This vivid, high-energy human tableau interweaves the lives and passions of a middle class, small town family against the scandal and events of a transitional America in 1906.

This vivid, high-energy human tableau interweaves the lives and passions of a middle class, small town family against the scandal and events of a transitional America in 1906. Director Milos Forman and producer Dino De Laurentiis have assembled an all-star cast-including legendary James Cagney- that brings the best-selling E.L. Doctorow novel to life in unforgettable fashion, with memorable music by composer/conductor Randy Newman. Ragtime is both a compelling story of human emotions and a reflection of the innocence, excitement and drama of that important time in the country's history. Nominated for 8 Academy Awards.

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.

E. L. Doctorow's novel Ragtime was a sprawling fictional account of American manners and mores in the years between 1900 and 1913. Among the mosaic of colorful factual and fictional characters in the novel were escape artist Harry Houdini and radical Emma Goldman. Both characters are all but eliminated in the film version, which only concentrates on three of Doctorow's many plot threads: The story of an immigrant artist (Mandy Patinkin) who becomes a movie director; the saga of Gibson Girl Evelyn Nesbit Shaw (Elizabeth McGovern), for whose sake playboy Harry K. Thaw (Robert Joy); kills architect Stanford White (Norman Mailer) and a lone black man's (Howard Rollins Jr.) quest for justice when his car is destroyed by a racist fire chief (Kenneth McMillan). This last subplot consumes most of the film's running time, to the overall detriment of the pacing. There are also several scenes involving an unnamed upper-middle-class family (headed by James Olson and Mary Steenburgen) who are evidently meant to be the aud