Among the many tantalizing “what-if”’s of film history, a couple stick out to me: 1974’s Death Wish was originally developed for Jack Lemmon by Sidney Lumet. The former won an Oscar that year for his harrowing performance as a compromised businessman in the garment industry in John G. Avildsen’s Save the Tiger, one of the best American dramas of the 1970s but largely forgotten today. Lumet had Serpico out around the same time, and the thought of them following up those films with Death Wish is fascinating; rather than the lurid revenge movie turned in by Charles Bronson and Michael Winner, Lemmon and Lumet’s Death Wish would’ve become a classic in the vein of Falling Down, Dirty Harry, and Taxi Driver. Bronson is fine in the role, but you have to buy that he’s a wishy-washy liberal architect; you have to buy that violence and guns make him queasy, at first. Can you imagine what Lemmon would’ve done with that role? Take his performance in 1982’s Missing and complete the thought: we’ve seen him in parental despair… but we never got to see him exact his revenge. To see Jack Lemmon turn into a Manhattan vigilante… the mind reels.
Another one that bugs me is the possibility of Robert Altman’s Ragtime. The master director was hired by Dino De Laurentiis in the mid-1970s to adapt E.L. Doctorow’s panoramic American epic, but was dismissed during post-production on 1976’s Buffalo Bill and the Indians, or Sitting Bull’s History Lesson. Altman told The New York Times, “[De Laurentiis] was disappointed in Buffalo Bill and requested that I cut the film rather drastically… I did my best to accommodate him, but in the end it’s my movie and I had to put it out the way my conscience dictated… I’m naturally disappointed. I feel like Adlai Stevenson—it hurts too much to laugh and I’m too old to cry. It’s not the artists who are disagreeing, it’s money.”
Martin Scorsese is among those who mourn this missed opportunity. “The big tragedy, I think… when he was going to do Ragtime, and he didn’t get it. As interesting a film as it turned out to be, with Miloš Forman, there’s something uniquely American about it, and it had to do with a kind of gigantic fresco of America at the time. The rebelliousness and the nature of the material, and a gallery of characters. Who could handle that better? Who could juggle it better? Who could weave them in and out like a beautiful tapestry? Who else but Altman could do that kind of thing? I saw him right after that happened. I said, ‘What do you do now?’ He said, ‘Punt.’”
Although De Laurentiis forced Forman to cut Ragtime down from three hours to two-and-a- half, the movie got made, and that’s all that De Laurentiis ever cared about. But by 1981, critical and revisionist histories were on their way out in America. Long gone were the days when films like Little Big Man, Soldier Blue, and The Hunting Party could not only get made but become substantial hits; when Ragtime was released, the film industry was still recoiling from the colossal failure of Michael Cimino’s Heaven’s Gate, perhaps the most sophisticated and unsparing of revisionist Westerns. Nominated for eight Oscars, it won none, and its leading men and women mostly marched into obscurity, outshone by early appearances by future stars Samuel L. Jackson, Jeff Daniels, Fran Drescher, Ethan Phillips, and John Ratzenberger, and the final performances of Hollywood legends Pat O’Brien and James Cagney.
Howard Rollins and James Olson are the forgotten stars of Ragtime, the former as struggling pianist Coalhouse Walker and the latter as “Father,” the head of an upper-middle class family in Upstate New York who takes Walker’s infant son in after he abandons him and the mother, a mostly mute Debbie Allen as Sarah, a movie martyr whose only purpose is to suffer, die, and provide Walker with a reason to exact revenge on the white men who impugned his dignity. What happened exactly? A bunch of volunteer firefighters—all micks, led by Kenneth McMillan—refuse to let Walker drive past the firehouse. Willie Conklin (McMillan) gives him some bullshit about ordinances, and higher-ups getting involved, and more or less tells Walker to suck it up and take it like a man. We all know this never could’ve been solved by a simple street brawl—even in Upstate New York, if two guys are fighting, one white, one black, the black guy is getting shot, or put in jail at best. Walker instead approaches a nearby policeman (Jeff Daniels, in his first film role), apprises him of the situation, and asks for some legal response. Daniels’ cop is sympathetic for the time, a future liberal, one who acknowledges the insult and Conklin’s moronic behavior, but who still insists Walker let it go, keep on moving, don’t complicate things.
