Much of the movie "Daniel," which opened in New York last Friday, derives from the case of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, who were executed for atomic espionage conspiracy in 1953. How close is the film to history?

E. L. Doctorow and Sidney Lumet, executive producers of "Daniel," say that the Rosenberg case "inspired" both the film and Mr. Doctorow's 1971 novel, "The Book of Daniel," on which the film is based. But they assert: "There is no attempt here to be historically accurate."

Many artists have created a fictional world borrowing from - or changing history. Shakespeare and Tolstoy, among others, did so. However, the Rosenberg case is still close to the present, still has political impact and still arouses passions - witness current interest in two new books about the Rosenbergs with differing interpretations of recently released documents - and consequently it is especially important to separate fact from fiction in this instance.

Three questions come up: First, where does the film parallel or differ from the actual case? Second, does the film offer its own verdict of innocence or guilt? Third, does the film make any political statement?

To begin with, the movie tells the story of Paul and Rochelle Isaacson, who are executed after conviction for their conspiracy to commit atomic espionage. This drama is seen largely through the eyes of their children. The result is that the film is emotionally charged from the very start. But there are also a number of factual differences.

One major departure in the movie is the portrayal of the chief witness against the Isaacsons.

The Rosenbergs, the only Americans executed on a conspiracy conviction, had as their main accuser David Greenglass, Ethel Rosenberg's youngest brother. Mr. Greenglass testified that he gave Julius Rosenberg notes and sketches in January and September 1945 on the design of the implosion-principle atomic bomb which was later exploded over Nagasaki. Ethel, he said, typed up his handwritten notes in September. Before the trial he had denied any complicity by his sister.

Mr. Greenglass served nearly nine and a half years of his 15-year sentence. He was freed in 1960.

In the movie, the chief accuser is a dentist. who is a neighbor, and the audience is given no detailed information about what he testified concerning the alleged spying. We are told that the dentist, who is not a relative, names the fictional Isaacsons as principals after his own arrest.

Also in the movie, the Federal prosecutor and trial judge refer to the defendants' backgrounds as Communists - an inflammatory label at that time - to show "motivation." At their trial, the Rosenbergs invoked Constitutional privileges against self-incrimination and refused to talk about Communist affiliation.

There are also a number of major and minor differences between the Rosenbergs and the fictional Isaacsons. Julius Rosenberg had been a City College student during the Depression, as had the movie character, Paul Isaacson. Julius Rosenberg graduated with a degree in engineering in 1939. Ethel Rosenberg was not a fellow collegian as the character of Rochelle is in the movie; she went to work after graduating from high school.

In World War II, Julius Rosenberg was a civilian electronics inspector for the Army Signal Corps, rather than a uniformed pro-Soviet soldier, as is the movie character.

Julius Rosenberg was dismissed from his job in February 1915 as a security risk because he had been a member of the Communist Party which he denied in the Army investigation. No such episode or reference appears in the movie.

After the war, Julius Rosenberg became the co-owner of a Lower East Side machine shop with David Greenglass and two other men. The main character is the lone operator of a tiny radio sales and repair shop in Astoria, Queens.

Both the Isaacsons of the movie and the Rosenbergs lived in poverty. The Rosenbergs had an 11th-floor apartment in Knickerbocker Village, instead of the movie family's flat above the store.

There are significant differences between the real and the fictional children, too. The Rosenbergs had two sons - Michael, born in 1943, and Robert, born in 1947. Michael earned degrees from Swarthmore, Cambridge University in England and the University of Wisconsin. He is now a college teacher of economics.

Robert earned degrees from the University of Michigan and taught anthropology. Recently, he changed careers and began studying law.

The real sons use the surname Meeropol. They were legally adopted in 1957 by Abel Meeropol, a writer, and his wife, Anne, a teacher.

The brothers identified themselves publicly as the Rosenberg sons in 1973 when they sued the lawyer Louis Nizer over his book, "The Implosion Conspiracy." Their suit - later settled on terms not made public - charged copyright violation in the use of their parents' death-house letters, defamation and violation of privacy.

In the movie, one child is a girl, who becomes involved in antiwar demonstrations during the Vietnam war, and later advocates revolution. The older child, Daniel, is only moved to reexamine his parents' lives after his sister attempts suicide and later dies. There are other differences and similarities between the movie and the actual case.

The Rosenbergs' trial counsel was Emanuel H. Bloch. His defense effort was later decried by Rosenberg sympathizers for, in effect, agreeing that there had been a theft of important atomic secrets and for failing to cross-examine Harry Gold. Mr. Gold earlier had confessed to being a spy courier for Klaus Fuchs, a British physicist who admitted spying for the Soviet Union. Mr. Gold testified to once having received material from Mr. Greenglass.

In the movie, the defense lawyer's widow contends that the fictional Isaacsons used and destroyed other people. She also says that they stymied her husband, who defended them at the trial, by refusing to let other witnesses be called. The Rosenbergs, at their trial, were their only defense witnesses.

In the movie, the daughter of the chief prosecution witness says that the Isaacsons headed a spy network involving many things never disclosed at the trial. In the actual Rosenberg case, Federal atomic agency officials barred Mr. Greenglass from testifying about experiments on using smaller quantities of uranium or plutonium to make bombs. Federal investigators tried to find proof of wider espionage, but were not able to get sufficient proof to introduce it at the trial.

