Ragtime

I had meant to review these earlier, but criticizing Trump and waxing poetic about the virtues of the AR15 (yet again) took precedence.  

This was a novel, by E.L. Doctorow, in 1975, followed by a movie in 1981.

Two issues I want to address before I go into both.

Book vs. Movie.   How many times have you heard someone remark, when asked if they read a book, “I saw the movie” or “I’ll wait for the movie”?  Probably multiple times.  Unless the novel has been drawn out to a multi-episode miniseries, chances are you can watch a 90-120 minute movie much quicker than reading the novel.  None of us are getting any younger, so I suppose the time element could be a justification to forgo reading the book.

However, books give us certain benefits.  Characters' subjective impressions and thoughts – these don’t translate well into film.  Sex and nudity – you can go to town here on paper, to an extent which would render the film pornographic if faithfully adapted to the screen.  And sci-fi can go all over the place, to an extent which might be prohibitively expensive to translate onto the screen. 

Madison Square Garden.  What attracted me to Ragtime was the shooting of Stanford White by the jealous Harry Shaw at Madison Square Garden on June 25, 1906.  My father, a proud New Yorker (although from Brooklyn), told me that there were no less than FOUR different “Madison Square Gardens”.

V1.       1879-1890 at the actual Madison Square in Manhattan.  That’s named after James Madison (P4, 1808-1816) and located at Fifth Avenue and Broadway at Twenty-Third Street. 

V2.       1890-1925.  At the same location.  This is where the Shaw-White shooting took place in 1906.

V3.       1925-1968.  At Eighth Ave. between Forty-Ninth and Fiftieth Street, now the site of One Worldwide Plaza.

V4.       1968-present.  The current venue, where the Knicks and Rangers play, and concerts are held here.  It took over Penn Station, which is now completely underground.  I caught a season 4 episode of “Boardwalk Empire” where Nucky Thompson winds up in the above-ground Penn Station.  My sole experience at the current MSG was seeing AC/DC there in August 1988 with my brother.  We managed to snag fifth row seats from the box office just days before the show, probably because no one was particularly impressed with their current album, Blow Up Your Video, which truly stank.  Fortunately for AC/DC fans, the band is well aware that their later material stinks, and live you can expect the set to be mostly split between Bon Scott material and Back In Black songs, with just a handful of other songs.  Anyhow. 

Ragtime, by E.L. Doctorow.  It was published in 1975, and Doctorow himself was born in 1931, so he has no firsthand knowledge of New Rochelle, NY, or of Manhattan, in the early 1900s.   The peculiar charm of the novel is that it blends a fictional family in New Rochelle, NY – the part of NY right before you hit Connecticut on I-95 after leaving NYC – with historical characters.  Moreover, the novel goes off in various tangents concerning the historical characters, leaving the fictional characters to be returned to later.  The novel’s various tangents were highly entertaining, so much so that reading it, in addition to watching the movie, was well worthwhile.  For example, Harry Houdini shows up early on, then Sigmund Freud & Carl Jung, then famous anarchist Emma Goldman, JP Morgan and Henry Ford, etc., with actress Evelyn Nesbit the most prominent historical character, winding up in a romantic relationship with fictional Younger Brother.

Ragtime (DVD).    I read about the Shaw-White shooting a few months ago, discovered this movie has it, put it on my Netflix queue (not available for sale on DVD for a cheap price) and by the time it finally arrived I had forgotten why I put it on my queue.  Elizabeth McGovern, nowadays the American Mom on “Downton Abbey”, is much younger, playing Evelyn Nesbit, the Gibson girl of the Art Nouveau era.  Part of the film deals with her, her jealous husband Shaw who winds up in a murder trial, and the Younger Brother (Brad Dourif) who has a crush on her.  Mind you, she shows up completely nude (!).  The rest of the film covers a black guy, Coalhouse Walker (Howard E. Rollins), a jazz musician fortunate enough to own a Model T.  Driving through New Rochelle, the local fire department blocks him off and dumps horse shit on his car.  Eventually Walker assembles a team of confederates – including Dourif’s character in blackface – in hoods, brandishing Springfield rifles, and takes the Pierpont Morgan Library hostage.  Relative to the novel, the film sticks to the narrative concerning the fictional family and ignores the tangents concerning historical characters.

The cast is remarkable.   I wasn’t able to recognize James Cagney as Police Commissioner Waldo, but I did recognize Dourif, McGovern, Jeff Daniels as a New Rochelle cop, Fran Drescher ("The Nanny") as a Jewish woman fighting with her husband in the Jewish neighborhood of NYC, John Ratzenberger as the cop who arrests Shaw after the shooting, and Samuel L. Jackson as one of Walker’s gang members.  This alone should make the film worth watching, but as noted above, I found the novel complements the film and makes enjoying both to be worth the effort.