Amazon.com Essentials:
Fact and fiction intertwine in Milos Forman's colorful
kaleidoscope of E.L. Doctorow's sprawling novel of turn-of-the-century
America. Anchored in the true story of the murder of architect
Stanford White (Norman Mailer) by Harry Thaw (Robert Joy) over the
affections of his wife Evelyn Nesbit (Elizabeth McGovern), Forman
weaves a portrait of early 1900s America in a tapestry of intertwining
fictional tales. The primary thread involves the proud black pianist
Coalhouse Walker Jr. (Howard Rollins) and his demand for justice when a
racist fireman destroys his automobile, which escalates into a reign
of terror by Walker and a band of revolutionaries. A secondary story
involves an ambitious immigrant artist (Mandy Patinkin) whose
primitive flipbooks send him on the road to creating early
cinema. Centering all of these stories in one way or another is an
upper-class family known simply as Father (James Olson), Mother (Mary
Steenburgen), and Younger Brother (Brad Dourif). James Cagney came out
of a twenty-year retirement to play the irascible Irish police
commissioner, a character created for the film. Forman's biggest
departure from Doctorow's novel, however, is his focus on Walker's
story, cutting away the other threads to little more than asides in
the final half of the picture, the primary dramatic weakness of an
otherwise rich evocation of America's past. Randy Newman's lyrical
score and Miroslav Ondricek's understated cinematography earned two of
the film's eight Academy Awards nominations --Sean Axmaker
