This movie makes me wish so much that I could have lived in that time period. This was a time when even the poorest of the poor could work and advance themselves. Our country was young and there were opportunities on every street corner.
shareNot any opportunities if you were black! Even the poorest of poor abused and mistreated blacks. It was comman place for every other race of people to hate and lookdown on black people. Black people have been hated and mistreated ever since they were first brought over here on slave ships. No other race group is hated in THIS country more then black people have been, and still are! And please don't tell me that the Irish were hated and lookdown on too. Yes they were, but even the Irish hated the blacks. And black people never did anything to the Irish. American white people hated the Irish, but they did nothing to the American whites. They took it out on the blacks, because they knew they had no rights or protection. They went around beating and killing every black person they could find during the New York uprisings in 1861, even the black childern!
So this may have been a good time period to live in if you were white or any other race group but black.
I think this should be took somewhere else.
shareRagtime actually shows two completely different worlds. One is so beautiful and elegant that yes, we think we would like to be able to step back into it. The other is grim and depressing, filled with people who cannot get ahead, living in tabloid culture run amok. It looks suspiciously like the America of 2006.
This movie touches on many different societal issues, some more thoroughly than others. All the themes in the movie are expanded on in the book. Whether you only see the movie, or read the novel or do both, it's obvious that 100 years ago America was a white man's world.
Tateh, the silhouette cutter on the Lower East Side, was one talented man who moved up and out, and made his fortune as a silent film director. But for every Tateh there were thousands of immigrants who didn't reap the benefits of living in the Land of Opportunity.
Evelyn Nesbit was a pretty but uneducated girl who became an "artist's model" at 15. She was the sole support for her family after her father's death left them in poverty. She became a chorus girl and then the mistress of architect Stanford White. He was 47, she was 16. Evelyn's mother actually encouraged the affair. Evelyn was not the grand society dame the movie makes her out to be.
Racial tensions abounded, not just between whites and blacks. Different immigrant groups hated each other with a passion. Jews, the Irish, middle Europeans (whatever their religion) all found themselves in a world where they could not to speak to or do business with other ethnic groups. Marriage across ethnic classes or social orders was completely unacceptable. Figuring out which groups were your enemies and which were your friends was treacherous.
It was a society governed by discrimination and hate, much of it arbitrary. Someone had to be lowest in the pecking order. Blacks and women—whatever their color—occupied that niche to one degree or another.
Black men were free in name only. If they worked hard and played by the rules they had no part in setting up, they were mocked and called "uppity," "coons" or "Uncle Toms." As Coalhouse Walker's story so tragically demonstrates, there was no justice anywhere for a black man seeking to maintain his dignity and his humanity. And what of his beloved Sarah? When she is first found after giving birth, Father, the cops and the doctor regard her as little more than an animal.
Father gradually sees that Coalhouse is every bit the gentleman as any white man who's ever been admitted to the house through the front door. With gentle pressure from Mother, Father comes to see that Sarah is a person in her own right, and entitled to happiness and respect as well. But Father is ultimately an army of one and thus powerless to save Coalhouse, just as Coalhouse himself could not save Sarah.
Ragtime the novel and the movie create a world of glamour, power, extravagance and excess. The movie chooses to illuminate only one aspect of the realities of that era in American history. The book explores in great detail the daily injustices, humiliations, setbacks and degradations experienced by almost everyone who was not white and male in that time and place.
I too loved the movie and have always been fascinated with this time in American history. Having said that, to look back through rose colored glasses is a fools game. It was a time of many injustices,great change and Robber Barons. Gee, times haven't changed much, have they?
Which is one reason why this era is so intriguing. Plus the fact that Evelyn was born in the town next to where I live.
No historic period is perfect, today no more so than the early 20th century. If it was good for somebody, it sucked for somebody else, which has always been and still is true. I'd love to visit 1906, but the pervasive smell of horse shit and cigars would make me glad I could return to my own time any moment I wanted to.
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