Does the movie decide on the innocence or guilt of the Isaacsons?

In the film, Daniel Isaacson tries but fails to find out if his parents were innocent or plotting to get defense secrets for the Soviet Union. He comes up with a theory that another couple might have been real spies, and that they were somehow protected and able to flee. The film leaves the issue unanswered.

The real Rosenberg sons wrote a book in 1975 called "We Are Your Sons: The Legacy of Ethel and Julius Rosenberg." In it, they insisted that their parents were innocent and "framed."

Since 1975, Michael and Robert Meeropol and their counsel, Marshall Perlin, have been suing various Government agencies under the Freedom of Information Act. The Government has released some 200,000 pages of documents so far, and the Meeropols have contended in Federal Court in Washington that perhaps 100,000 more pages remain to be released.

The film depicts a fictional reporter for the New York Times. He tells Daniel Isaacson that the trial case against his parents had no substance. The reporter says that an internal Justice Department memorandum - never released publicly - 'favors the defense."

Some such document actually did get released. But its conclusion was the reverse of the one referred to in the movie. The actual report, dated Nov. 7, 1957. analyzes challenges to the trial and sentence. Its author Benjamin F. Pollack, a Justice Department attorney, wrote that the record "establishes the guilt of the Rosenbergs beyond a reasonable doubt," even though it rested on only a few witnesses.

A new book, "The Rosenberg File: A Search for the Truth," by Ronald Radosh and Joyce Milton, makes use of some of the 200,000 pages of document recently released. It contends that Julius Rosenberg was "coordinator of an extensive espionage operation." Ethel Rosenberg, it argues, probably knew of and supported her husband's endeavors."

The book also says that another couple, Morris and Lona Cohen "vanished" from their New York apartment after the Rosenbergs' arrest, and later turned up in London as Peter and Helen Kroger. The Krogers were convicted by a British court in 1961 as part of a spy ring. They were traded to the Russians in 1965 in exchange for a British spy.

Mr. Radosh and Miss Milton say that the Federal Bureau of Investigation refuses to release files on the Cohen-Kroger couple.

On the other hand, Walter and Miriam Schneir, in a new version of their book, "Invitation to an Inquest," use the latest released Government documents to insist on the Rosenbergs' having been wrongly convicted.

The movie "Daniel" depicts electrocutions similar to those of the Rosenbergs. Julius Rosenberg collapsed and was dragged to the death chair. Ethel Rosenberg underwent three successive shocks, only to have two amazed physicians report her still alive. She was given two more high-voltage shocks, and then she died.

As to the film's aim, Mr. Doctorow and Mr. Lumet say that they want to show "three decades in the life of American dissent." They say that they explore "the effects of parents on children, of ideologies on life." They call their film "the story of two generations of a family whose ruling passion is not success or money or love, but social justice."

Politically, the movie harks back to Communist and other leftist demonstrations in 1938. It moves on to anti-Vietnam war protests of the 1960's. It winds up showing the half-million or more persons rallying in Central Park in 1982 against nuclear weapons.

Dissent gets a good play. The Communist demonstrations of the 1960's get equated with those of the Vietnam era. The film inevitably omits much history and ignores political or moral distinctions between various protest movements.

The movie's fictional Daniel starts out as a character disinterested and out of politics. At the end, Mr. Lumet says, "Daniel's salvation lies in a return to political action."

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This crude method of signaling the 'past' sets it off visually as not just history but a kind of prehistory, one already embalmed in amber, as it were, or encased in a text turning yellow with age. As a device, it would seem to contradict what is one of the central tenets of Doctorow's novel, a version of Forster's 'only connect'. This works out to be less the book's thesis than its passion and ultimately, its sense of frustration. Commenting on his parents' trial in the early 50s for having passed atom secrets to the Russians, Daniel is angered most that everyone, including his parents' counsel, accepted the judicial context (i.e., that some crime had been committed by somebody). He concludes: 'I am beginning to be intolerant of reformers ... I am beginning to be nauseated by men of good will. We are dealing here with a failure to make connections. The failure to make connections is complicity. Reform is complicity.' But a little earlier, he has observed: 'The radical discovers connections between available data and the root responsibility. Finally he connects everything ... Nothing is left outside the connections. At this point society becomes bored with the radical. Finally connected in his characterisation it has achieved the counter-insurgent rationale that allows it to destroy him. The radical is given the occasion for one last discovery - the connection between society and his death.'

Racked between these two perceptions The Book of Daniel does not so much make out the case for the Rosenbergs/ Isaacsons as it poses them as a case of the collective, collaborative delusion in which any individual is enlisted by his society ('The final existential condition is citizenship. Every man is the enemy of his own country ... All societies are armed societies. All citizens are soldiers. All governments stand ready to commit their citizens to death in the interest of their government'). It is a work of radical pessimism whose strength is its texture, a structure of ideas and a mood rather than a political case history in the conventional sense. It is also not a narrative in the conventional sense - and to their credit Lumet and Doctorow have preserved the fragmentation, the multiplicity of voices (Daniel now recites direct to camera Doctorow's interpolated history lessons on capital punishment as an instrument of class warfare). To an extent, though, they have been forced to pretend that there is a narrative basis, hence the stylisation of the past not only as something separate from the present but as a discrete area of investigation. Daniel (Timothy Hutton), a rootlessly angry young man in the late 60s, a rebel without a cause at a time when causes are all too ready to hand, now seems something of a film noir hero, a man who must unlock a secret in the past (the question of what his parents did or didn't do that resulted in their being executed as traitors) before his 'memory' - or, in this case, psychological wholeness - can be restored.

