Anyone who has ever seen a movie based on a book he or she enjoyed has experienced the disappointment of realizing the book was better. The book is almost always better. This holds true so often that film buffs can rattle off the few famous exceptions: The Godfather, Jaws, The Princess Bride, etc.

Ragtime, released 27 years ago this week, was not one of those exceptions. Based on E.L. Doctorow's highly acclaimed 1975 novel (a New York Times #1 best seller for 13 weeks), it's a prime example of a movie that's reasonably good on its own merits but profoundly disappointing if you've read the book. "How could they leave out So-and-So?" you holler at the screen, annoying your fellow audience members. "Why did they delete the such-and-such subplot?!"

The novel spans the first two decades of the 20th century, with made-up characters mingling with real people. Part of its intellectual charm is that it lets modern readers marvel at the cavalcade of legendary personalities who were contemporaries of one another: Henry Ford, Harry Houdini, J.P. Morgan, Booker T. Washington, Sigmund Freud, Carl Jung, anarchist Emma Goldman, and North Pole explorer Admiral Peary, to name a few. All of these and more interact plausibly with the novel's fictional characters, not in cheesy ways, as in some stories (cough ... Forrest Gump ... cough). Doctorow suggests that while the next decade, "the Jazz Age," is generally considered the pivotal moment in pre-World War II America, it was really this earlier period, characterized by a different style of music, that shaped and defined our 20th-century culture. (See this essay for more on that aspect of Ragtime.)

It's fun to think: If you were writing a novel like this set in the early 21st century, which titans of industry, entertainment, and politics would you have to include? George W. Bush, Barack Obama, Bill Gates, Will Smith, Tom Cruise, and Britney Spears come to mind -- but with the exception of Obama, do any of them really seem like they'll still be considered historically "important" a hundred years from now? Are any of today's public figures changing the world the way Henry Ford and Sigmund Freud did? That's something to think about, anyway.

But back to the matter at hand: Where the novel Ragtime was notable for its thoughtful mixing of fact and fiction, the movie Ragtime simplified itself by eliminating most of the historical figures. That's right -- the very thing that made the book noteworthy is what the filmmakers stripped away. You can see why the word "disappointing" comes to mind.

It almost didn't happen that way. Robert Altman, the man behind Nashville and M*A*S*H*, was originally attached to direct Ragtime, and he'd have been perfect for its tapestry of characters who weave in and out of each other's lives. Doctorow wrote a screenplay adaptation for Altman, but it was intended as a six-hour film or TV miniseries, and the project was scrapped. Instead, Milos Forman, who had earned an Oscar for One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest and a lot of scorn for the flop Hair, was brought on to make a more conventional film, with his Hair screenwriter, Michael Weller, doing the adapting. It might go without saying that Doctorow did not care for the final product.

The book focused on three groups of early-20th-century Americans: a well-to-do WASP family with characters generically named Father, Mother, and Mother's Younger Brother; a black pianist named Coalhouse Walker, his girlfriend Sarah, and the child they had together; and Tateh, a Jewish immigrant trying to find work in New York City. The film includes all three but focuses on Coalhouse Walker, whose story finds him taking a radical stand against racism and injustice after a crew of ignorant firemen vandalize his car and humiliate him.

Forman, whose parents were killed by the Nazis, grew up in Czechoslovakia under harsh Communist rule. He says in a featurette on the Ragtime DVD that Coalhouse's story spoke to him directly, particularly the scene in which Coalhouse must choose whether to swallow his pride and accept injustice or fight a battle that he knows will almost certainly end badly for him. "In Czechoslovakia, 'swallow your pride' is your everyday food," Forman says. He liked that Coalhouse had had enough.

Coalhouse is played by Howard E. Rollins Jr. in an Oscar-nominated performance that even the film's detractors admired. (Roger Ebert was able to overlook the film's deviations from the book and adore it on its own merits, while the New York Times' Vincent Canby took the movie to task for rushing through some subplots while cutting others altogether. But they both acknowledged the terrific acting.) If it was necessary to give two of the book's major stories the short shrift in order to focus on the third, Forman made the right choice in picking the one he was most personally invested in, and also in finding an actor (virtually unknown at the time) who could carry the film with such power and dignity.

Being a period piece, it doesn't matter much that the film was made 27 years ago. The production design is beautiful, and whatever charms the movie had in 1981 are surely just as strong now. It has early-career appearances by Jeff Daniels, Samuel L. Jackson, Fran Drescher, and John Ratzenberger, and it has James Cagney's final film performance (which he came out of retirement to do). It's only fans of the book who should steer clear of it.

I wonder if karma punished Ragtime for its offenses against literature. The movie earned eight Oscar nominations, but lost in every single category. That's not a record, but it's close. Two of those nominations, in the Original Score and Original Song categories, were for Randy Newman, thus launching a losing streak for him that spanned 20 years and 15 nominations. The film made less than $20 million at the box office and, despite those Oscar nominations, has now largely been forgotten. Meanwhile, the 1998 Broadway musical based on the book -- which is much more faithful to it, vastly superior to the movie, and endorsed by Doctorow -- earned 12 Tony nominations, won four of them, and has endured as a favorite among regional theater companies. Some adaptations work, and some don't.

FROM THE TIME CAPSULE: When Ragtime was released 27 years ago this week, on Nov. 20, 1981...

• The year's top films to that point, Raiders of the Lost Ark and Superman II, both June releases, were still in theaters. On Golden Pond, which would eventually pass Superman II for 1981's #2 spot, was a few weeks from being released, as was Warren Beatty's Reds. The Evil Dead and Halloween II, both from October, were still scaring people's pants off.

• Luke and Laura's wedding on General Hospital had occurred four days earlier, the most-watched hour of daytime TV in history. In real life, Prince Charles and Lady Diana were newlyweds, having been married in July.

• TV shows The Fall Guy, Gimme a Break, and Entertainment Tonight had just premiered. Simon & Simon and Falcon Crest were within days of their debuts. The most popular shows on TV were Dallas and 60 Minutes.

• The top song on the Billboard Hot 100 chart had been Hall & Oates' "Private Eyes" for two weeks. It was about to be replaced by Olivia Newton-John's "Physical," which would hold the #1 spot for the rest of the year and well into January.

• The first female U.S. Supreme Court justice, Sandra Day O'Connor, had been on the job less than two months.

• Richard Simmons' Never-Say-Diet Book was #1 on the New York Times best seller non-fiction list. For fiction, the top book was Colleen McCullough's An Indecent Obsession. Stephen King's Cujo was #4.

• Elijah Wood, Hayden Christensen, Jessica Alba, Natalie Portman, Nicole Richie, Jonathan Taylor Thomas, Justin Timberlake, and Jennifer Hudson were all less than a year old. So was MTV. So was the band Metallica, which formed in October. George W. Bush's twin daughters, Jenna and Barbara, had five days left to gestate, while their soul mate Britney Spears had about two weeks.

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"Eric's Time Capsule" appears every Monday at Film.com. You can visit Eric at his website, where there's always a little syncopation to get your toes a-tappin'.

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