A rambling yet engaging story.Set in the early 20th century the movie initially follows the lives of several characters, from different walks of life. Their stories are not independent - their lives do intersect, sometimes fleetingly, sometimes indirectly, sometimes more permanently.This creates a rambling, unfocused, feel to the movie, especially in the first half to 2/3rds of it. After a while it mostly settles down and tends to focus on one main character, but in the early stages it is difficult to get into the movie, due to the disjointed nature of it.Ultimately it is quite engaging, as you start to support certain characters and the plot takes shape.Solid performances all round. ELizabeth McGovern and Howard E Rollins received Best Supporting Actress and Best Supporting Actor, respectively, Oscar nominations for their performances.James Cagney, 82 years old at the time, gives a great, gravitas- filled, performance as the Police Chief. This was to be his last cinematic role, though he did make one more movie, a TV movie, before his death in 1986.Also interesting to see many now well-known stars in early-career minor roles: Jeff Daniels, Samuel L Jackson, Fran Drescher, John Ratzenberger.

E.L. Doctorow's sprawling novel set in New York of 1910 was adapted rather loosely by Milos Forman to tell a story of race and justice in America. The main plot lines, that of a black man (Howard E. Rollins Jr.) seeking justice for the vandalism done to his car, and the sensational trial of Harry K. Thaw for the murder of famed architect Stanford White seem unrelated at first. As the picture winds on, however, the point of the parallel stories becomes more obvious: in the white rich man's world of the day, Thaw's money and family connections could manipulate the justice system to give him the results he desired, even free him from responsibility for his crime, while Rollins' character could have no such expectations, however justified his outrage. A further subplot involving the rise of immigrant artist Mandy Patinkin is woven into he fabric of the narrative, giving the film at least some of the sprawling flavor of the book, although other plot lines had to be cut for brevity's sake. Forman had many of his usual collaborators, such as art director Patrizia Von Brandenstein (Amadeus) and choreographer Twyla Tharp (Hair), assisting him in the elaborate task of minutely re-creating period details of interior decoration, dance, and stage entertainment that give the film its wonderful period color. A superb ensemble cast which also included James Cagney, Mary Steenbergen, James Olsen and Brad Dourif works hard to portray the manners and mores of the day, not to mention the racial and class attitudes, which made up so much of the fabric of the novel. All in all, it is a very good and watchable film on its own, although fans of the book might balk at some of the changes made in its adaptation. Features a then-controversial nude scene involving Elizabeth McGovern, in a terrific debut performance as Thaw's wife, showgirl Evelyn Nesbitt.

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.

When RAGTIME was published in 1980 it was a big best seller, establishing E. L. Doctorow as a leading popular novelist, and also showing the way to Mr. Doctorow to future literary work set in other periods of American history. It was optioned for the movies, and became a hit of the 1981 film season. Guaranteeing it's success was the announcement that after nearly two decades (except for some minor television appearance dealing with conservation) James Cagney was going to reappear in the film, in an important supporting part: the somewhat corrupt New York City Police Commissioner Rhinelander Waldo.Actually RAGTIME had several "old time" faces in it. Cagney's pal, and frequent co-star, Pat O'Brien played Harry Thaw's lawyer Delphin Delmas. And in a smaller part, Donald O'Connor appeared as a singer and dance teacher who was part of the cast of "Mademoiselle Champaign", the musical that was being shown at the Madison Square Garden on June 18, 1906 (the night architect Stanford White was shot and killed by millionaire Harry K. Thaw). Interestingly enough, when I first saw RAGTIME, it was at a theater that stood on Northern Blvd., in Queens. There were two theaters, one showing RAGTIME and one showing GHOST STORY, a film that starred Fred Astaire (his last film), John Houseman, Melvin Douglas, and Douglas Fairbanks Jr. The affect of seeing all these old time actors on the marquee of the theater was to make me look at the cars on the road to make sure they did not all have rumble seats and running boards.The story was cut in the final movie that was shown. Emma Goldman and Harry Houdini, among other real characters, were in the shot film, but their sections were cut (in some DVDs theses sections are sometimes shown as extras). Houdini's role was rather important, for in the plot he was supposed to demonstrate an escape trick to the Younger Brother (Brad Dourif) that he was going to use later on to aid Coalhouse Walker's gang (Howard Rollins). Emma was supposed to represent the rise of labor as a force against the powers of the rich. She also was to undercut the blare of the Hearst Press regarding the White Murder Case, which was called the "Crime of the Century". "How can it be the crime of the century," Emma asks with amazement, when the century is only six years old?" J.P.Morgan and Henry Ford also appear, forming a club for themselves only as America's two richest men, and going to Egypt on an archaeological trek. Morgan's mansion and library (still there on East 32nd Street and Madison Avenue) and Ford's Model T play important roles in the story too.Doctorow's novel was to show the growing pains of what is modern America, with the rise of American power under Teddy Roosevelt, the rise of immigrants and their contributions (Goldman, Tateh the future movie pioneer: Mandy Pantikin), the rise of African-American self-respect and struggle for equality (Coalhouse/Rollins; his wife Sarah/Debbie Allens), the power of the rich (Harry Thaw's crazy acquittal - the "Million dollar defense": Robert Joy; and the deus ex-machina appearance of Waldo/Cagney to settle the final confrontation).The complications of the story are the collision of groups seeking equality and power, from the past (the rich, the family that hires Coalhouse's wife Sarah), the African-Americans, the immigrants (Houdini, Tateh). Inside the groups are conflicts. They younger brother becomes a committed revolutionary, while his older brother (James Olsen) is a remnant of conservative seeming sanity. Coalhouse finds his violent activism (which is due to personal tragedy caused by bigots) is opposed by America's leading African-American educator (Dr. Booker T. Washington: Moses Gunn). Washington believes in self-respect earned by a bootstrap approach that will gain the admiration and support of the better elements of the White majority. Ironically, after he has helped unman Coalhouse towards the end of the story, Waldo and the other whites push him aside as though they consider him little better than, say, a Pullman Car porter!The film was well directed by Milos Forman. The acting was quite good, including Cagney who was rather infirm at the time, but who is shown to advantage, and has his last good part. It was nice to see him going out on a high note here. Rollins was very promising, and it is a pity that he died so young from A.I.D.S. with so little shown for his talent. I can go down the list, including a brief performance by Norman Mailer as the ill-fated White. But take special note of Kenneth McMillan (as Willie Conlin) who is the bigoted fireman who mistreats Coalhouse and causes the tragedies. He is pretty good as a malevolent slob (or piece of slime) who ends up a pawn in a final game of sudden death that ends the movie.