The cast is a wonder to behold, beginning with the return of James Cagney to the screen as Rheinlander Waldo, the police commissioner who has a final showdown with Coalhouse. Still, considered as pure Hollywood, ''Ragtime'' has plenty of solid surprises. Only the drama of Coalhouse Walker Jr., the embittered black man, remains to sum up the nastiest nuances of the Northeastern United States in the early 20th century. But they were part and parcel of their period, and their omission from the film reduces a potentially sweeping tapestry to something more like mere nostalgia. It's not that these people and causes need to be sung and celebrated in what is basically an entertainment movie. Tateh is on board, but his radical socialism is barely hinted at, and we never hear of the bloody New England strike that is one of the novel's most dramatic episodes. While the movie has received some critical praise for its social awareness and political consciousness, most of Doctorow's strongest sociopolitical points have been excised. The hand of Hollywood can be clearly felt in the adaptation of the story, however. The screenplay, by Michael Weller, is a substantial achievement in its own right, incorporating a remarkable number of the book's threads and themes, and largely cleaning up the yarn in the process, except for a few rough words and a brief nude scene. Yet it's the most consistently crafted and earnestly inspired Forman project in quite a while, and that is cause for celebration, if not unbounded joy. Commenting on Forman's earlier work, his colleague, writer? Buck Henry, recently praised it for capturing ''behavior'' rather than ''acting.'' The same can't be said for ''Ragtime,'' big and brassy as it is. It is probably too late to hope Forman will return to the exquisitely intelligent and delicately understated style he developed in his best Czech and early Hollywood work, such as ''The Firemen's Ball'' and ''Taking Off.'' In his subsequent (and best-known) movies, he has sold out artistically - retaining his energy and technical command but turning his attention toward plot pyrotechnics rather than character development. Milos Forman then took charge - a native of Czechoslovakia whose credits include such quintessentially American films as ''One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest'' and ''Hair.'' Robert Altman, master of the overstuffed American myth-movie, wanted to bring it to the screen, but the project fell through. Its plot is complicated, its characters are numerous, its narration is digressive and occasionally raunchy. But it posed considerable problems for would-be filmmakers. It's a colorful book, and its popularity made it a natural for Hollywood treatment. Others are fictitious, but seem just as typical of their time and place - from the immigrant Tateh, who almost literally makes riches out of rags, to the black Coalhouse Walker Jr., whose wounded pride leads him to acts of violent revolution. Many of its characters are familiar figures in the myth and history of the United States, from showman Harry Houdini to anarchist Emma Goldman. Doctorow, which takes place around New York in 1906.
It's hard to imagine a more American novel than ''Ragtime,'' by E.
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