CRADLE WILL ROCK: Tim Robbins' History of Why We Are Suckers
Written: Dec 23 '99 (Updated Jun 01 '05)
Product Rating:
Pros: Huge star cast brings historical meditation, great music, to a stirring, technically brilliant climax.
Cons: Leisurely pace may lose people who demand simple stories without subplots.
The Bottom Line: Despite Robbins' contempt for Orson Welles and John Houseman, whom he evidently considers sell-outs, CRADLE WILL ROCK conveys a story of the devaluation of our traditional arts, thoughtfully, entertainingly.
(Update: 6/10/02): Now on DVD, CRADLE WILL ROCK takes a bit of time: lots of additional features.
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It is a movie in the style of Director Tim Robbins' mentor Robert Altman (say, NASHVILLE). Given a limited release in selected cities, it deserved a wider audience -- and may look better on the smaller video screen, as many expansive movies do.
The story line weaves a number of dissimilar threads into a tapestry of art and the theater, at a time in the late 1930's when World War II was approaching America. We follow a down-but-not-out Olive Stanton (Emily Watson) as she escapes her flop behind the screen of a newsreel theater and makes her way to apply for a job with the WPA Federal Theater Project. Along the way, Olive has tenuous, casual, mostly unaware connections with the various characters who will have a bearing on the film's moving climax. She is assigned as a janitor to a Federal Theater run by Orson Welles and John Houseman.
On a *whim, Welles (Angus MacFadyen), who is shown little respect in the film, assigns her to a leading part for the now legendary pioneer musical labor play, Marc Blitzstein's THE CRADLE WILL ROCK.
[Later, The Cradle Will Rock, not Pal Joey or Oklahoma, became the first successful Broadway musical since Showboat with a serious (albeit primitive) plot; this play was also the first to have a full Original Cast Recording.]
Olive Stanton rewards Welles' judgment and the film.
That is the basic story line, but along the way, we meet Nelson Rockefeller (John Cusack) trying to cajole a capitalist mural out of radical artist Diego Rivera (Ruben Blades); Susan Sarandan as an Italian Public Relations Rep selling European Art to American millionaire industrialists to finance Mussolini's War in Spain; a right wing ventriloquist (Bill Murray) conspiring with a disgruntled employee (Joan Cusack) to reveal communist tendencies in the Federal Theater Project to Representative Martin Dies' fledgling House Un-American Affairs Committee; Cherry Jones as the Head of the Federal Theater Project fighting to save her program to provide the Arts to everyone in our great Country (definitely Un-American if commercial interests can't control the process), etc.
[I was amused by the critics, here and elsewhere, who said Murray was the best thing in the movie because he is so lovable, when actually he plays a declassed, depressed psychopath similar to Michael Redgrave in DEAD OF NIGHT or Anthony Hopkins in MAGIC. Just proves, it is either hard recognize manic depression, or to overcome image.]
Amazingly, Robbins manages to bring these elements together in a true, if sprawling, work of art that spares no one but celebrates the Common Artist represented by Composer Blitzstein (Hank Azaria) and the leads in the musical: "Joe [sic] Foreman" (John Turturro) and bittersweet heroine "Molly," as played by Olive Stanton (Watson).
[It might be noted that, while Olive Stanton is now scarcely remembered, Howard daSilva (Academy Award, THE LOST WEEKEND, Wilder, 1945), who actually created the role of "Larry Foreman" in the play, went on to a long, stormy career in films and the theater.]
The historical events in CRADLE WILL ROCK, for dramatic effect, have been compressed, rearranged, and stylized. My one great disappointment is that Robbins neglects the crucial part played by Welles and Houseman in the zany history of The Cradle Will Rock (which inspired all those Rooney-Garland "let's rent a barn" musicals), and presents them as a pair of clowns. Whatever their failings, they later proved themselves the kind of artist Tim Robbins seems to admire. I am also surprised that nowhere do I see in the credits a reference to Welles' screenplay on the event, which he almost managed to shoot as his last Hollywood feature film in 1983. While more narrowly focused, it makes some of the same points.
[5/1/'00: I have just learned Robbins claims that, in order keep his vision clear, he did not look at Welles' screenplay. He should have. It is tight, personal and marvelously original, much of which Robbins' version is not.]
Near the end of the spectacular cross-cut climax of CRADLE WILL ROCK, Nelson Rockefeller sits down with friends at a high society costume ball and laments his need to destroy the Diego Rivera mural he has commissioned. His friends suggest a solution: Promote Modern Art (and art, in general) for its line, color, flash -- devoid of meaning, a commodity like any other. It is this view of the future that Writer/ Director Tim Robbins shows Blitzstein, Joe and Molly/Olive standing against -- lullabyed by the musical's haunting, seldom sung ballads "Love Song" and "Nickel Under the Foot," the amusing "Croon Spoon" and "Honolulu"; and stirred by the rousing call to arms: "Cradle Will Rock."
