Milos Forman (1981)

E L Doctorow’s Ragtime attracted a great deal of attention, as a novel historical novel, on its publication in 1975.  Set in New York in the early years of the twentieth century, the book’s dramatis personae include fictional characters, relatively minor actual celebrities of the era who play a sizeable part in the story, and major real-life figures, most of whom make cameo appearances.  The two main invented characters are Coalhouse Walker, an African-American piano player, whom outrageous racism drives to terrorism, and an East European immigrant, Tateh, who becomes a pioneer of film animation.  The second group is headed by the socialite Evelyn Nesbit; the architect Stanford White; Nesbit’s crazily jealous husband Harry Kendall Thaw, who murders White; and the New York Fire Commissioner, Rhinelander Waldo.  The third category boasts, among others, Sigmund Freud, Carl Jung, Harry Houdini, Henry Ford, J P Morgan, Archduke Franz Ferdinand, Booker T Washington and Emma Goldman.  The definitions of major and minor here are entirely personal:  ‘minor’ means I’d not only never heard of the people in question when I first came to Ragtime in the late 1970s but also forgotten them again when I saw Milos Forman’s film for the first time yesterday.  I remember the book as an example of something I didn’t enjoy much but blamed myself for not enjoying because it was supposed to be brilliant.   I’d also remembered that the film flopped and was surprised to see its box-office receipts (around $11m), award nominations (including for eight Oscars, though it won none) and ‘Rotten Tomatoes’ fresh rating (90%, albeit from only ten reviews now).  If Ragtime wasn’t rated a dud, I think it should have been.

On the surface, the fast-moving, multi-faceted novel might seem ideally suited to adaptation from the printed page to the cinema screen.  E L Doctorow’s mix of people in the story is a comment on how various media and pop culture had, by the 1970s, combined to shape – or jumble – the cultural memory of those who’d imbibed them.  I assume that Doctorow chose to set the novel in a time and place that would illustrate the development of popular music and film in particular, and the contribution of particular immigrant groups in America to these art forms.  The movie opens with genuine newsreel footage which then segues into mock newsreel footage and Forman repeats this device a couple of times subsequently.  Some of the real-life famous names appear in the genuine newsreel but only Booker T Washington has a significant role in the action that follows (with Houdini supplying a last-minute cameo).  Forman virtually replaces the A-listers element of the original material by casting some familiar movie faces of bygone days:  Donald O’Connor, Pat O’Brien and – most notably, after an absence from the screen of twenty years – James Cagney, as Waldo.  A more broadly-based big beast of American culture, in the shape of Norman Mailer, is Stanford White.

The first hour of Ragtime is so inert and unfocused that it’s hard to tell whether what you’re seeing is what Forman and the screenwriter Michael Weller had in mind or the consequence of a desperate attempt to patch together a narrative from a surfeit of footage.  In any case, the result is in no way a kaleidoscope of American life before the country’s entry into World War I (and/or of what that era had become in popular imagination by the 1970s).  The film is merely rhythmless and nearly incoherent.  Those who’ve read the book will wait in vain to see, for example, Freud and Jung riding the tunnel of love at Coney Island – or the minor celebrities or invented characters woven into any kind of larger fabric.  There’s a mercifully brief frenetic sequence set in Tateh’s neighbourhood with lots of effortful ethnic overexcitement in evidence.  Evelyn Nesbit features in this bit and the action otherwise concentrates either on the scandal and legal wranglings surrounding her and the killing of Stanford White at Madison Square Garden or on a well-off white family in New Rochelle in whose grounds a newborn black baby is abandoned.   None of these people is enough to sustain the viewer’s interest and the connections between the several narrative strands are tenuous.

The father of the baby in the New Rochelle garden is Coalhouse Walker and its mother, Sarah, works as a housekeeper for the unnamed family:  they are ‘Father’, ‘Mother’ and ‘Younger Brother’.  The family, especially Mother and Younger Brother, take a shine to Coalhouse, who now makes a good living through his piano playing.  He’s set to marry Sarah when the film’s pivotal event occurs.   On his way to New Rochelle in his brand new Model T, Coalhouse is prevented by a crew of firemen from passing by a firehouse.  He goes to report this to a policeman and, when he returns, finds that someone has defecated in the car.  The policeman advises Coalhouse just to drive on, clean the car seats up and forget about it but he refuses and is placed under arrest.  Father pays to get him out of jail but Coalhouse can’t accept the insult and injustice he’s suffered.  He tries to sue but can find no lawyer to represent him.  He recruits a group of other African-Americans (how isn’t clear) and they start fire-bombing fire stations.  (Unbeknown to the rest of his family, Younger Brother joins them and makes their bombs.)  Once Coalhouse’s story becomes the centre of dramatic attention, Ragtime gets a focus it didn’t have before and doesn’t lose subsequently – but, as a result, the film becomes not much more than a protracted (the total running time is 155 minutes) racial crime drama.  The occasional returns to other elements of the story, from this point on, feel wholly perfunctory.

Howard Rollins Jr is charismatic and sometimes affecting as Coalhouse.  Elizabeth McGovern is fresh and amusing as Evelyn more often than Milos Forman deserves.  The fine cast also includes Mandy Patinkin (Tateh), James Olson (conscientious in the thankless role of Father), a young Jeff Daniels (the policeman) and Richard Griffiths (some kind of shady lawyer).  Kenneth McMillan as the racist fireman Conklin is so vividly convincing – more than almost anyone else on screen – that you end up wanting more of the vile character he’s playing.  This was James Cagney’s final film role and his playing of Commissioner Waldo is economical and relaxed:  Cagney is well aware of the strength of his screen presence and of how little he needs to do to hold the camera.  By contrast, Mary Steenburgen (Mother) and Brad Dourif (Younger Brother) are ill at ease.  When Mother – who, as Steenburgen plays her, appears weak to the point of neurasthenia – finally leaves her husband and drives off with the now affluent Tateh, Forman and Weller seem suddenly to have lurched back into the synthetic, interconnected aspect of the novel that you thought they’d long since abandoned.  The film hasn’t aged well visually – or not in the print shown by BFI at any rate.  Forman may have wanted a sepia tint in some of the images to link them with the newsreel sequences but I’m sure the DoP Miroslav Ondricek didn’t come up with the pervasive pinky brown of this print.

8 June 2014