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[...] can be no doubt that the average viewer's penchant for sentimentality gets a good workout in the "preposterous melodramas" that fill out this program: a cute, black, newborn baby found in a garden is taken in and cared for by a tender-hearted white matron; a black man delighted by his paternity wants to marry the mother of his illegitimate child; a designer of fireworks seeks justice by making bombs for a group revenging racial bigotry; a poor Jewish immigrant becomes a famous and successful film director and runs off with the beautiful matron; and all of this preposterous fictional melodrama is interlocked with the equally prepostrous (but true) historical melodrama of the Stanford White, Evelyn Nesbit, Harry K. Thaw mistress and murder business. It is the end of an era, an era of sentiment, tranquility, and certainty on the surface, but one already racked with the underlying strains and fissures in the social climate that we associate with the twentieth century: staid and comfortable WASP, middle class, agricultural/small business America about to be propelled into the violence and upheaval of the World Wars, the Flapper Age, the Depression, and the rapid advance of alienating corporate institutions.

. . . the average American is a mixture of business, ragtime, and sentimentality. He satisfies his business instinct by getting so much for his nickel, he enjoys his ragtime in the slapstick humor, and gratifies his sentimentality with the preposterous melodramas which fill the program. 1

When Hugo Munsterberg wrote the above in 1916, he was only positing what a "caustic critic" might say about the appeal of the movies to the American public: it was not his own view. And yet these lines remarkably identify some perennial elements of the American character, elements which are not only displayed in Milos Forman's film, Ragtime, but which might explain why this curious film has been popular with the mass audience and somewhat less so with the critics.

Ragtime gives a lot for its nickel. It is full of action, sex, spectacle, murder, music, and history. Audiences can "feel" they are in the presence of real American history without actually having to verify the accuracy of it. (In fact there never was an incident in which the Morgan library was held for ransom by black terrorists.) Though the "ragtime" of silent comedy's "slap-stick humor" is not literally present in the film, the visual echoes of the Keystone cops and tin lizzies are apparent. Audiences hoot loudly when the sixteen cops in Keystone uniforms haul in the long underwear-clad fire chief to Waldo's presence. And there can be no doubt that the average viewer's penchant for sentimentality gets a good workout in the "preposterous melodramas" that fill out this program: a cute, black, newborn baby found in a garden is taken in and cared for by a tender-hearted white matron; a black man delighted by his paternity wants to marry the mother of his illegitimate child; a designer of fireworks seeks justice by making bombs for a group revenging racial bigotry; a poor Jewish immigrant becomes a famous and successful film director and runs off with the beautiful matron; and all of this preposterous fictional melodrama is interlocked with the equally prepostrous (but true) historical melodrama of the Stanford White, Evelyn Nesbit, Harry K. Thaw mistress and murder business. What more could an "average American" want?

Ragtime, however, is not simply escapist genre entertainment designed to titillate and entertain the masses with love stories set against the background of history. Instead it is a complicated and intricate set of narrative inventions which, while retaining its popular appeal, actually goes against the grain of Hollywood conventions as ragtime goes against the sentimental conventions of traditional, popular music. The Harvard Dictionary of Music defines ragtime, popular between 1895 and 1915, this way:

. . . its harmony is conventional and is based on the common tonic, dominant, and subdominant triads of the major mode [the film uses "conventional" narrative triangles (triads)-Mother, Father, Younger Brother; Thaw, White, Nesbit; Sarah, Coalhouse, son-as a way of grounding the tale] . . . . However, owing to its (often improvisatory) creation and performance primarily by pianists . . . , the melody of Ragtime becomes somewhat more instrumental in style . . . through the persistent exploitation, as a fundamental characteristic, of Black rhythmic complications such as the use of melodic motives comprising groups of three or six notes in conflict with the 2/4- or 4/4- meter. . . .2

The rhythm of the editing and the narrative disjunctures of the film are equivalents of the way ragtime works in music, creating a tension between the conventional elements and the improvisational elements.

