Cradle Will Rock (1999) from Johnny Web (Uncle Scoopy; Greg Wroblewski)

Bah, humbug, Robbins. God damn, you're 40-something, son. By your age most guys have realized that the world is not black and white, but an infinite subtle array of grays.

This is a true story and a great subject for a movie. Orson Welles and John Houseman once attempted to stage a left-leaning pro-union musical on the bankroll of the U.S. Government during the Great Depression, as part of the National Theatre Project. When the theater was closed and their props seized and impounded, they marched the entire opening night audience 20 blocks up the street to another theater. Since the actor's union forbade the actors to go on stage, the playwright was to perform the entire play by himself with a piano, but the actors, unsolicited, performed their lines from the audience. It was a stirring scene when they began to speak from their seats. Unfortunately the play (a real play - this is mostly a true story) was a real eggsucker, and the scene continued, which sent that emotional crescendo earth-bound in a hurry. Robbins' sympathy with the play's ideology must have blinded him to the fact that it really, really stunk. As a result, he lovingly presented long scenes from the play and its rehearsals, and they all seem interminable. Emily Watson's singing is excruciating torture. She sounds like that Mrs. Miller lady that used to be in the audience of all the talk shows years ago, and her diction and phrasing are so poor that I couldn't understand one single word she sang. (Watson was terrific when not singing, as she usually is!)

Like Ragtime, the story interweaves fictional principals with real personalities. For some reason, Robbins decided to publicly "out" John Houseman. I never knew Houseman was gay. Frankly, I never gave it any thought, or cared. Outing him didn't seem to serve any purpose other than meanness, but that at least was accurate. Some of the other historical portraits verge on lunacy. It's one thing to take liberties with people who lived before the 19th century, because nobody really knows what they looked and sounded like, but the personalities of Orson Welles, Nelson Rockefeller, Diego Rivera, and others are well known to many of us, and have been recorded on film, thus making it obvious that many of this film's characterizations were way off the mark in this film. Angus McFayden's portrayal of Welles must be the single least accurate historical representation I've ever seen in a major film. The young Welles was a tall, flamboyant man, with a distinctive basso voice, an IQ of about a thousand, and a massive ego to match it, a sesquipedalian man who could and did pontificate eruditely on every subject under the sun. Plus he was only about 21 or 22 when this incident happened. Angus McFayden played him as a perfect replica of Dudley Moore in Arthur.

I've only concentrated on the negatives above, but I have to say that this basic story is so stirring that it's hard to screw it up completely, and the movie has a lot of strong moments. Turturro got a great role, for example, and he ran with it. There are some good laughs, and Robbins winds together about four storylines in a complex and clever fashion. This could have been a masterpiece, but it isn't, it's just an OK movie, and there's nobody to blame but Robbins, who wrote and directed.