The trouble with the drift of the film in this direction is that the material with Daniel and his even more traumatised sister Susan (Amanda Plummer) works as a kind of political psychodrama - they are the most obvious casualties, as it were, of the depth charges set off in the national consciousness by the McCarthyite terror - but it doesn't supply the film with much narrative energy. Only late in the day does Daniel's rushing hither and you suggest that he is actually involved in a quest for the truth. Each tiny scene with one more witness to or commentator on his parents' tragedy (their lawyer's widow, who believes that they were guilty at least of allowing themselves to be used by others, the journalist who pooh-poohs the atom secrets charge but believes there is no smoke without some fire) conforms to the texture of Doctorow's novel. But it doesn't answer the need which the film has created for itself: a resolution of character through drama; a satisfactory definition, at least, of the central mystery which will allow the protagonist to learn and move on.

If this need does not exist in the novel it is because characters in a way don't exist. The book is full of vividly described landscapes and social history, largely reproduced in the film - the Bronx neighbourhood where the children grow up; the intense but contrasting involvement (his theoretical, hers pragmatic) of the parents, Paul (Mandy Patinkin) and Rochelle (Lindsay Crouse), in the populist movements and Communist (or Stalinist) sympathies of the day. But Daniel is more the consciousness of the book - he in fact is supposed to be writing it, as a form of therapy, instead of writing his graduate thesis - than its hero. And Susan, who has attempted suicide at the beginning of the story and dies at the end, is even less a character, she is the most brilliant but damaged fragment of that consciousness. Having used Daniel as both map and lightning rod in this intellectual history, Doctorow is free to write him out in similar terms at the end in fact with the self-conscious literary flourish of 'three endings'. The film finds itself stuck with a different rhetoric: Daniel vindicating himself as a character, and the martyrdom of his parents, by taking up the banners of the anti-Vietnam movement.

The most disconcerting thing about the bifurcated structure of the film is that what visually is its anchoring, sharp-focused half - the trauma of Daniel and his sister and their attempt to find a cure - actually seems to have little purchase and little justification, beyond some fine acted scenes in the politics of the family, sibling rivalry and identity crisis. It is in the orange-doused scenes of the past that Daniel develops real sharpness and where the atomising, Prince of the City side of Lumet comes to the fore. Beginning with the easily assumed innocence and commendable politics of the Isaacsons, the film proceeds to strip away the mystery of how they came to be put on trial and then executed on a flagrantly bogus charge in terms of an ethos to which they had also contributed. In unconscious collusion with a repressive Establishment, the Isaacsons, and/or their party, had sought martyrs as eagerly as the FBI had sought scapegoats. These are matters which, fascinatingly, have found their way from the 'book' of Daniel into the film. They are compromised only when the latter chooses to impose that narrower, psychological focus which its own contracted form of the title suggests.

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Exactly 30 years after the Rosenbergs' execution, director Lumet sits in a Paramount Pictures boardroom along with Mandy Patinkin (the actor who plays the Julius Rosenberg counterpart) and this writer. We are later joined by E. L. Doctorow who wrote The Book of Daniel, published in 1971, as well as the screenplay. The tape recorder is turned on. Parenthetically, I should mention that I knew nothing about the Rosenbergs prior to this recent rash of publicity, that I'm Brooklyn-born, Jewish raised, without religion by a loving mother and father, that my paternal grandparents headed the Workmen's Circle Party in Montreal during the 40s and early 50s - they were dedicated Socialists, though my father and his brothers were capitalists (and still are), and that the movie character Daniel and I grew up about the same time. In fact, my parents and I could have been the family at the next blanket in Coney Island. So Daniel is a film I relate to nostalgically, emotionally, and politically. It is a movie I will never forget. But moviegoers with opposing backgrounds or fact-sticklers who followed the actual Rosenberg case will have a tough time with it. Daniel is heavy going.

At the time of the interview, the only critical feedback Lumet has received was a positive story by political writer Andrew Kopkind in The Movies, a great review in Cosmo, and an okay one in Glamour. Since then, the New York reviews have been honorable but mixed.

Lumet matter-of-factly admits' he's nervous as hell about the reviews. A lot of people will come to Daniel with the preconceived notion that it's a docu-drama. And also that it's going to be a proselytizing piece about guilt and innocence. Lumet explains, "the audience has to clear its mind and see the film as a fictional piece. Doctorow takes real cataclysmic events and uses them as a point of departure for what he wants to say. The only thing that is accurate is the execution scene - it is the only thing I researched. This is not the story of the Rosenbergs."

And yet it is. In the execution scene the audience is graphically submitted to the individual deaths of the Rosenberg characters. If that weren't enough, a prison official states "it didn't work" after the switch has been pulled on Ethel, so we gasp at the possibility of going through it again. Fortunately, we're spared. As for the film not being the story of the Rosenbergs, we know that Ethel and Julius had two sons. In Daniel, they have a son and a daughter, played in the 1953 sequences by Ilan M. Mitchell-Smith and Dael Cohen; in the 1968 scenes by Timothy Hutton and Amanda Plummer. The children are called Daniel and Susan Isaacson. Their parents, played by Lindsay Crouse and Mandy Patinkin, are Paul and Rochelle Isaacson.