Robbins final shot in the movie, which puzzles some, strikes others as absurd, and enrages a couple, points to what I've said: From such a modest -- yes, amateurish -- little labor musical, suggesting the first serious social theme in a New York musical since Showboat ten years earlier, came the bright lights and glamour of Broadway's (largely meretricious) Musical Theater of today. And a Liberal New Deal Administration, called Communist by both Democrats and Republicans, caved in and closed it down (as they did the whole WPA Theater Project a year later) on a charge The Cradle Will Rock was subversive.
In that year, 1937, a couple of hundred innocent American citizens seeking a living wage were clubbed or shot to death at the hands of strike breakers and company-controlled police in cities like Detroit, Youngstown and Pittsburgh. It spurred the Wagner Labor Relations Act (and inspired this musical play). Four years later, ten million American soldiers had to go to war against the armies of Adolph Hitler, Benito Mussolini and the Axis, whose methods many of our corporate leaders had applauded.
Emily Watson's Olive Stanton, in that last puzzling shot of CRADLE WILL ROCK, is simply saying, "Here, take it all! I'm an Actor. We were locked out. I was just trying to do my job."
If anyone considers that gesture, and the rest of the film, propaganda, perhaps it is, but who speaks today for the 40,000,000 Americans, a majority children, living at or below the poverty line in this richest country in the history of the World? We give them, of course, lots of advertisements for greed, guns, bombs, sex, booze and dope, both real and vicarious. But can anyone seriously be so oblivious, so picayunish, to believe that in this world where at least three billion humans live in similar conditions, and much worse, America will not face a reckoning?
Lock outs are common today. They're called "down-sizings," or "lay-offs," and our movies and other popular arts say little about them.
Most of our fine arts, as well as our popular art, is decorative, easily adapted to commercial advertising, of little lasting value to ordinary people, except as the sensory Muzak in their lives. We value our art, as we do everything else, by how much money it makes.
But one day soon, when more than things in the movies go BANG, not just our arts, but our Leaders -- and Each One of Us -- will have to acknowledge the shallow, empty vision we offer our people, and the people of the World, through our media and commercial advertising.
Bursting into the midst of our consumer driven society, CRADLE WILL ROCK should have stimulated considerable argument, should have made for gestalt discussion among all of us who faced the New World Order in the coming Millenium. The fact it did not is a pity.
You now have the opportunity to revive and continue the debate, learn some history of why our Popular Arts offer so many explosions, meaningless sexual encounters, fart jokes and appeals to our greed. The fact is that large corporate, political and commercial interests think we are stupid; they have profits and data to support that idea. In case you hadn't noticed, they have defanged the once dangerous beast known as American Art.
As Robbins writes in his epigraph: "This is (mostly) a true story."
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*Welles had similar whims when he gave early chances to actors Agnes Moorehead, Joseph Cotton, etc; writers Arthur Miller, Howard Koch, etc; composers Bernard Herrmann, George Auric, etc.
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6/10/02 -- This review was written long before 9-1-1-2001, and is presented here with only minor stylistic changes. No ordinary citizen could have predicted exactly what happened in New York City, but the general outline was pretty clear, as I indicate. As we see all the bumptious types and the totalitarian influences of the 1920's and 1930's return under the banner of "The War on Terrorism," it would be wise for us to ask what do the forces behind them want . . . this time?
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8/24/03 -- I have learned this morning of a television documentary, "Who Killed the Federal Theater Project," soon to be presented by PBS. It deals with some of the events and issues found in this review.
A press release link may be found at the excellent
www.wellesnet.com
I am also indebted to the spirited discussions at this site (superbly managed by Jeff Wilson) for a possible insight into another reason why Robbins called his film CRADLE WILL ROCK, instead of THE CRADLE WILL ROCK. It seems that Welles's third daughter, Beatrice, who controls Welles' early properties has become highly litigeous and demanding toward anyone who wishes to make commercial reference to anything her father did. This is particularly regrettable because it has held up or damaged some important posthumous releases of Welles' work -- i.e., THE OTHER SIDE OF THE WIND.
Fortunately, from recent reports, many of these matters may now have been resolved, but of course, that is too late for Robbins, who was making his independent labor of love four years ago.
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As labor strikes break out throughout the country during the 1930's, the art & theater world of New York City is a growing cultural revolution.More at HotMovieSale.com
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