By Robert Hofler

The new revival of the 1998 Broadway musical “Ragtime” gives us a good idea of what the 1981 film adaptation of E. L. Doctorow’s critically acclaimed 1975 bestseller would have been like if Steven Spielberg had directed it — and not Milos Forman.

At the time, many critics felt and wrote that the movie version of “Ragtime” should have been assigned to Robert Altman. Doctorow’s profile of a racially diverse America and its newest immigrants is not so much panoramic as it is kaleidoscopic. Doctorow created improbable but fascinating links between real people like illusionist Harry Houdini and activist Emma Goldman and fictional characters like ragtime composer Coalhouse Walker Jr., who has impregnated a desperate young Black woman, Sarah, who is essentially adopted, along with her baby, by a rich white woman called Mother.