Patinkin sits quietly through most of the session, like a student at the heels of a great teacher. He absorbs every word uttered by Lumet, though he must have heard much of this before. He offers that he hasn't read books on the case or trial transcripts. But during production, which began late September '82, he became friendly with a radio-show host in his forties who had gone to that storm-ridden Paul Robeson concert in Peekskill in 1949, depicted in the movie. Patinkin claims that this man still lives his life very much wrapped up in events of the past.

The actor is 30 and hails from an apolitical Chicago family. He is married to an actress and they have a one-and-a-half-year-old son. Prior to Daniel, Mandy had wrapped up a co-starring role with Barbra Streisand in Yentl.

During the first week of Daniel rehearsals, Lumet conducted seminars for his cast on the history and development of the Communist Party. Patinkin's shooting script is scrawled with history notes not actor's direction jottings. "I couldn't drink in enough of it," he laughs, "until Sidney said, okay, gang, that's it. No more."

Lumet had been directing in television when the Rosenbergs were in the headlines. In 1939, he played Sylvia Sidney's kid brother in One Third of a Nation, a tear-jerker about a family suffering through the Depression, and in 1957 directed his first film, 12 Angry Men. There is a moralistic liberal thread running through most of the 31 movies he's directed.

Lumet had followed the Rosenberg case closely when it was in the headlines. "I remember being devastated that Ethel's brother testified against them. I remember having no feelings of guilt or innocence. Still don't. In a peculiar way, I think that's not very important. Whatever they did, our government did worse.

"Look, I set out to make a movie about parents and children. To me, Daniel is the story of a boy who buries himself with his parents, and spends the rest of his life trying to climb out of the grave."

Daniel shifts back and forth between the McCarthy era and the Vietnam war era. The early sequences with Lindsay Crouse and Mandy Patinkin, filmed in sepia tones, are so strong that the later scenes with Timothy Hutton and Amanda Plummer are often just waits. When I mention this to Lumet, he doesn't fight me. He quietly lets it ride until we can go on to something else. Patinkin doesn't gloat, either. Or defend his fellow actors. He just keeps his mouth shut.

Doesn't Lumet think that there'll be right-wing critics who will interpret Mandy's scene with the young Daniel over the Wheaties box as Communist indoctrination? "Point of fact," Lumet assures, "it's about a father giving his child the best of himself. In another plot, it would be a rabbi or a musician or a painter talking to his son." He continues, defining the passion of parents - often so strong that they forget the sensitivity of their children. "It's Judy Garland forgetting to kiss Liza when she went off to the studio. It's Lena Horne forgetting to kiss Gail before a concert appearance. ( "Gail," who is Lena Horne's daughter, is Sidney's ex-wife.)

Lumet punctuates his ideas and revelations with marvelous facial expressions and hand movements. He is the definitive storyteller and revels in explaining the creative process, be it building a Yellow Brick Road for Diana Ross to "ease on down" in The Wiz or expounding on how corporate tyrants manipulate the masses via television in Network. He will return to the networks in his next film, Kingdom, about a TV evangelist. It's scheduled for November production, and will probably star Robert Duvall.

He's also a perfectionist. For Prince of the City he tested for literally thousands of untrained actors for roles. With Daniel he needed professionals and claims he knew every single actor he wanted to cast. With the exception of three (no names), he got them all. The movie was a labor of love. Each actor worked at scale. So did the crew. Budgeted at $8.5 million, Lumet brought Daniel in for one million under.

He'd been wanting to make the movie ever since he read galleys of Doctorow's The Book of Daniel 12 years ago. At that time, he called his pal, Ted Ashley, who had just been made president of Warner Bros. "We've gotta do this," said Lumet. "You're out of your mind," said Ashley. In the ensuing years, there followed a number of submissions to other studio heads - and an accompanying number of rejections. Five years ago, after a stream of hits, Lumet took Doctorow to lunch at - where else? - the Russian Tea Room. He proposed that they would not get the film made on a normal basis. They had to do it as a "co-op" because there would never be any money forthcoming from a studio. This realization came only after he had offered to do any picture any company wanted him to direct, providing they allowed him to make Daniel.

Mechanically, John Heyman is the producer who got it moving. Heyman had come to Lumet with the script for another film, and Lumet gave him Daniel. Four weeks later, Heyman called: he could raise the money if it weren't too much. Within weeks, he rounded up the cash from three different independent sources, all of whom agreed that Paramount would be the best distributor. Ironically, the studio had turned the film down the year before as "a Paramount Picture."

In the weeks before production commenced, Lumet "jewified" his mostly non-Jewish cast (Mandy is the only Jew among the leads). Hutton moved in with Lumet and his wife and, according to the director, "took a crash course in being Jewish. I wanted Timothy to know what my father had taught me. [Lumet's father was a famous Yiddish actor.] I sent him over to Williamsburg because it was important to learn what the yarmulkes are for. Why a wife has to shave her head."

