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E.L. Doctorow’s great novel tore through its chosen window in American history like a pep-pill-stuffed jitterbugger; Milos Forman’s film on the other hand maintains the stately pace of a waltz. This is not so much a fault as a contrast, but perhaps the book would have been more appropriately placed in the hands of a wildly energetic director (such as Coppola) or a master of social texture (like Altman), rather than Forman, a surgeon of low-key humanism. .
Inevitably from such a cornucopia as the novel, the adaptation would be selective. But the novel’s visions were intended not merely to evoke the past but also point out how similar USA 1901 was to USA late-’60s, with its high-flown rhetoric, racial tensions, social conflicts, and collective dirty mind. The book’s greatest scenes were almost all essentially filthy jokes, essaying the distance between the romantic, delicate postures of the era’s high society with its actual proclivities.
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Forman’s film shies away from much of this, and the movie oddly lacks what his subsequent come-back film, Amadeus, had in spades – a tactile sense of historical milieu. The rollercoaster ride has stalled, leaving only an over-extended emphasis on Coalhouse Walker Jnr’s (Howard Rollins) justice-seeker turned domestic-terrorist.
Nonetheless, it’s a film with many pleasures to offer, not least of which is Rollins’ perfect incarnation of Walker, in a performance that had many at the time counting on him to become a major star, something which unfortunately never happened. Keeping pace with him is the disinterred James Cagney, in a coolly entertaining turn as the copper Walker tells to come and get him; Elizabeth McGovern as the petulant Evelyn Nesbitt; Robert’s Joy’s batty Harry Thaw; Brad Dourif perfectly cast as the ardent, finally anarchic Little Brother; and James Olson’s deft embodiment of everything both noble and foolish about the all-powerful Victorian patriarch. In a perfect world, Maureen Stapleton would have also played Emma Goldman here.
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