'Younger Brother' is just one of the unnamed characters who feature as part of a springboard into subsequent storyline which sees the arrival of a newborn black baby on the grounds of the vast house he lives in alongside his older older sibling aka 'Father' (James Olson) and his wife, 'Mother' (Mary Steenburgen) The police track down the baby's mother in the neighbourhood and 'Mother' expresses a wish to take them both in, with the woman as their maid and the child seemingly as a surrogate babe of her own. Desperate, she dumps 'Younger Brother' and falls back on her previous experience, setting her sights on the bright lights of showbusiness.
Ragtime movie evelyn nesbit full#
However her in-laws, having learnt she's been courted by the youngest son of a wealthy upstate business family (Brad Dourif) since the trial began, refuse to pay her the full amount and offer her a small sum on the proviso she signs divorce papers. Promised a million dollars, she testifies as such ensuring her husband avoids the electronic chair and is sent to an asylum instead. The lawyers for Thaw's family convince Evelyn to suggest her husband was driven to insanity because White had previously drugged, assaulted and abused her. Convinced White has corrupted Evelyn and humiliated his good name, Thaw attends the theatre one evening and publicly shoots White, killing him.
This is because the model for the statue was Thaw's wife Evelyn Nesbit (Elizabeth McGovern), a former chorus girl. The film opens with millionaire industrialist Harry Kendall Thaw (Robert Joy), making a scene when Standford White's latest creation, a nude statue on the roof of Madison Square Garden, is unveiled. Doctorow's 1975 best-selling and kaleidoscopic novel set in and around New York at the turn of the 20th century must have been like catching smoke.Ĭannily, Milos Forman chose to sift through the original narrative and focus specifically on what is essentially just two strands - the real-life incident of the murder of architect Standford White (played by no less an American icon than Norman Mailer) and what subsequently became known as 'the trial of the century', and the story of black pianist Coalhouse Walker, Jr and his desperate quest for justice after his new Model T Ford falls victim to the attentions of a racist clique of firemen - allowing other stories and characters from the novel such as historical figures like Harry Houdini, JP Morgan, Henry Ford, Sigmund Freud and President Teddy Roosevelt, and fictional characters like struggling Eastern European artist Tateh and the wealthy unnamed New Rochelle family, to fall a little by the wayside or be relegated to mere window dressing.
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