SOURCE: Benson, Sheila. “Ragtime—An Optimistic Novel Lost in Translation.” Los Angeles Times (15 November 1981): Calendar section, p. 29.

[In the following review, Benson asserts that much of the depth of E. L. Doctorow's novel Ragtime is lost in its film adaptation.]

E. L. Doctorow's bold exhilarating novel Ragtime, his “real-world act,” was a newsreel of America at a critical period, from 1902 until just the end of World War I when “the era of Ragtime had run out.” America at that time combined innocence, optimism, energy and personal and social ambition at levels it would never reach again.

And in the book every character and virtually every detail was interdependent. Doctorow created three fictional family groups: a comfortable middle-class New Rochelle bunting and fireworks manufacturer's family called simply Father, Mother, their Little Boy and her Younger Brother; a Latvian-Jewish immigrant family in New York's Lower East Side, Tateh (meaning father) the silhouette maker, Mameh and the Little Girl, who sews in the garment district. And finally, a dignified black ragtime piano player, Coalhouse Walker Jr., his love Sarah, and their baby son.

Into the lives of these three families tumbled the stars and comets of the day. J. P. Morgan and Henry Ford, Freud and Houdini, “Red Emma” Goldman and teenage seductress Evelyn Nesbit, flanked, of course, by her husband Harry Thaw and her architect-lover Stanford White. Every character was seismographic, a jostle here produced a bruise there. Freud visited and left America, finding it a “gigantic mistake”; a decade later “his ideas began to destroy sex in America.” Henry Ford came up with the assembly line, and a sparkling Model T, defiled in an act of humiliation, becomes the story's most memorable symbol.

Doctorow's book was a cool and fast read, seemingly as flat as one of Tateh's miraculous cutout paper silhouettes and certainly as intricate. And in spite of the agony of some of its scenes—the dangerous and bloody early days of the American labor movement, sweatshop life and bigotry on the rise—Ragtime as a book left you on a high as infectious as ragtime itself. Doctorow's goodwill and deep-seated optimism prevailed.

Enter Dino De Laurentiis, who bought the book's rights with Robert Altman of “Nashville” in mind. But the two had a falling-out during the making of Buffalo Bill and the Indians and director Milos Forman was brought into the project.

What Forman and screenwriter Michael Weller (Hair) have done is to wade in, lift three characters who seem to them the most significant—Evelyn Nesbit, Younger Brother and Coalhouse Walker Jr.—thin out a whole history book of references, and build [Ragtime,] their rich, intricate, often bewildering film with what was left.

It is the connective tissue of the book, the aerialist's net that supported its audaciousness, that has been removed. Without this thread of history the characters at times are left doing things which seem completely arbitrary.

We also lose two major characters. Harry Houdini stood for the magically successful side of the immigrant wave, but he is peripheral to the action. But to lose Emma Goldman, who politicized Evelyn Nesbit in the book's most extraordinary scene, is a real tragedy.

Forman's casting is careful and often inspired. The New Rochelle family, the canvas on which new Freudian awareness and the awakening conscious of the American woman will be sketched, rejoices in the presence of Mary Steenburgen as Mother. In a subtle and delicious performance she imprints delicately but firmly a sense of who really holds the power in this post-Victorian era. This genteel conflict isn't as interesting since Father's character has been stripped down. He's all obvious repression and rigid control, tautly played by James Olson, but his interesting history, exploring the North Pole with Peary, has been omitted.

Mother and Father are the link to Coalhouse Walker Jr., and with him to the film's vitality. During a family Sunday supper, a newly born black baby is discovered abandoned in the back yard. The baby becomes Mother's obsession. She takes him in, then his sweet, silent mother Sarah (Debbie Allen) and it is while he is in search of them that we meet Coalhouse Walker Jr.

His name and character are a hint: Michael Kohlhaas is a novella by Heinrich von Klist set in 16th-Century Germany. In it a wronged man, having exhausted lawful means, turns to anarchy, razing a castle and finally whole cities. “One of the most upright and … most terrifying men of his time,” he is most certainly the model for Coalhouse.

The film is crammed with action but has no real focus until Coalhouse turns up, at the front door, heaven help us, in New Rochelle. Newcomer Howard E. Rollins takes charge of the film from that first ebullient moment. He becomes our obsession—everyone in Ragtime has one. Evelyn Nesbit is obsessed with Tateh's beautiful child. Younger Brother with Evelyn, and then with Coalhouse. And Coalhouse is obsessed about justice, which he demands at any cost.

Because Coalhouse is so energetic, so sympathetic, so sweetly, fatally optimistic, the way the film changes the book is critical. That it becomes “The Coalhouse Walker Story” in the last third of the film's 2 hours and 37 minutes is no surprise. His is the only cohesive story line and the casting of James Cagney in what was virtually a minor role, as the police commissioner who must oppose him, weights the film further.

But Forman and Doctorow seem to take differing views of the outcome.

After barricading himself in J. P. Morgan's priceless library and mining it with dynamite, Coalhouse's demand is constant and simple. He wants his car restored by Willie Conklin, the bullying coward who desecrated it (Kenneth McMillan). And in the book's most cinematic scene he gets just that; Conklin has to rebuild the Ford, out on the street in front of the library, a nine-hour job which he does “sweating, grunting, complaining and at times crying.”

Forman removes this scene, and with it Coalhouse's triumph. But by emphasizing the inevitable conclusion he seems to have subtly altered the message: This is the birth of 20th-Century black militancy and You Are There.

There are other small, strange shifts. When Tateh tries to sell his silhouette flip book, which is, of course, the rudimentary beginnings of moving pictures, in the film he is given ＄4 for the idea and 40 cents for each future book. Doctorow gives him ＄25 and ＄25, respectively, a decent sum in those days. Not everyone was cheated by money-loving Americans.

There are less depressing things to be found in the film, however. The idea of Randy Newman as the composer of a wickedly lively, perfectly suited score seems to have been inspired. There isn't an imperfect performance, quarrel as you might over emphasis, over which an actor has very little control. You might suspect that even Cagney is a little embarrassed at the amount of brouhaha vs. the size of the role, but he brings integrity as well as stirring remembrances of things past in a nostalgic audience.

As the film shifts its emphasis to Coalhouse, the character of Younger Brother recedes more and more. Brad Dourif has no problems conveying confused and marginal characters, with [One Flew over the Cuckoo's Nest] and Wise Blood it's becoming his specialty. All Younger Brother wants is to commit his life to Evelyn, who in turn only wanted someone who would treat her badly and whom she could treat badly. The way of the world.

And as Evelyn Nesbit, Elizabeth McGovern is wonderfully dippy and off-center. With her luscious mouth but uncharacteristically slim build for that period of robust women, this Evelyn would have had to attract men by sheer force of personality. This McGovern has. Her scene as an outraged September Morn, haggling in the buff with her husband's envoys for ＄1 million as reasonable payment for her time with sadistic Harry Thaw is tragically funny.

Mandy Patinkin as Tateh, who in one speech gives Mary Steenburgen her first glimpse of passion, is fascinating and memorable. And exquisite small daughter, who will eventually form an alliance with The Boy. The wonderful bored Boy in his sailor suit and this small, wise girl-child are real brother and sister, Jenny and Max Nichols, children of Mike and Mrs. N.

There remains the question of whether Ragtime could ever yield itself to a film. I suspect that it could, but that a less morose hand might have to guide it. This Ragtime is patchy and chilling—not exhilarating—but it at least hews to Scott Joplin's warning: Do not play this piece fast. It is never right to play ragtime fast.