Word: doctorow
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...itself a variant, the most successful variant, of fascism. Fascism with a human face." The left "did not have ears" for this truth, she told the sometimes booing and hissing crowd-composed of about 1,300 left-wing activists, among them Singer Pete Seeger and Novelist E.L. Doctorow-because of its haughty reluctance to be associated with its "enemies" on the right, who were considered to be simplistic Red baiters. Said she: "Imagine, if you will, someone who read only the Reader's Digest between 1950 and 1970, and someone who read only the Nation or the New Statesman...
...dwell on the performances is to admit the ultimate failure of Forman's enterprise. His commitment to the actors allows them the time to bring their characters to quirky behavioral life, but every reaction shot, every unfinished phrase or repeated sentence means that many moments stolen from the Doctorow overview. Forman has taken as gospel the novel's epigraph-Scott Joplin's admonition, "It is never right to play ragtime fast"-reduced a pageant to an anecdote, and sacrificed sweep for nuance. Grateful as one is to have this Ragtime, with its many thrilling performances...
...should have been a silent movie. Facts and faces flicker through E.L. Doctorow's novel with the speed and power of jerky images from a newsreel of the American soul circa 1910. Archetypes are intercut with tintypes; a panorama of mass or class dissolves into a closeup of an agitated bourgeois mind; fable is superimposed on history. And they all run like hell to the D.W. Griffith finish line. Long shot: Harry Houdini performs thrilling escapes, restaging his own birth trauma for a country just then emerging from isolationism into imperialism. Closeup: Emma Goldman, anarchist spellbinder, woos Evelyn Nesbit...
...Hair, Forman concentrates on one main story and one subplot-Coalhouse Walker's rise to notoriety and Evelyn Nesbit's career as America's first sex goddess-and only glances at or ignores the rest. By taking 155 minutes to tell less than half of Doctorow's 270-page pageant, Forman and Weller have created an impressive but strangely lopsided movie...
...industry source, 43% of those Americans who regularly go to movies are now over 29 (only 25% were in that age group eight years ago). Very few major movies aimed at adolescents are being released this holiday season. Instead, the next weeks will offer Ragtime, an adaptation of E.L. Doctorow's panoramic vision of turn-of-the-century America; Reds, Warren Beatty's life of Revolutionary John Reed; Absence of Malice, a serious examination of journalistic ethics; and Whose Life Is It Anyway?, which is about euthanasia. Even the new John Belushi-Dan Aykroyd feature is far from...