Product Details

• Actors: Hank Azaria, Bob Balaban, Jack Black, Rubén Blades, Joan Cusack
• Format: Closed-captioned, Color, NTSC
• Language: English, Italian
• Rated: R (Restricted)
• Number of tapes: 1
• Studio: Walt Disney Video
• VHS Release Date: October 8, 2002
• Run Time: 132 minutes
• Average Customer Review: 3.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (62 customer reviews)
• ASIN: 6305810079
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #225,743 in Movies & TV (See Top 100 in Movies & TV)

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com

"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. The songs are by Blitzstein, and the character-rich cast also features Vanessa Redgrave, Susan Sarandon, John Turturro, Emily Watson, and Philip Baker Hall. --Sean Axmaker

From The New Yorker

In 1937, Orson Welles and John Houseman tried-and, just barely, succeeded-in putting on Marc Blitzstein's "The Cradle Will Rock," a musical drama about prostitutes, unions, and a lot of other things that musicals were never meant to mention. Tim Robbins's picture-his most crowded, and probably his best to date-tells the story, or the interlocking stories, of that supercharged age. Houseman (Cary Elwes) and Welles (Angus Macfadyen) are merely part of the procession; we also get the saga of Nelson Rockefeller (John Cusack) paying Diego Rivera (Ruben Blades) to paint a giant mural and then having it destroyed. As if in homage to that lost work, Robbins operates on the mural principle, moving gaily and with high technical fluency from penniless actors (John Turturro and Emily Watson) to sincere socialites like Countess La Grange (Vanessa Redgrave) and a ravishing Fascist named Margherita Sarfatti (Susan Sarandon). It could have been a mess, and there are patches where Robbins's inspiration wears a little thin; yet, all in all, his ambitious tolerance pays off, and you are happy to be hauled toward the grand-and unashamedly theatrical-finale. With Joan Cusack and Bill Murray as bashful anti-Communists, Hank Azaria as Blitzstein, and-best of all-Cherry Jones as Hallie Flanagan, the smiling mainstay of the Federal Theatre in its darkest hour. -Anthony Lane
Copyright © 2006 The New Yorker

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

15 of 16 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Dance of the Dialectics, July 21, 2005

By 

Glenn A. Buttkus (Sumner, WA USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Cradle Will Rock (DVD)

The time was 1936-the painful apex of the Great Depression. This was the world inhabited by the plethora of characters in this film. Most of them were real people-augmented by fictional counterparts. Composer Marc Blitzstein was real-as was his Brechtian musical. Its opening night is still considered the most extraordinary night in the history of American theatre. Rockefeller, Hearst, Diego Rivera, Orson Welles, and John Houseman were all real-and they did have a struggle with Actor's Equity and Federal Theatre Project (1935-39).

Tim Robbins, director, kept the film moving at a frenetic pace-flowing smoothly-overlapping several sub-plots and vignettes-and pulling it all together for the opening night of the landmark Marxist musical play. He cast his lovely lady-Susan Sarandon, in the small part of Mussolini's mistress Margherita. She shined as usual. Hank Azaria was very intense and effective as the composer Blitzstein-who heard "music" while immersed in the strife of the times. Ruben Blades played the artist Diego Rivera quite effectively-but that part will always belong to Alfred Molina after his turn in FRIDA (2002). John Cusack played NY mayor Nelson Rockefeller. Angus MacFadyen hammed it up a bit much as the young tiger-Orson Welles. Carey Elwes played John Houseman with a bit of a limp wrist. Cherry Jones was very good as Hallie Flanagan-head of the FTP. Vanessa Redgrave had a ball playing Countess LaGrange. Philip Baker Hall was the fictitious steel magnate-Gray Mathers. Bill Murray did a grand job playing ventriloquist-Tommy Crickshaw. Joan Cusack was prissy-good as muckraker Hazel Huffman. Emily Watson lifted our spirits playing down-on-her-luck Olive Stanton. John Turturro stood out as the young actor and family man-Aldo Silvano. The supporting cast was huge. It included Bernard Hughes, John Carpenter, Gretchen Mol, Jack Black, Paul Giamatti, Bob Balaban, and Harris Yulin.