When Walker and the cop go back to the car, it’s full of horse manure; still, the cop suggests Walker clean it himself, and when Walker continues to insist that he won’t leave until Conklin himself cleans the car, the cop says he’s “left me with no choice,” and arrests him. Father bails him out, and when they return to get the car, they discover it’s been vandalized and filled with even more manure. Father, another sympathetic future liberal, insists Walker just forget the whole thing. But this brother’s mind is made up! The white folk don’t understand—they didn’t shit on my car, they shit on my pride! And by the time Walker has holed himself up in the town library, lined with bombs by half a dozen flunkies including future campus liberal Brad Dourif (Father’s brother-in-law), and none other than Booker T. Washington (Moses Gunn) comes in to lay the pimp hand down and tell Walker that he’s “damned” and that everything he’s done has set his race back decades, Walker can only repeat the same five words over and over again: “They left me no choice.”
Ragtime resonates right now for its depiction of wounded black male pride and quasi-endorsement of revenge and extra-legal measures in order to restore that pride. Walker’s reiteration of the words “They left me no choice” echo Karmelo Anthony’s defense after fatally stabbing Austin Metcalf. In both instances, young black men were driven to murder because of a relatively minor slight: according to Anthony, Metcalf “put his hands on me,” which apparently warrants a one-sided knife fight. Walker’s automobile is ruined, but he isn’t poor, and multiple people offer to help him with the situation in practical terms. None of them recognize the gravity of the situation, Walker’s wounded pride—but should they? Ragtime is ambivalent enough about Walker, because after all, how much of a saint can you be if you abandon your infant son and mute wife? At the same time, the body of the movie depends on the audience accepting Walker’s response as proportionate, appropriate, and righteous, when it’s really just as stupid, selfish, and shortsighted as Anthony bringing a knife to school.
Ragtime opened soft in the fall of 1981, so shortly after its late November release, Paramount paid for a second advertising campaign aimed at black moviegoers: “A black man said, 'Respect me or kill me!' They took away Coalhouse's wife, child, and pride. He made them pay in a way America will never forget. It was a tough time... it was Ragtime!” Indeed, Walker’s story would’ve made for a phenomenal blaxploitation movie precisely because exploitation movies never granted their characters moral superiority, nor did they frame such petty disputes as part of the dark, grand narrative of American racism. When Robert Doqui gets dragged from a car with a rope around his neck in Coffy, there’s no second order social significance to it, he’s just another pimp who’s come to the end of the road.
Walker’s actions are particularly galling precisely because he’s so insecure to begin with. It’s not as if his wife were raped, or his baby killed; what Conklin did to his car was par for the course for the black man in early-20th century America. That doesn’t make it right, but it doesn’t justify going on a rampage, either. Ragtime runs into problems when it can’t make up its mind about Walker, whether or not he’s insane or justified, and it all comes out foggy… otherwise, how could the white liberals in the audience make sense of it all? I mean, it’s just a car… but, then, you don’t know what it’s like to be black… maybe not, but I know dinged pride isn’t worth your life, and certainly not others’. Hollywood has never been comfortable with black American masculinity, which they alternately fetishize and impugn, just as Conklin messed up Walker’s car. Theirs is a politics so confused, so incoherent, that all that comes out is wanton mayhem, expressed today in attempted assassinations and miniature revolts; combine that with a morbid fear of ever criticizing black behavior, and you end up with insane drug addicts ranting and raving and pushing people on to the subway tracks. And the white liberals make excuses for this! “It’s socioeconomic.” Okay, but shouldn’t you do something about it? Like right now?
The liberal ambivalence towards black male rage and the neurotic obsession with pride is on full display in Ragtime, a movie that’s otherwise cut to pieces, a 155-minute movie clearly meant for at least 180, and adapted from an acclaimed doorstop literary novel. You can only get so far with good literature in cinema, and much of Doctorow’s work was either excised or never filmed at all. What remains is most unexpected: a sobering reminder that so many uncomfortable racial habits and dynamics remain unexplored and even justified so many years after Ragtime’s release and early-20th century setting. “They left me no choice” sounds cool, and in some cases it’s true, but not in Walker’s, and certainly not in Anthony’s.
Terry Crews recently talked about the cultural expectation within the black community that being called the n-word warranted a violent response. He realized that “The jail is full of black men who were baited by a word and had to follow the rules,” and that once he stopped thinking of himself as a slur, he wasn’t bothered by it anymore. “It’s like calling Bill Gates broke: he’s going to laugh or not react at all, because he knows it’s not true.” Crews has his head on straight, but every white liberal who continues to ignore this incredibly stupid and self-destructive idea that’s evidently common among black American men is only ensuring that more men will be baited into death or prison because of their wounded pride.
—Follow Nicky Otis Smith on Twitter: @NARCFILM