SEEING RED.

Cradle Will Rock, Tim Robbins's true tale of the quashing of a gay composer's "commie" musical, is told with eye-popping passion

Cradle Will Rock

* Written and directed by Tim Robbins * Starring Hank Azaria, Bill Murray, Cherry Jones, Joan Cusack, Vanessa Redgrave, and Susan Sarandon * Touchstone Pictures

The FBI dossier on composer Marc Blitzstein read, "Wears mustache, horn-rimmed glasses, elongate, elongated slightly hooked nose, soft-spoken, theatrical mannerisms." If Blitzstein couldn't conceal his ethnicity, his brains, or his, um, mannerisms, he did manage to dwell successfully in two closets: He was privately a homosexual and secretly a communist. Artistically he represented a third closet: a Brechtian ideologue with Richard Rodgers aspirations. The composer of what many consider the great American opera, Regina (based on Lillian Hellman's The Little Foxes), Blitzstein rebelled against his privileged Philadelphia roots, believing that music should "have a social as well as artistic base ... and reach not only the select few, but the masses."

Fully in touch with his sexual leanings, in 1933 he nevertheless married the German writer Eva Goldbeck, who proved a staunch ally. Their time together was brief: She suffered from breast cancer and ultimately died of anorexia in 1936. (Blitzstein was killed in a 1964 mugging while on holiday in Martinique, at the hands of three Portuguese sailors, one of whom he had tried to pick up.)

It was in mourning for Eva that he wrote The Cradle Will Rock, a landmark presentation of the Federal Theatre Project--itself an ill-starred Works Progress Administration enterprise intended to keep theater artists off the unemployment lines. This incendiary musical play, with its bare-bones staging, pro-worker sentiments, and thumb-nosing approach to musical scoring, caught the unionist spirit of the day as it precipitated the downfall of the Federal Theatre Project amid suspicion of communist propagandizing.

The sensational opening night of Blitzstein's populist tour de force provides an apt climax for Cradle Will Rock, Tim Robbins's boisterously overstuffed movie valentine to the renegade zeitgeist of the mid '30s. Distributed by Disney for God's sake, the film boasts the sort of lush period detailing that company was known for in the heyday of Hayley Mills--and the most daunting epic ensemble since John Wayne and a thousand stars stormed the beaches of Normandy in Fox's The Longest Day.

Our favorite commie-in-the-Hollywood-pile, Robbins gives us his most ebullient tract yet with this three-ring political circus. In center ring are Blitzstein (Hank Azaria) and the tumultuous mounting of Cradle by a fire-breathing young Orson Welles (Angus Macfadyen) and his fussbudget collaborator, John Houseman (Cary Elwes).

In second ring are the efforts by a WPA red basher (Joan Cusack) to undermine the production; a pathetic ventriloquist (Bill Murray) who is tutoring two inept, gay Edgar Bergen wanna-bes; and the congressional stooges of the U.S. government. Countering this attack is an eccentric English arts patron (Vanessa Redgrave, performing as if on uppers) and Federal Theatre honcho Hallie Flanagan (the divine Cherry Jones, standing out from the throngs with gravity and grace).

Taking third ring is the reflexive struggle of painter Diego Rivera (Ruben Blades) to mount a mural for Nelson Rockefeller (John Cusack) without compromising his political ideals to corporate interests.

Lest we wonder what any of this has to do with us, Robbins opens with a newsreel about Hitler's anti-decadent-art campaign (listening up, congressional Republicans?) and closes with a shot of Times Square today, all agleam with-corporate billboards. Given his obvious sympathies and his panoramic focus, Robbins is reasonably humane to the philistines and, with the possible exception of Frida Kahlo, resistant to mere name-dropping (or, since this is a film, face-dropping).

The picture winds down with sledgehammer swipes at Rivera's mural, and there will inevitably be those who accuse Robbins of sledge--hammer tactics. But he conveys such an unbridled respect for the lost potential of theater to electrify and galvanize, such an unapologetic lefty voice amid the cautious Forrest Gump-ing of commercial filmmaking, that one is inclined to forgive Robbins his sins and salute his accomplishments. Cradle Will Rock kicks ass.

Stuart is film critic and senior film writer at Newsday.

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