The Question of the Cradle.

• Author: McKissack, Fred

Tim Robbins has Has starred in a couple of Robert Altman's films, and you can tell he learned a thing or two about the craft of directing. His Cradle Will Rock has many plot strands that twist into a good story. Set in 1936, it concerns the making of Marc Blitzstein's eponymous musical of greed, unionism, and, alas, hope. The musical was being directed by Orson Welles (played by Angus MacFadyen) and produced by John Houseman (Cary Elwes) when the Works Progress Administration yanked funding for it at the last minute and prohibited its showing. Blitzstein's theater was padlocked, but not to be denied, he and the cast marched to a different theater and performed the show, with the actors singing their parts from the audience.

This alone would be a film worth making. But Robbins expands his canvas to bring in the story of the beleaguered but determined Federal Theater Project director, Hallie Flanagan (played by Cherry Jones), and an account of Nelson Rockefeller's commission of a mural by Diego Rivera (John Cusack as Rockefeller and Ruben Blades as Rivera are wonderful, incidentally).

Along the way, we see homeless Olive Stanton (Emily Watson) being chased out of a Manhattan movie theater. She runs past Hazel Huffman (Joan Cusack), a Federal Theater Project employment clerk, who is putting up fliers in search of fellow anti-communists. Huffman, with the sort of reluctant pity one might see from a stick-in-the-mud aunt who doesn't understand how you've made it this far in the world, gets Olive a job as a stagehand with Orson Welles's theater company. It is Huffman's testimony before Congress about communists that undermines the Federal Theater Project.

Cradle Will Rock is well written, well directed, and well acted, and Robbins entertains large themes here, including the role of political art, and the heavy hand of government censorship.

But for me the film comes down to this: What price are people--both strident leftists and so-called patriots--willing to sell themselves out for in order to meet their goals? Rockefeller, whose own self-important brilliance as a patron of the arts is only outshone by his teeth and the sun, hires Rivera, who also is arrogant and egotistical. This pairing is both humorous and revealing. While Rivera is the "good guy" for painting a mural that depicts the valiant workers' struggle, the excesses of the wealthy, and a heroic Lenin, you have to wonder why he accepts the money from Rockefeller. Can you take tainted...