[In the following excerpt, Simon asserts that Ragtime's unsuccessful transition from page to screen is due to the novel's diffuse storyline structure.]

For once I am in complete agreement with the majority of my colleagues: Ragtime, the movie, does not work, largely because one misses the kaleidoscopic construction of the Doctorow novel. Milos Forman, the director, and Michael Weller, the scenarist, chose what they felt to be the principal strands of this multifarious web: Evelyn Nesbit and the celebrated murder case; Coalhouse Walker Jr., the black musician with his fanatical and fatal quest for justice; Tateh, the impoverished Jewish immigrant who works himself up into a movie director; and the typical turn-of-the-century American family that gets itself embroiled with all of them.

Some of the many subplots and characters beyond these make all but subliminal appearances (e.g., Houdini), some ended up on the cutting-room floor (e.g., Emma Goldman), and quite a few (e.g., Henry Ford, J. P. Morgan, Dreiser, Freud, Zapata) never even passed their screenplay test. So, instead of free-wheeling ragtime, we get a fugue, and a rather unbalanced one at that, with Coalhouse and his vendetta given top priority. A good deal of Doctorow's irreverent, ahistoric, but politically satiric jocularity bites the dust in the process. But could the filmmakers have stayed faithful to the novel? The printed page can work as a kaleidoscope because the reader takes the shuffling and reshuffling images at his own pace, making his quietus whenever he may choose; but a screen-sized kaleidoscope shimmying around relentlessly for several hours would leave audiences dizzy and confused—if it did not just make them leave, period.

So Ragtime was doomed from the beginning, and with what may well have been additional pressure from the crass producer, Dino De Laurentiis, Forman ended up making a predominantly earnest social document, a film whose piously liberal intentions, deprived of Doctorow's jazzy texture and mischievous mythmaking, emerge as conventional, indeed stolid, fare, a with now and then a jaunty fillip. When history is monkeyed with as recklessly as it is in the novel, it turns out, paradoxically, more acceptable than when it undergoes fewer, lesser distortions, which now sound like false notes in a solemn music. And since the Coalhouse story becomes so important, it cannot help revealing how inferior it is in moral fervor, psychological complexity, and sublime irony to Heinrich von Kleist's masterly novella Michael Kohlhaas, from which Doctorow derived the tale as a respectful but reductive hommage.

We are left with some very handsome production values—John Graysmark's set designs, Anna Hill Johnstone's costumes, and Miroslav Ondricek's cinematography; individual scenes that work, but are surrounded by others that don't; and a mixed bag of performances. Howard E. Rollins is a superbly restrained yet emotionally resonant Coalhouse, and there is excellent support from Kenneth McMillan, Elizabeth McGovern, Debbie Allen, Robert Joy, and a couple of others; acceptable performing from Brad Dourif, Mandy Patinkin, and quite a few more; but plodding contributions from James Olson and Mary Steenburgen as father and mother. Norman Mailer is rather stiff as Stanford White even before, mercifully soon, he becomes a stiff; and poor old Jimmy Cagney, as the police commissioner, even though one gets the feeling that he is moved about on casters, still manages to exude cocky authority. In this lean period of the cinema, I cannot reprove whoever admits to having caught the movie; but I doff my hat to him who can say: “No, but I've read the book.”