Cradle Will Rock (1999)

1999 · Movie · 132 min. · United States

Cradle Will Rock (1999)
Cradle Will Rock (1999) YouTube
Drama Stage Play Ensemble Film

"Based on a (mostly) true story," according to the opening titles, Tim Robbins's dazzling dramatization of one of the great stories in American theater indeed takes a few liberties with history. Ostensibly the story of the mayhem surrounding Marc Blitzstein's worker's opera The Cradle Will Rock, directed by Orson Welles for the WPA at the height of the Depression, Robbins paints a veritable mural around this incident, a city alive with plotting industrialists (John Cusack as Nelson Rockefeller), radical artists (Ruben Blades's Diego Rivera), and struggling citizens (Bill Murray's frustrated vaudeville ventriloquist Tommy Crickshaw). Lightning strikes when the government closes the show before it even opens and the cast marches 20 blocks to an empty theater and tosses the staging aside to perform in the aisles, the balconies, and the seats. It's a rare moment of cinema capturing the immediacy and charge of live theater on the screen and it's the heart of Robbins's often exhilarating film. His heroes are Blitzstein (a warm, gently impassioned Hank Azaria) and cheery WPA Theater director Hallie Flanagan (Broadway star Cherry Jones), but in the process he snidely turns Welles and producer John Houseman into sour, silly caricatures. The stew of artistic creation and political action gets murky and at times contradictory, but vivid performances and Robbins' driving pace and staccato crosscutting keep it humming through even the most didactic moments.

Direction Tim Robbins

Cast Hank Azaria · Rubén Blades · Joan Cusack · John Cusack · Susan Sarandon · Vanessa Redgrave · John Turturro · Philip Baker Hall · Bill Murray · Emily Watson · Cherry Jones · Angus MacFadyen · Cary Elwes · Paul Giamatti · Jamey Sheridan · Bob Balaban · Jack Black · Kyle Gass · Barnard Hughes · Steven Tyler · Daniel Jenkins · Victoria Clark · Barbara Sukowa · Adele Robbins · Chris McKinney · Henry Stram · Lee Arenberg · Timothy Jerome

Soundtrack David Robbins

Screenplay Tim Robbins

Cinematography Jean-Yves Escoffier

Original title Cradle Will Rock

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6.8

3K votes (FilmAffinity)

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