By comparison, another historical film released about the same time, Warren Beatty's Reds (except for the interludes of the "witnesses") is entirely conventional. .Reds follows "established rules of film technique like the unobtrusive cut, consistency of point of view, and clear story line. "3 Ragtime, on the other hand, subtly plays against these expected elements. Just as ragtime (the style of music) is a soft and subtle exposition of the structure of traditional melodic form through variation, interpolation, and substitution of the melodic and rhythmic structures of popular music, so too is this film of Forman's a soft and subtle analysis of traditional mainstream cinematic form. Ragtime, the film, is a rag on ordinary filmic expectations, but it never breaks the form totally, never turns the film into an anti-genre, anti-Hollywood film. It never turns its back on the mainstream audience like an Altman or a Godard film might do. Rather than rupture, it works by ellipsis, by playing little variations on accepted conventions, making characters behave not like characters, making the tempo of the film a little ragged, yet never allowing the ordinary viewer to lose sight of the overall sequential direction. Ragtime's reception by the general public is similar to its reception of ragtime music. For the average listener, ragtime is lighthearted, gay, toetapping popular music (despite lukewarm reviews Ragtime did well at the box office), but for the musicologist and connoisseur, the music is as complex as classical music. (So far only David Thompson has noted and remarked about Ragtime's intricate construction.)4

Forman achieves his subtle complexity with two complementary structuring methods: one, through the editing of the narrative and two, by establishing or disestablishing characters as characters. He begins in one direction, lays down one narrative line or presents a character and then substitutes or changes that line or character without delivering the climactic actions that would be expected from the opening moves (the opening chords, to continue the analogy to musical form) in a traditional Hollywood history film.

First let us consider how narrative expectations are subverted. Just like the Sunday dinners in the Family Home (do they ever get to eat their soup?), many narrative beginnings are interrupted before it would be appropriate if one were making a conventional film. For example, cutting away from the first scene of Harry K. Thaw's puritanical denunciation of Stanford White at the bachelor party to the Home where the ritual Sunday dinner is about to take place is very abrupt. Normal exposition about who Thaw is and who White is and who Nesbit is is withheld as we watch the finding of the child. On the other hand, some sequences seem to go on too long, not adding any new information, slowing down the pace at which information is being transmitted.

For example, after the Family rushes out into the garden to see why the maid is screaming, a close-up reveals the black baby lying in the weeds. This shot is held several beats longer than would be necessary to identify the object of concern. It is almost as if the camera relishes the beautiful contrast between the warm brown of the baby's skin and the rich green of the plant life. The shot is held long enough to arouse either a strong sense of sentiment "aren't babies cute?") or mental associations which might surround such an image: "Where do babies come from? You find them in the cabbage patch,"-Moses found in the bullrushes, Jesus in the manger, -or any number of other allusions. Then when the Mother picks up the child and says, "Call the doctor," one expects a quick cut to the examination, but again Forman holds on the Family for several seconds longer as they move down the path toward the house. The cut finally does come, as it must, but now Forman begins to work back and forth as the film progresses between his two choices, holding too long and cutting away abruptly, to create his slightly disjointed rhythm. Both holding on too long, or jumping ahead could be described as a "ragged" editing tempo which is analogous to the "ragged" musical tempo from which ragtime gets its name either lagging slightly behind the beat or trying to edge forward faster than the beat.

To be sure, the cross-cutting between the lives of the high and mighty of New York society at the bachelor dinner and the solid middle-class home in New Rochelle might seem conventional, serving perhaps to heighten contrast between classes or lifestyles or as a way of teasing the audience about what these two seemingly disparate stories might have in common, a not unconventional mode of exposition for a Hollywood film. But in Ragtime the effect is neither to show contrasts nor to invite speculation in the audience. In each sequence so much time is given over to the camera's detached attention to details-the showgirl's costumes, the fruits on the table, the wall hangings in the bachelor dinner, for example, or the camera's gaze at the old man and the little boy who appear like decor in the Sunday dinner sequences-that any kind of dramatic tension which might give the sense that these two settings and sets of characters might be drawing together toward some climax (typical Griffith parallel editing) is dissipated.

Forman refuses to provide the kind of Hollywood continuity associated with plot-oriented narratives. In Ragtime his camera frequently looks elsewhere, filling the image with a multiplicity of details and actions without drawing attention to specific centers of interest. Donald O 'Conner dancing on stage when White is murdered is hardly noticeable; yet he turns up later as Evelyn Nesbit's dance instructor. Other times his camera calls attention to a specific detail in an exaggerated manner using an abrupt cut for impact. Almost a parody of Citizen Kane's "Merry Christmas/Happy New Year" bit of trickery, he compresses the time between Pat O'Brien's attempts at persuading Evelyn to lie about her relations with White and the trial itself. After revealing Thaw's whip perversion to his mother's astonishment and how nice and tender "old Stanny" was during their affair, she replies to the lawyer's carefully stated suggestion of a dollar figure to suborn her testimony, "How much?" A quick cut places the spectator in the middle of the trial as she tells the same story about the whips but reverses the names of the two men. Nothing else of the first part of the trial is shown.