The director bombarded the eardrums of his cast with folk songs sung by Paul Robeson. "That's the music I was brought up with," he says. "I knew I wanted a Robeson sound track long before we began the film."

When a close-to-final print was ready, Lumet hired Cinema II for a night and unveiled Daniel to a demographic audience of about 70, including what he calls his mishbukah, his orthodontist and 12 lab assistants, kids from NYU, Columbia, and Marymount ("there are some good Catholic girls there"). He quickly discovered that when audiences see it with small groups, there's a deathly silence at the end. People are shattered - they don't want to talk to anybody. But given an hour or two of solitude, they want to sing its praises to everybody.

The first Daniel cut ran two hours and 32 minutes. The final version runs two hours and nine. Cuts were made over a period of months. Doctorow, who had nothing to do with the movie of Ragtime, worked closely with Lumet on the editing. Lumet describes the deletions as "micro-surgery. Nothing came out because it was a problem. Wonderful stuff remains on the cutting-room floor."

I interrupt. Haven't Lumet and Doctorow manipulated the movie - and our emotions - so that we don't know as much about the Isaacson/Rosenberg politics as we do about their characters? So when they're finally hauled away to jail, we wonder, "What is this about?" And when they go on trial and are found guilty, the charges matter less than the fact that these two warm, enthusiastic people are being prosecuted and dragged away from their children. When they're finally electrocuted, we've become so fond of them that we don't care or really want to know what their politics are. Is that what Lumet meant to do?

"Dead on," he replies, a look of pleasure glazing his eyes.

But isn't that a shortcoming in the script?

Before Lumet has a chance to respond, E. L. Doctorow enters the boardroom. "I'm sorry I'm late. Is this the John Travolta interview?" He orders coffee from a Paramount publicist and plops himself down in a chair next to Mandy.

Without waiting for a cue, Doctorow plows right in. It's as if he'd been listening to our conversation on his car radio.

"I have a few remarks to make about the difficulty with the fact and fiction structure," he begins. "My interest as a novelist is to be specifically into an experience: how the subject feels, what it's like to be somebody else. Really the central vision of both the book and film is Daniel. The convention of the film is we're in Daniel's mind and he is a child to this experience. What happened to his parents is something he was forced to participate in without having any control, without making any decisions. Daniel and his sister are survivors of their own holocaust."

When Doctorow pontificates - as he tends to do - you can (pardon the cliché) hear a pin drop. Although he's probably no older than Lumet, Doctorow's more the philosopher, the sage. And though he may not be any more intelligent than Lumet, he appears more intellectual. Lumet cloaks his wisdom in everyday off-the-cuff remarks. He, and especially Patinkin, are taken by Doctorow's in-sights, only dollops of which I'm able to report here.

"Writers have always come into the real world, used it for their own purposes then gotten out again," Doctorow theorizes. "Daniel Defoe read the autobiography of this nut who claimed to be a castaway, and shaped it into Robinson Crusoe. Dreiser used the same device in An American Tragedy, which he based on a famous crime. Is Jay Gatsby really Arnold Rothstein? Yes, he is, but he has merged into Gatsby. This kind of infusion of the artist's imagination with current events is common.

"Certainly anyone who knows me knows that if I wanted to write about the Rosenbergs, I'd have called them the Rosenbergs. When I wrote The Book of Daniel in the late '60s there were more interesting questions to explore than the aberrant behavior of a pair of radicals. I was interested in the connection between the New Left and the Old Left. What was the role of the radical in America? Was it sacrificial? Why do the left movements always destroy themselves? These questions intrigued me far more than the legal specifics of the Rosenberg case. What I took from the case was the extremity of their legal situation and the use of the conspiracy statutes. Those same statutes applied in the 1960s to the Chicago 7 and the Boston 5, but failed because the social climate was different."

Could something like the Rosenberg arrest, trial, conviction, and execution be duplicated today?

Lumet jumps in. "Absolutely. It's a great American Jewish catch-all to be used by the government for anything they want. If Reagan gets elected again, we're going to see a revival of right-wing ideological conspiracy cases. Even the possibility of blacklisting."

Politely, Doctorow interrupts. "Some people claim that The Book of Daniel and the screenplay anticipate the new Radosh book, The Rosenberg File. I haven't read the book, but certainly the suggestion that the Julius character was more involved than the Ethel character, that's in my book and screenplay. And that Ethel wasn't guilty but was used to get Julius to talk. And that there was a lot of legal chicanery - all in the book and movie.

"I wrote The Book of Daniel from the point of view of someone who doesn't know whether they're guilty or innocent. I didn't know, but thought during the writing, I'd decide. It became apparent, however, that I would never know, and there were better questions to ask.

"To get back to the Rosenbergs, they're dead. And no description of their guilt or innocence is ever going to bring them back. The meaning lies not in what they've done, but what we've done to them: That's what fascinates people who think about our national identity."

Lumet bobs his head. We are running off the track: the film is running off the reel. "Apropos of all this," he interjects, "Lindsay Crouse and Amanda Plummer particularly, kept asking, 'Are the Rosenbergs guilty? If they're guilty, I gotta read a line this way. If they're not, I gotta act it another way.' I kept saying, 'When you're finished, you will see that whether they were guilty or not guilty, they would have behaved exactly the same. Put it out of your mind. It's not part of the discussion."

