| Movie Review | The Journal of American History, 88.3

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| Movie Review | The Journal of American History, 88.3 | The History Cooperative

Movie Review

Cradle Will Rock. Dir. by Tim Robbins. Touchstone Pictures, 1999. 134 mins.

Cradle Will Rock is a labor of love produced by the activist actor-filmmaker Tim Robbins, who attempts to capture the mood of despair in depressionera America as well as the new possibilities generated by such New Deal programs as the Federal Theater Project (FTP) of the Works Progress Administration (WPA). Robbins focuses his film on the Orson Welles (Angus MacFadyen) and John Houseman (Cary Elwes) production of Marc Blitzstein's (Hank Azaria) musical Cradle Will Rock, chronicling the struggles of workers in the mythical city of Steeltown. The film culminates with Cradle's controversial 1937 premiere at the New York City Venice Theatre after efforts to cancel the production due to congressional opposition. Defying a ban from Actors' Equity, the performers and Blitzstein complete the show, combining art and reality in a heroic struggle against the forces of greed and censorship. 1

The villain in Robbins's film is the House Committee on Un-American Activities (HUAC) and its chairman, Martin Dies (Harris Yulin), who investigate allegations of Communist influence within the FTP provided by the vaudeville ventriloquist Tommy Crickshaw (a fictional character portrayed by Bill Murray) and a disgruntled WPA clerk, Hazel Huffman (Joan Cusack). The FTP is ably defended by its director, Hallie Flanagan (Cherry Jones), whose memoir Arena (1940) was influential in Robbins's screenplay. Nevertheless, congressional funding for the FTP was discontinued in the spring of 1939, represented visually in the film by a funeral procession for an FTP children's show production of Pinocchio. . . .

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