On the other hand Forman maintains the camera gaze too long in the other key Nesbit scene. After the trial Evelyn returns to her suite to find the Younger Brother waiting. She is tipsy from too much champagne and ready for love. She disrobes and throws herself on top of the Younger Brother. As they wrestle and giggle on the sofa, two men from the Thaw family walk in to pay her off for her perjured testimony. 'During the rest of the scene she remains quite naked as she and the men haggle over the amount of money she is to receive. Here, the actual lovemaking is interrupted by business and Evelyn shows her greedy nature, putting modesty aside to continue her financial argument. For her it is serious business; for the viewer the scene goes on too long. It is not that the scene doesn't work in showing us her true character, but the continued presence of that young, thin, naked body now entirely divested of any erotic quality becomes almost embarrassing to view. We have both metaphorically and literally seen the naked truth about Evelyn Nesbit and the vision is uncomfortable. She should have wrapped herself up after a suitably brief, hence titillating, glimpse of her flesh, and would have done so in a conventional film.

Perhaps the most obvious break in temporal continuity occurs near the middle of the film. Coalhouse Walker has returned to the Home in New Rochelle to resubmit his proposal of marriage to Sarah. After listening to the Father's frank but patronizing talk about responsibility, Walker plays a tune on the piano, first straight, and then he rags it in an interesting set of variations. The family, including Younger Brother, all cluster around the room to listen. The music he's playing continues without a break on the soundtrack, but the image changes to Walker upstairs where he confronts Sarah who gives in and says she will marry him. Then there is a cut to Nesbit's dance lessons in a rehearsal hall where the Younger Brother appears to tell Evelyn how much he needs her. Now Younger Brother could have taken the train to New York later that day (remember he was listening to Coalhouse play the piano in the living room), but the next sequence shows the now exuberantly happy Walker driving away from the Home towards the Fire Station and his ultimate fate there, presumably right after he has received Sarah's promise of marriage. Thus in terms of temporal and spatial reality, the scene in the rehearsal hall is out of sequence. It is a flash forward or simply out of place. Forman is clearly organizing his editing here not on the basis of temporal continuity, but on the basis of thematic variation since Walker's expression of his need for Sarah and Younger Brother's expression of his need for Evelyn are parallel emotional realities, though quite different in tone. Once again Forman is ragging his way through the accepted Hollywood manner of telling stories which would nearly always have subsequent actions in the diegetic time scheme come after prior actions in the unfolding of the film itself. If A occurs at noon and B occurs at 2 p.m. and C occurs at 3 p.m. of the same day, conventional film narrative construction would never edit these scenes as A-C-B as Forman has done here.

Though disruption of the several subplots by elliptical and ragged crosscutting is a primary way that Forman places stress upon the conventional formula for costumed turn-of-the-century historical films, the other is his method of inscribing characters. They don't live up to expectations of how characters in such films should behave. In most Hollywood films, characters are one-dimensional images. Forman's characters are more elastic than that; they struggle to free themselves from the ordinary limitations of genre characters. At moments they seem like well-behaved characters doing what they are supposed to do in the well-run, well-plotted universe of the fictional reality. At other moments they appear more like real people, full of inconsistencies. Though this dual nature is readily apparent in those characters portrayed by not very well-known performers-Olsen, Steenburgen, Rollins-it is also true of the celebrities and stars who had minor roles in the film.

Norman Mailer is a prime example. The violent threats and loud sounds being made by Harry K. Thaw at the bachelor dinner seem to evaporate against the dull and plodding delivery of lines by Mailer as Stanford While. Such off-beat casting demonstrates how Forman's personal interest in the ordinary aspects of life creates something entirely different from the conventional. Here he has a media celebrity play a part, someone whose name might be familiar to audiences, but in choosing a nonprofessional actor, the effect is to create a nondramatic character. In fact in this film there is no character created for the figure of Stanford While. It is simply Norman Mailer in a costume. Thus the potential dramatics implicit in a celebrity like Mailer playing a part. in a film about a famous celebrity are defused, and the character of Stanford White seems more ambiguous and more ordinary than if it had been played by an actor. All of the contrasts between Mailer's rational calm and Thaw's psychopathic hysteria become even more complex if we recall Mailer's own press image: the manic ruffian of the American literary world who has assaulted the press and his own wife in violent rage.

Forman's use of James Cagney moves in another direction. Cagney plays against and with his own filmic past, the ruthless gangster of White Heat, for example. With his whiskers and make-up, however, he also looks like Teddy Roosevelt, an image of justice and fairplay. There is a terrible irony, heavy-handed at first thought, that this Teddy Roosevelt look-alike should give the order to kill Coalhouse Walker despite his word of honor to the contrary. "You heard what I said, Fire!" And yet the line as delivered does not simply make Commissioner Waldo the minion of the powers that be (save Morgan Library at all costs!) because the viewer sees also, recalls at least, the ruthless, but at the same time admirable quality of excess that made Cagney's Cody Jarrett such a powerful figure. Cagney was always vindicating tough-mindedness (success is the only goal) no matter what law enforcement or gangster parts he played.