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Indeed, Doctorow and Lumet have collaborated on a curious disclaimer in the program notes circulated at the press screenings: "The historical events that inspired both the novel and the film is the trial and execution of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg in 1953. But except for the extremity of their legal situation, the characters in Daniel, as well as the setting and circumstances of their lives, are fiction. There is no attempt here to be historically accurate. The questions we ask as storytellers are not those which seek factual verification. The story is told from Daniel's point of view. He becomes a kind of detective of his own life as he investigates the annals of his family's history and relives his responses as a child and now as an adult to the extraordinary demands made on him by his parents' trial and death. Through Daniel's search for self-discovery in his own memories, as well as his contacts with people who were involved in his parents' case, we see from the inside three decades in the life of American dissent - from the Depression and World War II to the postwar McCarthy period and the antiwar movement of the 1960s. The effects of parents on children, of ideologies on life, of history on individuals, are questions considered in the story of two generations of a family whose ruling passion is not success or money or love, but social justice."

Production story rumor has it that Doctorow had considerable, if not over-whelmingly decisive, input into the process by which his book was transferred to the screen. We thus do not have here the overly familiar scenario of the novelist betrayed. Doctorow's own writings have consistently displayed a movie-wise sensibility. In The Book of Daniel, for a most pertinent example, there are fleeting references to Father of the Bride and Alexander Nevsky, an extended discussion of the questionable ironies of The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, and a systematic dissection of the reactionary ethos of Walt Disney. Doctorow even gets in his licks against the persecutors of the Hollywood 10 (not to mention Elia Kazan and Budd Schulberg) with a jailhouse communication between Paul Isaacson and his wife Rochelle: "Dearest Rochelle: When we were downstairs during the recess Thursday I glanced at a copy of the Daily News one of the marshals had folded to a review of a new Marlon Brando picture about a gang member who decides to brave the wrath of his colleagues and testify in court against their criminality which he has come to see is wrong. Thus is promulgated for the millions the ethic of the stool-pigeon! Does this strike a bell in view of the prosecution's private remarks to Ascher? What else is to be expected of a Hollywood long since purged of its few humanitarian filmmakers? And what is to be expected of a jury picked however partially from a depraved culture? It is frightening."

Doctorow's first and fourth novels - Welcome to Hard Times and Ragtime - were adapted to the screen to a disappointing box-office response. Both books reflected a radical sensibility at work in period Amerika, but whereas Burt Kennedy's treatment of Welcome to Hard Times twisted Doctorow's Marxist fable of the Old West into a mysteriously nihilistic nightmare of personal redemption, Milos Forman's treatment of Ragtime was about as antiestablishment as any mainstream American movie has ever been. With this track record it is no wonder that Lumet and Doctorow found it very hard to get backing for Daniel, a production that was finally brought in for the currently meager budget of $8.5 million, and even that after a collective effort at salary deferral and reduction.

What is most disappointing about the movie is that so little of the book's mordant wit and black humor has found its way onto the screen. And yet the blame for making a dumb movie out of a smart book must rest largely with the smart writer. Why? How? I can only speculate that Doctorow and Lumet were torn between conflicting desires to be faithful to their subject, and yet also accessible to viewers who never experienced the epiphanies of political bull sessions in the City College cafeteria during the Great Depression. The white-bread casting of the crucial roles of Daniel (Timothy Hutton) and Rochelle (Lindsay Crouse) are one indication of tantalizing indecision. Hutton reportedly campaigned hard for a part that the late John Garfield was born much too early to play. Hutton is not so much miscast as cast adrift without an adequate dramatic context. Nor is he endowed with the literary transparency of the character in the novel. Contemporary movie theory is adamantly opposed to off-screen narration, and thus Hutton is unable to articulate the wrenching transition from present to past and back. Andrzej Bartkowiak's gloomily derisive Eastern European cinematography must therefore take up the stylistic slack with dispiriting contrasts between the glaring glitziness of the late '60s and the golden glow of the '40s and '50s. Daniel thus claims, along with its other faults, the distinction of being one of the ugliest optical ordeals of the moviegoing year.

Scene after scene is chopped up into self-defeating psychological confrontations, and if Timothy Hutton is not quite enough as Daniel, Amanda Plummer is much too much as his doomed sister Susan. Their scenes together alternate between an unearned nastiness and an unearned intimacy. One need go back no further than Margarethe von Trotta's Marianne and Juliane, with its sibling confrontation between Jutta Lampe's Juliane and Barbara Sukowa's Mariane to perceive a painfully exquisite drama emerging from the collision of family feelings with political convictions. Marianne and Juliane are sisters from their heads to their toes. By contrast, Daniel and Susan come over as two strangers wrestling with their roles.

Lindsay Crouse and Mandy Patinkin as the ill-fated Isaacson parents are a bit closer to the mark as a credible twosome. But their parts are all beginning and end with very little middle. All the lust and lechery in the novel fails to appear in the movie, which is one of the most scrupulously sexless entertainments I have seen in years. The lech of the perfidious Selig Mindish (Joseph Leon) for Crouse's Rochelle, and their subsequent eyeball-to-eyeball confrontation at the trial would seem to be obligatory building blocks for any screenplay adapted from The Book of Daniel. Instead of establishing this relationship, the movie merely refers to it. My own suspicion is that Doctorow and Lumet feared that any expression of eroticism would be regarded as a lack of seriousness. Similarly, the grotesque humor in the situation had to be suppressed so that the Isaacsons could go to the electric chair as two plaster saints beyond either Party or family. 

