IMDb user comments for Scott Joplin (1977)
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More fiction than fact, but the music makes it worthwhile, 29 July 2004
Author:
rnewstead from Appleton, WI
The man who gave us the Maple Leaf Rag and the Entertainer, Scott
Joplin, once said that he would not become known until fifty years
after his death.
He wasn't off by much--it took fifty-six. In 1973, Marvin Hamlisch used
the then-largely unknown Joplin's music in the movie "The Sting,"
spurring a ragtime revival and a renewed interest in Joplin
specifically. Joplin's work received long-overdue attention from music
scholars, and he was awarded a posthumous Pulitzer for his body of
work, some fifty known rags, waltzes, marches--and one opera,
Treemonisha.
This movie rode the wave of his renewed popularity, but plays so loose
with the facts of his life that we end up knowing little more about
him. Billy Dee Williams is a superb Joplin, as is Art Carney as his
publisher, John Stark. But the movie either ignores or glosses over
certain details, such as Joplin's longtime friendship and collaboration
with Scott Hayden. Hayden is not even mentioned in the film, which
prefers to focus on Joplin and the tragic, unsung musical genius Louis
Chauvin, who Joplin barely knew. Chauvin in his prime would compose
beautiful rags on the spot, never to be heard again, because he could
not write them down. The movie implies they were friends from the
earliest days, which they were not. They did collaborate on one piece,
"Heliotrope Bouquet", when Chauvin was dying and no longer able to
play--this the movie gets right.
It also touches on the growing animosity between Joplin and Stark, but
this too is sugarcoated. The movie implies they reconciled, which in
reality never happened.
Yet the movie is worth seeing if only for one thing--the wonderful,
brooding music of a man for whom recognition was long overdue.
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