In the book, the father was portrayed as basically a wimp. In the movie, the father, portrayed by Mandy Patinkin, is barreling with masculine exuberance, even on the way to the electric chair. I think this was a good change, I don't think the movie would have worked otherwise. This is the main change I remember from the book to the movie.
shareits been a while since i read the book, but i cant get into the movie. even though the screen play is written by doctorow it doesnt seem as interesting. perhaps i just prefer his writing style to his screenplay. however, in the book, the mothers strength in contrast to the fathers reluctance to die for a crime neither of them committed, creates a dichotomy which quite intruiging, after all dont forget the father's committment to self-sacrifice on the bus. He is not afraid to suffer for his beliefs, he is simply reluctant to die for something he never did.
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The Rosenbergs were guilty of espionage in War time and deserved exactly what they got.
shareWrong, wrong, wrong. First of all, the United States was not at war with the Soviet Union. Secondly, as the VENONA transcripts revealed, Ethel Rosenberg was considered by the Soviets to be so uninvolved in any actual espionage work, they didn't even bother to give her a code name. Even Julius was involved only by way of making the introduction of his wife's brother-in-law, David Greenglass, to the Soviet agents. The information Greenglass passed to the Soviet spy (at a house in Albuquerque about a mile from where I'm sitting now) was of hardly any value to the Soviet nuclear program, almost useless.
Several other atomic spies, especially Klaus Fuchs and Ted Hall, provided far more usable information to the Soviets than did the Rosenberg-Greenglass-Sobell ring, but after the Cold War ended and the former KGB began opening their files, it began looking more and more like all the American spies were good for, from Stalin's perspective, was corroborating the work of the Soviets' own scientists, thus pushing up the date at which they acquired usable nuclear weapons by, what, two months? Three months? As compared to when they would have had the bomb with no help whatsoever from espionage activities in America and Britain, not very long at all.
At most, Julius Rosenberg was guilty of intending to do serious damage to the West's monopoly on nuclear weapons. Well, I take the same attitude as Ted Hall's wife does: is that all ya got? Just think what unbearable nuclear holocausts might have happened if the West hadn't lost our monopoly. She thinks her late husband was a hero for helping break the monopoly. So do I.
But as for Ethel, she was pretty close to completely innocent, and her coward of a brother-in-law murdered her by lying through his teeth about it on the witness stand.
"I don't deduce, I observe."