Now there is a piece of writing from the heart and the gut, certainly a piece full of the very bigotry that "fried" the Rosenbergs. The distaste for liberals expressed however obliquely, by Doctorow through Daniel does not extend to a mass murderer like Stalin, who is contemplated by Doctorow with a peculiarly bloodless objectivity: "Whatever Stalin's reasons for wanting to make an ally of Hitler - whether in despair of promoting Russian interests with the western countries, or out of a keen impulse toward a Fascist-Soviet hegemony, or because he needed time to prepare his country for war with Hitler which he knew was imminent (but if this was so, why did he kill his ranking army officers?) - it can be said that this like every major 1930's policy move of Soviet Russia the Great Socialist Experiment, was predicated on the primacy of the nation state, the postponement of Marxist dreams, and the expendability of the individual. E. H. Carr suggests that the genius of Stalin was in his recovery of Russian nationalism, dormant under the westernized, internationalist Lenin. 'Socialism in one country' was Stalin's affirmation of his country's fierce, inferiority-hounded pride in the face of the historic, tragic, western hostility to backwoods Russia."

In all their research, neither Daniel nor Doctorow seem to notice the irony of the virtually simultaneous Slansky trial in Czechoslovakia, an irony mentioned by Alan M. Dershowitz in his Times review of the Rosenberg File: A Search for the Truth by Ronald Radosh and Joyce Milton: "And the American Communist Party, while publicly working to save the Rosenbergs, apparently welcomed their deaths as serving several important functions: it would silence them forever and create international martyrs; it would also deflect world attention from the trial and execution in Prague of Rudolf Slansky and 10 other former leaders of the Czechoslovakian Communist Party, a trial in which the prosecuting Stalinists were blatantly anti-Semitic and which threatened a split in the international Communist movement."

The misadventures of Slanksy and his friends do not make the proceedings against the Rosenbergs in Foley Square any less squalid. To imagine one's parents reviled as Reds in the yellow press, and to imagine hearing the roar of a nation for their execution is the stuff of trauma, if not drama. But to be moved by the deaths of the Isaacsons one would have to have been swept up in the rush of their lives, and this is what one does not get from Daniel. The movie begins on a down note, and stays there relentlessly. For a time, it appears that we are being set up for an emotional payoff at a Paul Robeson concert in Peekskill, a payoff worthy of the last shots of Ingmar Bergman's Wild Strawberries, or at least John Ford's How Green Was My Valley. Heaven knows the story of the American left remains to be told, and any human being's past can he remembered with a degree of nostalgia.

The Communist Party, the German-American Bund, the country club, the wilds of Staten Island, what does it matter? My own parents were steadfast monarchists from the mountains of Sparta and Mycenae, and we were probably the only relief family in Brooklyn to vote for Alf Landon in 1936. The earliest image I can remember is a day of blazing sunlight, ineffably white as nothing can ever be again, and I am sitting in the back of my parents' Pierce Arrow Touring Car, and it is before all their money is gone, and I am singing a Greek folk song I still remember. A few years later we see earnest young men on subways shaking coin-cans for the Loyalists in Spain, and we look away because they are obviously Communists. So, all right, I am far from the ideal spectator of Daniel, but there is still that ineffably white sunlight, a little bit of which burns eternally in all of us. Could not that blazing sunlight have been summoned once more for that day in Peekskill when Paul Robeson sang 'Daniel in the Promised Land," and there were Paul and Rochelle Isaacson, Papa and Momma, glowing in the sun with a fierce idealism that made them seem, if only for a few instants, like gods, rather than deluded intellectuals blocked and frustrated by the intransigent mediocrity of their lives, and yet marked at that very moment for a hideous martyrdom?

Unfortunately, Lumet is too much the plodding realist even to attempt the electrifying surge of romanticism needed to lift Daniel out of the despond. Lumet has always supplied a certain intensity to his projects, but never electricity. His touch is solid but never magical, which is to say that he is just about as good as his scripts and players, but never much more. If you wish to observe a collection of sordid characters spiritually transfigured by a director's mise-en-scene, then the late Rainer Werner Fassbinder's Berlin Alexanderplatz is the film for you.

Daniel does not even meet the minimal standards of nostalgie de la bolshie. The factional quarrels in Reds are infinitely more rousing, and the zest for political maneuvering in Fame Is the Spur and Dirty Hands is infinitely more exhilarating. Curiously, there is a ridiculously short staircase scene in the movie pitting Stalinist against Trotskyist that wasn't even in the book, but, again, the "debate" is so skimpy as to suggest the fear of the filmmakers of overloading the mental circuits of increasingly hedonistic audiences.

Certainly, this is an odd time to be making the cinema hum "The Internationale" with any hope of great profit. Doctorow suggested wistfully in his novel that Holden Caulfield would have eventually become a member of SDS. Today's preppies seem to have more affinity with the stylish crassness of Risky Business and it is a sad commentary on the social climate of our time that Chevy Chase reportedly gets some of his biggest laughs in National Lampoon's Vacation by terrorizing a black functionary with a gun. But then our own beloved president claims that he proved his sensitivity to the needs and aspirations of Hispanic-Americans by serving enchiladas to the Queen of England. In this atmosphere, where is Garbo to tell her underlings in Ninotchka that it won't be long now, comrades, or even the old vaudeville comic Willie Howard with his comes the revolution and we'll all eat strawberries and cream, and if you don't like strawberries and cream, comes the revolution, dammit, and you'll eat strawberries and cream.

