Ragtime

I've metioned on quite a few occasions how, having been born in 1972, I grew up hearing about the release of a bunch of movies that might have sounded interesting, except that I was much too young to see them in the theater on their original release, so only got around to them much later. Another example of this is Ragtime, which TCM finally ran at the beginning of 2025 in honor of Debbie Allen's 75th birthday. So of course I recorded it, and eventually got around to watching it and writing up this review as part of the backlog of movies to post about.

The movie starts off in the first decade of the 1900s, although I think it doesn't quite get all of the historical events it portrays as quite accurately contemporaneous. Part of the opening involves Evelyn Nesbit (Elizabeth Montgomery), the chorus girl who was at the center of the celebrated case of Harry Thaw murdering Stanford White which was also covered in the movie The Girl in the Red Velvet Swing, which I blogged about all the way back in 2011.

Among the people interested in Evelyn is an unnamed young man known only as "Younger Brother" (Brad Dourif). He's the somewhat shiftless younger brother of a woman known as Mother (Mary Steenburgen) who married up to a man credited as Father (James Olson). Father runs an explosives factory and employs Younger Brother; Father is also not happy at all with his brother-in-law's dissolute life. Father is about to have a lot more to worry about, however, when a young black woman Sarah (Debbie Allen) gives birth and leaves the baby with the family, not being able to support it herself. Mother takes pity on Sarah, offering her a servant's job which will at least give her a place to stay and take care of the baby.

Meanwhile, performing in various clubs in New York City is Coalhouse Walker (Howard Rollins), a fairly talented pianist. It doesn't take much to guess that he's the father of Sarah's child, so when he learns of the news of this abandoned child he's eventually able to put two and two together, showing up at the family's house asking to see Sarah, who isn't quite happy to see him although the two eventually reconcile and plan to get married. Those plans are put on hold, however, when Coalhouse is driving back to New York and is stopped by a racist firehouse chief Conklin (Kenneth McMillan) who claims Coalhouse is going to have to pay a toll to go down the road. When Coalhouse can't pay it, the firemen trash Coalhouse's Model T, leading to a cause célèbre. Theodore Roosevelt passes through town on a whistle-stop tour, so Sarah decides she's going to try to get the president's attention which might help her husband's case. Unfortunately, the police assume she's someone out to attack the president so they accost her, beating her to death.

This drives Coalhouse off the deep end, and he and some of his radical black friends respond with a campaign of terror against white firemen, ultimately leading to their takng over the J. Pierpont Morgan Library with the demand of handing over Conklin to their vigilante justice. Younger Brother, chafing under his brother-in-law's control, wants to rebel, and since he knows explosives, he gets in touch with Coalhouse offering to help with explosives. This brings us to probably the best known part of the movie, which was the return of classic era star James Cagney after 20 years away from the screen. He plays New York Police Commissioner Rhinelander Waldo, whose job it is to try to get a non-violent resolution to what eventually becomes a hostage crisis. After all, the library holds any number of priceless artifacts that nobody should want to see destroyed.

Ragtime was based on a book by E.L. Doctorow which I haven't read, but which is from what I've read of reviews an incredibly complex book that was thought to be tough to translate to the big screen without excising a lot of it. As it is, the movie runs over two and a half hours, yet some reviewers still think too much was excised from the book. Not having read the book, I have to say that I think the movie can stand by itself as a pretty darn good story, even if it is a bit long and has some characters who I think could have been excised without losing all that much. The performances are good and the production design is very good. If you haven't seen Ragtime before, it's definitely one worth watching.