Ragtime (1981)
Storyline
A young black pianist becomes embroiled in the lives of an upper-class white family set among the racial tensions, infidelity, violence, and other nostalgic events in early 1900s New York City.
Directors
Writers
Cast
Samuel L. Jackson, Jack Nicholson, Michael Jeter, Jeffrey DeMunn, John Ratzenberger, Brad Dourif, Richard Griffiths, Mary Steenburgen, Elizabeth McGovern, Bruce Boa, Christopher Malcolm, Norman Chancer, Frankie Faison, Jeff Daniels, Robert Joy, Calvin Levels, Ted Ross, Moses Gunn, Hal Galili, Billy J. Mitchell, Herman Meckler, Fran Drescher, Harry Ditson, Max Nichols, Debbie Allen, Mandy Patinkin, Dorsey Wright, Kenneth McMillan, James Olson, Alan Gifford, Thomas A. Carlin, Donald O'Connor, Pat O’Brien, Howard Rollins, Bessie Love, James Cagney, Norman Mailer, Hoolihand Burke, Edwin Cooper, Jenny Nichols, Zack Norman, Eloise Taylor, Don Plumley, Robert Arden, Robert Boyd, John Clarkson, Brian F. Dean, Derek Martin
Trailer
Reviews
88
Rgatime is a loving, beautifully mounted, graceful film that creates its characters with great clarity.
88
The Globe and Mail (Toronto)
Ragtime itself twinkles with delight - perhaps only an immigrant, and a recent one, could have made this film, which looks squarely at the social problems gnawing at North America but which finds, within them and without them, cause for hope. [20 Nov 1981]
80
The page-turning joys of E.L. Doctorow's bestselling Ragtime, which dizzily and entertainingly charted a kaleidoscopic vision of a turn-of-century America in the midst of intense social change, have been realized almost completely in Milos Forman's superbly crafted screen adaptation.
75
Ambitious, but only sporadically engaging.
60
The New York Times
The movie is sorrowful, funny and beautiful. It is also, finally, very unsatisfactory.