Hence, Lumet's last-ditch effort to imply that the Rosenbergs were redeemed by the peace movement of the '60s, and even the nuclear-freeze demonstrations of the present era turn out to be an exercise in artistic futility and intellectual bankruptcy. The children of Spock have turned out be as shallow in their political commitments as in their awareness of history. Significantly some scenes with Daniel Stern as Sternlicht, the hippie radical link between the CP epoch of Paul and Rochelle Isaacson and the SDS epoch of Daniel and Susan, have reportedly been cut from Daniel. I would imagine that if in the movie Sternlicht repeated many of the wild things he said in the book, the whole link between the Old Left and the New Left would have been swept away in a torrent of '60s obscenities. Thus, everything that supplied vitality to the novel has been removed from the movie for the sake of the misguided sanctimoniousness of left-wing puritanism. Take the Phyllis Isaacson of the heavy thighs and heavy tits and slim lovely face of the novel, and compare her with the wimpish Phyllis of Ellen Barkin in the movie. The fact that Phyllis serves as little more than a punching bag for Daniel's verbal abuse does not indicate antifeminist tendencies in Doctorow and Lumet, but, rather, the atrocities performed on underdeveloped characters without any malice afore-thought. The ultimate problem with Daniel goes even deeper than that. The unyielding derision with which Doctorow describes America is the stuff of which two-week runs at the Film Forum are made. What makes Lumet and Doctorow think that Middle America is incapable of recognizing movies in which its lives and values are held in contempt? After all how well has Kafka ever played in Peoria? Not that Daniel is even Kafka. It is more like lumpy Dreiser without the saving grace of naturalistic details.

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The controversy has spilled over into considerations of DANIEL, a movie that would seem to be about the Rosenbergs and their children (what other historical figures could possibly have inspired it?), although the filmmakers claim it is not. Sidney Lumet, who directed the movie, and E.L. Doctorow, who based the screenplay on his own novel, The Story of Daniel, are at pains to separate themselves from the Rosenbergs who are renamed the Isaacsons. Beyond the usual disclaimers, they say that their movie isn't really about the parents, but about the legacy of the children.

As a viewer, I don't really care. I don't expect DANIEL to be historically accurate about the original court case, nor do I want the story of the children to follow the real lives of the Rosenberg children. What I do want, though, is for the movie to make it clear where it stands on the Isaacsons. I don't mean I want the movie to declare whether they were innocent or guilty—but whether they were good or bad. And there the movie holds back. The parents in this film are seen through such a series of filters—political, emotional, historical—that they are finally not seen at all.

The movie begins with a close-up of Daniel's eyes. He is dispassionately reciting a dictionary entry about electrocution. These stark words summarize what happened to his parents and they are about the only knowable facts about the case. Then we meet other characters—Daniel's sister, Susan, and the adoptive parents who took in the Isaacson children. Susan seems terribly scarred by her childhood; she is hysterical, angry, suicidal. Daniel is less visibly scarred, but he is brutally cruel to his young wife and we wonder if she represents, for him, the mother who left—who chose death over her children.

The movie then begins to move back and forth through time. There are warm sepia-toned flashbacks to left-wing days in the 1930s, when the Isaacsons are swept up in the euphoria of the American Communist Party. The present-day scenes, usually shot with lots of blues and greens, follow Daniel's quest for friends of his parents who might share their secrets. The frustrating thing about this approach is that the flashbacks—which presumably could contain the information Daniel desires—are noncommittal. They show how the Isaacsons behaved, but are never clear about exactly what it was they did, or didn't do. It's easy to assume that's because the flashbacks are limited to what the children themselves witnessed. But, no, there are scenes in which the only people present are the parents (for example, a scene on a subway train where Jacob lectures Rochelle about Marx). Once the movie uses a single scene with an omniscient point of view, it becomes guilty of withholding additional information; if the film can see into the Isaacson's private moments when no children were present, then it can show us whether they passed secrets to the Russians. But the film doesn't want to. Its real subjects are the euphoric moments of left-wing idealism in the 1930s and how the passions of those moments are being paid for to this day by the children. Because the Isaacsons were swept up in a movement which gave them identity, support, and a sense of participating in history, these poor, miserable kids have to pay the dues.

Now that would be a subject, if the kids were dealt with in-depth. But the movie tries to encompass too much. It devotes so much time to the past, to the children's childhoods, that the present-day scenes are slighted. Susan is clearly so disturbed that she's of little help as a witness, but Daniel, the character the movie could have examined in three dimensions, is so manipulated by the plot that he remains a mystery. He's always the detective, seeking out his parents' friends, asking impassioned questions, functioning as the story device instead of as the subject. At the end of DANIEL we know that some emotionally careless parents left behind some emotionally crippled children. We suspect, oddly, that spy secrets and charges of subversion were not really relevant to the damage done to the children. I don't think that was the movie's intention.

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