Robbins has created an epic film with multiple narrative threads-endeavoring to encapsulate an entire world in turmoil-and set it to music. He adopted the point of view of the artist-the prince of players at the head of his troupe of swirling acrobats, jugglers, singers and actors. But when these many plot lines and battalions of characters are thoroughly mixed-and the denouement emerges-he pulled everything together into a precarious balance-performing a kind of performance magic. Based on the film's BO records (modest revenues)-a lot of people out there did not have the patience, education, stamina, or motivation to hold on for the full ride. It is not a film for the faint of focus. It takes a throbbing love of theatre and film to ride it full-tilt to the final buzzer and roll of credits.

31 of 37 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars compelling drama, July 23, 2000

By 

Roland E. Zwick (Valencia, Ca USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Cradle Will Rock (DVD)

Although ultraconservatives will undoubtedly dismiss `The Cradle Will Rock' as blatant leftwing propaganda, the rest of us will see it as a fascinating rumination on the intricate relationship that has always existed between politics and art. Writer/director Tim Robbins, whose left-leaning sympathies are common knowledge in the film industry, has managed to create a screenplay of amazing complexity and depth, functioning on an enormous number of levels - political, historical, aesthetic, personal - without ever losing clarity and focus. He has set up a dizzying array of characters, yet each one is fleshed out with enough depth and particularity to make him or her a vital part of the overall tapestry.

Set in the turbulent 1930's, Robbins' tale focuses on the National Theatre Company, an organization set up by Roosevelt during the Depression to provide out-of-work artists a vehicle through which to ply their trade and culture-starved audiences a chance to revel in the glories of live theatrical performances. Unfortunately, it was also a time of great civil and political upheaval, with Communism and Fascism battling for supremacy abroad and many Americans divided along similar lines in their loyalties. With passions running deep, it was only a matter of time before many in the United States Congress began suspecting the NTC of Communist sympathizing - and it was a short road from there to the eventual dismemberment of the organization. The film centers on the production of a controversial musical play called `The Cradle Will Rock' that portrays the glorious coming of unionism to a steel factory, a scenario that parallels the events in the lives of several of the characters in the film.

Given this fascinating historical background, Robbins has filled his film with a rich assortment of characters, from Orson Welles, as a fledgling young actor who sees unions as the ruination of artistic purity, to Nelson Rockefeller, as a well-meaning art patron who balks at the mural Diego Rivera has painted for him only after Rivera refuses to remove the image of Lenin from Rockefeller's monument-to-capitalism lobby. In fact, the cast of characters is so enormous, with each one taking a crucial part in the narrative proceedings, that it is quite impossible to mention them all here. Suffice it to say that Robbins covers the social spectrum from industrialists and capitalists to union workers and the unemployed, from sympathetic patrons and patronesses to the little people eager to root out the seeds of Communism even at the expense of their own ostracism. And not a one is uninteresting.

Robbins has assembled an all-star cast that reads like a who's who of contemporary movie acting (albeit of a non-blockbuster variety). Although at the beginning of the film, the casting of such familiar faces seems a bit disconcerting - leading to what critic Judith Crist refers to as the `hey there' syndrome, i.e. destroying the verisimilitude of a work by parading too many recognizable people before the camera - this technique actually helps the audience to differentiate the many characters who might otherwise pass by in a confusing and disorienting blur. Hank Azaria, Ruben Blades, John Cusack, Joan Cusack, Cary Elwes, Bill Murray, Vanessa Redgrave, Susan Sarandon, John Turturro and Emily Watson comprise this truly fine cast.

