E.L. Doctorow’s film legacy, from ‘Hard Times’ to ‘Ragtime’

Novelist E.L. Doctorow, who died Tuesday from complications of lung cancer, was a quintessentially American storyteller who weaved together history and fiction as he explored and reinterpreted our national myth.

As is often the case with prominent authors, his works inspired several adaptations on film, including “Ragtime,” “Daniel” and “Billy Bathgate.” And though the films based on Doctorow’s work vary in quality, they serve to illuminate the inherent challenges and potential rewards of translating dense historical fiction to the screen.

Doctorow’s 1960 debut novel, “Welcome to Hard Times,” was his first to be turned into a film. Directed by Burt Kennedy and starring Henry Fonda, it had the outward appearance of an old-fashioned western but retained the convention-upending core of Doctorow’s book, a meditation on the inescapable, inscrutable nature of evil. Alas, audiences didn’t take kindly to a nihilistic frontier tale with a cowardly protagonist, and reviews were decidedly mixed.

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Fonda would later admit that he and Kennedy “went into it with a great deal of enthusiasm, meaning we committed ourselves to the project based on the strength of our mutual enthusiasm for the book. ... It didn’t work as a picture.”

Director Robert Benton’s 1991 take on Doctorow’s gangster tale “Billy Bathgate” also had trouble capturing the spark of its source material, despite the presence of such talented actors as Dustin Hoffman and Nicole Kidman.

The problem, Times film critic Kenneth Turan wrote at the time, was that “the filmmakers didn’t stop to understand what made the book special. It does not, frankly, have a great plot, or characters who, except in the most literal way, grab you by the throat. What it does have is elegant, even poetic words, words that flow in a carefully burnished monologue from Billy Bathgate himself.” What works on the page “never even comes close to catching fire” on the screen, Turan said.

If Doctorow’s layered literary works resisted smooth adaptation -- other uneven examples include Sidney Lumet’s “Daniel,” based on “The Book of Daniel,” and Dan Ireland’s “Jolene,” based on a short story -- Milos Forman came closest to pulling off the feat with “Ragtime.”

A sprawling tale set in turn-of-the-century New York City, Forman’s “Ragtime” (adapted by Michael Weller) can be unwieldy, but the deep ensemble cast -- including James Cagney in his final film, Mandy Patinkin, Howard Rollins and Elizabeth McGovern -- helps hold it together. Although “Ragtime” disappointed at the box office, it earned eight Oscar nominations.

Doctorow, for his part, was never much a fan of the movies made from his books. But he did once admit in a Paris Review interview that “writing is immensely difficult.” Filmmaking, it turns out, can be pretty tough too.

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