Word: forman
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...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...
RAGTIME Directed by Milos Forman; Screenplay by Michael Weller...
...Milos Forman seems to have understood this. The film's first shot focuses on a pair of black hands striding over piano keys, then pulls back to reveal a nickelodeon screen whose newsreel image is closing in on some machinery. Step back for the long shot; move in for the closeup. Distance and involvement, irony and sympathy. Working with Playwright Michael Weller, his collaborator on the 1979 film version of 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...
...Forman, who inherited this project after Robert Altman was removed by Producer Dino De Laurentiis, is an actor's director. In Ragtime he has .elicited many fine performances: from Olson and Steenburgen, models of rectitude and discreet strength; from Rollins, who carries the film with a heroic charm that sours into fatal righteousness; from Debbie Allen as Walker's doomed love; from Ted Ross and Moses Gunn as two eloquent veterans of injustice who try talking sense and restraint to Coalhouse; and from James Cagney, back on-screen after a 20-year lapse and cool as a leprechaun...
Despite Ragtime (made at his doctor's suggestion and Forman's urging), Cagney, too, could stay home. He has never enjoyed self-promotion, preferring the quiet of his 800-acre farm near Amenia, N.Y. The comfortable stone house is as simple and solid as he is. He and his wife of 58 years, Billie, occasionally entertain friends like Mikhail Baryshnikov but venture forth only rarely. They journeyed to the White House when Ragtime was screened for the President, and this week at the New York Press Club, Cagney will memorialize his old friend Robert Montgomery, who died...