) who is taken in by our model family. His car is vandalized by some firemen (led by the slovenly Willie Conklin, played by Kenneth McMillan), and Walker wants justice. Everyone, from the cop on the beat to a black lawyer, tells him to forget it about, but his rage builds until he and some comrades commit terrorist acts.

In New Rochelle, a leafy white suburb, the unnamed family is always sitting down to Sunday dinner when something interrupts them. The father (James Olson), is representative of old guard America, who doesn't like change and is a model of decorum. But he is really controlled by his wife (Mary Steenburgen, brilliant) who cares not for appearances but for doing the right thing. She's sort of a stand-in for not only emerging feminism (I picture her character some years later as a suffragette) but as the progressive American, typified by Theodore Roosevelt, the president at the time.

Mother's Younger Brother (Brad Dourif) is a fireworks designer who links all threads together. He becomes obsessed with Nesbit (Elizabeth McGovern, who unfortunately plays her as a ninny) and follows her around. Eventually he confronts her and becomes involved with her. In a memorable scene made for Mr. Skin, Nesbit signs her divorce papers from Thaw while wearing nothing but a pair of stockings. "All right, who's got a pen?" she asks. Dourif will empathize with Walker and offer him his bomb-making expertise.

Another character is a Jewish artist (Mandy Pantinkin), who throws his wife out after he finds her cheating, and then successfully sells his flip-books. At the end we see he is a filmmaker, with Nesbit as his leading lady. This is surely a reference to the Jewish immigrants who would travel west and turn an orange grove into Hollywood.

The climax of the film is when Walker and his men seize the J.P. Morgan Library (a real place, and to all appearances, they used the actual exterior). Walker wants his car restored, and McMillan brought to his justice. Waldo, played by James Cagney with some of the sparkle and feistiness that made him famous) tries to negotiate with Walker, who finally does come out. But I won't spoil things.

The cast was full of firsts and lasts. It was Cagney's last film, after a long retirement, as well as for Pat O'Brian, as Thaw's lawyer. It's somewhat poignant that these two men, who made so many movies together in the '30 and '40s, should both end their careers in Ragtime. Unfortunately, they don't have a scene together. I also noticed this time that Bessy Love, who was a star back in the '20s, has a small role. Google her--she was some hot number back in the day.

Among actors making early appearances in small roles were Samuel L. Jackson, Jeff Daniels, John Ratzenberger, and Fran Drescher. Forman also keeps up his tradition of using nonactors in certain roles, as White is played by author Norman Mailer. Rollins and McGovern were nominated for Oscars.

Seeing so many Forman films over a short period of time I'm wondering how they are all connected. In the commentary, he mentions that he got the film after a deal with Robert Altman fell through (what a film that would have been). He loved the book. I think he knew that the heart of this film was Coalhouse Walker, who is a man living in the wrong time. He's an outsider who can't adjust to his surroundings, as many of Forman's characters are: Randle McMurphy, Claude Bukowski, Mozart, Larry Flynt, and Andy Kaufman. Each of these men, some real, some not, live on the edges, or discover that there is a different world around them. We don't know anything about Walker except he's "impressive and articulate," as Olson describes him, and plays ragtime. He's also too proud. We empathize with him, at least I hope we do, even as we realize that a car was at the center of this. But it's more than just the car to Walker--it's being humiliated, and being made to feel less than a man.