Nevertheless the viewer's response must be mixed. There is a conflict here between the image of Cagney and the role of Waldo. No matter whether Cagney was playing a gangster or a G-man, he always created an aura of personal integrity (his Captain in Mr. Roberts was one of the few times he ever played against that image). Though we only know him from the movies, we expect that integrity from Cagney. Commissioner Waldo, on the other hand, is a corrupt character, an Irish immigrant who made it to the top in the police department surely because he knew how to play the game. We expect cops to be dishonest, expedient, capable of telling lies, Machiavellian in fulfillment of their duties. It's a part of our image of America. But Cagney, the tough guy who comes round in the end, who realizes his mistakes, who often paid for them through self-sacrifice or self-immolation, is also part of our image of America. One can never forget that Cagney is also the brash, but honest Yankee Doodle Dandy. Thus it is Cagney, not Waldo, who surprises by being corrupt, by giving way to expediency. We expect him to be a tough but fair cop just because he's Cagney, and we are disappointed. Waldo, the character, undermines our expectations of Cagney, the star, making Waldo/ Cagney a more realistic figure in the film.

All of Forman's characters slip and slide around and about, protean in their changeability, constantly upsetting our complacency towards them. Who would have expected that Mother would fall for Tateh and his insubstantial lifestyle; that Younger Brother, so timid in his courtship of Evelyn at first, would grow hysterical at her rejection and later throw himself into the dangerous game of terrorist activities? And Coalhouse Walker, a mild-mannered, accommodating man, eager to live the bourgeois life and settle down with a good job at the club and a wife and family, who could have suspected that he would have gone on a, rampage, held out so long for his "rights" against all the many rational persuasions against such actions? And in his final personal soliloquy, with his hand on the detonator, who could predict which way he would go? At moments a caricature of the terrorist, a symbol of outraged repression, he is also at other moments just a man with fears and hopes. All of the major characters are inconsistent, ambiguous, shifting. Once again Forman is playing around with the conventions of the fixed stereotypical genre characters we have come to expect.

Forman's film of Ragtime is a wondrous mixture of dazzling cinematic artistry in its use of and abuse of conventional narrative and character expectations. Represented in the film by Tateh-a foreigner, a filmmaker who makes a success of himself in his new country-it is Forman who speaks when Tateh praises movies. At the cast party, Tateh raises his glass in a toast to "Light" and says, "The whole life of man will be in the photoplay." The photoplay can and should tell us all about the life of man: not necessarily the actual history of man, but the paradoxes of human existence, the fads and foibles, the history of attitudes, beliefs, dreams and desires, the universal contradictions of the absurd human condition. Forman not only shows us these contradictions in the subject of his film, but his style echoes them as well.

The interpolated newsreels (which are also a variation on expected Hollywood form) contain the same sort of oppositions, a mixture of serious and comic elements of the everyday scene. Though this mixture is basic to the form of the newsreel, nevertheless it was a most appropriate adoption by Forman. The first newsreel which comes at the beginning of the film shows us "The Hottest Summer in New York in 30 Years": Teddy Roosevelt greeting the first black man to be invited to the White House, Booker T. Washington; Harry Houdini and his mother; and the nude statue of Evelyn Nesbit, which is to be placed atop Madison Square Garden. The next newsreel comes after the murder of White, but doesn't mention it. Instead it focuses on the huge numbers of people who are emigrating to the U.S.A., Henry Ford producing cars one a minute, and Houdini doing one of his escape tricks. What appears to be the final newsreel (but is in fact done in color as a live action shot) shows Houdini once again, and the news that war is declared in Europe.

It is the end of an era, an era of sentiment, tranquility, and certainty on the surface, but one already racked with the underlying strains and fissures in the social climate that we associate with the twentieth century: staid and comfortable WASP, middle class, agricultural/small business America about to be propelled into the violence and upheaval of the World Wars, the Flapper Age, the Depression, and the rapid advance of alienating corporate institutions. Never again would the "average American" be able to so innocently satisfy his business instinct, his enjoyment of slapstick humor, his sentimentality with the preposterous melodramas that seemed to overflow both life and screen in those years before the Duke was killed. Presently, our image, both of the world and of films,is more like Forman's, full of irony, ambiguity, and contradictions.