Liberal as his leanings might be, Robbins is able to focus on the bitter ironies that abound on both sides of the political spectrum. For instance, while Susan Sarandon portrays a Jewish ally of Mussolini, abandoning her pro-worker principles to act as his capitalist representative in the States, Ruben Blades plays a Diego Rivera who has subordinated - if only temporarily - his own revolutionary ethos to the power of the almighty buck. Also, there is a certain paradox to the fact that, when the government has decreed the theater closed and thereby forbidden the premiere performance of the play, it is the actors' UNION that threatens the performers with firing if they carry out their plan to stage it furtively. Robbins is even somewhat evenhanded in his treatment of the `enemy' - the rich capitalists and the anti-communist members of the theatre organization - portraying them with good-natured humor and pathos. Joan Cusack, as a clerk at the employment office and Bill Murray, as a vaudeville ventriloquist, seem like decent people, only hopelessly misguided and lonely. (Unfortunately, Murray's sudden change of heart at the end seems inexplicable and unmotivated). As for the elite in the story, Robbins does a lovely job of spoofery at the end of the film; as the play is finally being performed at a nearby theatre - representing the triumph both on stage and in the world at large of the common man over the oppressive tyrants of industry - the tycoons, dressed in masquerade ball costumes of the 18th Century aristocracy and Catholic hierarchy, mull over their plans to retain control of the art world by bankrolling only those paintings depicting the scenes of utmost blandness and banality. Thus, these men of corporate power are portrayed more as amusingly quaint pests than malevolent or malicious despots.

There is certainly no denying that `The Cradle Will Rock' is, at heart, a bit of a leftwing diatribe. However, it is not a cruel or unreasonable one. And Tim Robbins' extraordinary skills as both a storyteller and filmmaker make this clearly one of the most interesting and impressive films of 1999.

11 of 13 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Will Rock You... Awake!, January 16, 2003

By 

Ronald Bruce Meyer (Bethesda, MD United States) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Cradle Will Rock (DVD)

Where is class warfare now that we need it? In the 1930s, when most decent people feared a Communist in every closet, no one thought twice about the fascists and their capitalist allies despoiling the commons. Into this time stepped the

Federal Theater Project (an offshoot of the New Deal's Works Progress Administration), which provided outlet and employment for Depression-era artists. Too bad they were Socialists, too. If you don't know the history of the period, you'll miss a lot of this fascinating story. Cradle Will Rock reflects the title of an FTP production, a real musical written by the real-life playwright Marc Blitzstein (played by Hank Azaria).The anti-communist Dies Commission tried to close down the FTP because it criticized capitalism and harbored Communists. But The Cradle Will Rock opens defiantly in another venue, on June 16, 1937, when the original theatre is padlocked.

Getting to opening night is a fascinating, serpentine historical journey. Imagine this mix of personalities: Orson Welles (Angus Macfadyen) crossing creative swords with John Houseman (Cary Elwes), Nelson Rockefeller (John Cusack) trying to temper the revolutionist artist Diego Rivera (Ruben Blades) - a confrontation played somewhat better in Frida. And then there were other, lesser-known and fictional, characters, such as real-life actress Olive Stanton (Emily Watson), pining for a role; real-life Margherita Sarfatti (Susan Sarandon), passing the hat among capitalists like fictional steel magnate Gray Mathers (Philip Baker Hall) to support the fascist Mussolini; fictional actor Aldo Silvano (John Turturro), balancing his socialist theatre aspirations against his pro-fascist family; and the FTP director and advocate, Hallie Flanagan (Cherry Jones), who fights the good fight for survival against the Dies Committee and do-gooder Hazel Huffman (Joan Cusack). (Huffman is lusted after by jaded ventriloquist Tommy Crickshaw, played by Bill Murray).

It is gratifying to know we can still get a pro-union film produced in this country, even though a lot of films escape to Canada to avoid union rules and negotiated pay rates. Just to give you an example of why rights for workers are necessary, here is an excerpt from a 23 December 2002 news story:

"Last week a jury confirmed what labor activists have argued for years - Wal-Mart is a corporate criminal making its profits by illegally breaking wage and labor laws: `In the lawsuit, 400 current and former employees from 18 stores in Oregon accused the company of violating federal and state wage laws by systematically pressuring them to work unpaid overtime.' And this case is just one example, as Wal-Mart has been quietly settling other lawsuits by employees across the country. Globally, Wal-Mart's drive for low wages extends to contracting with sweatshops in developing nations that systematically violate human rights and workers rights."

Writer-director Tim Robbins has venerable liberal credentials, dating to the wicked satire Bob Roberts (1992), and he juggles all of these story lines with consummate skill. He and his excellent cast capture the excitement of putting on a show that might actually change minds, rather than just bring in spare change. There was a time in American history when some people were paying attention to what's good for American people rather than just American corporations. Cradle Will Rock is meant to rock you, not to sleep, as most entertainment does, but wide awake.