Reconsidering Reds

By Editor/Publisher Mike Hanlon 

It has been [over] 40 years since the release of Reds, the much-honored 1981 glorification of the Russian Revolution produced, written, directed, and starred in by Warren Beatty. It's rather hard for a proud former Cold Warrior like myself to recommend a film that was produced by people who apparently had neither read Solzhenitsyn's Gulag Archipelago nor grasped the catastrophic costs of the Russian Revolution—20 million deaths in the Soviet Union, 94 million worldwide, according to the authoritative Black Book of Communism. Nonetheless, I think a view of the film (with some major qualifications) might be worth the 3 hours+ investment of your time to view it, even—maybe especially—if you saw it four decades ago.

Beatty plays a left-tilting Harvard-educated journalist from Portland, OR, named John Reed, who found himself in the middle of the Russian Revolution and won fame for an instant-history of that catastrophe, titled Ten Days That Shook the World. His sympathetic treatment earned him the distinction of being the only American buried within the Kremlin walls. 

For me, the outstanding quality of the movie—and which makes it worth re-watching (despite what I'm writing otherwise)—is Beatty's directing, for which he was deservedly awarded the "Best Director" Academy Award. He shows an impressive feel for the scale of historical epic film-making and the need to coherently tie many elements and points-of-view together neatly. The movie still has a fresh look, like it could have been filmed last week, and his on-location selections of Helsinki for Petrograd and Spain's Sierra Nevada for the Caucasus work perfectly as well. The viewer can't help feeling he's watching a grand and important story, artfully presented. When I viewed it again recently, I had the sense I was experiencing an interpretation (the winning side's view) of the Russian Revolution complementary to David Lean's Dr. Zhivago.

Director Beatty interweaves four elements to tell his story, which I will describe and comment on separately:

1. The Love Story: Reed's affair and marriage with Louise Bryant (Diane Keaton) is the pervasive narrative, permeating the entire movie. It's not a compelling or interesting relationship for me as Louise implausibly morphs from candidacy for the "Most Annoying Girlfriend on Earth" title (first hour) to "Most Devoted and Heroic Lovemate" (third hour).

2. Interminable, Boring, and Pompous Radical Intellectual Debates and Arguments: Talk, talk, talk. Fast forward through these scenes. (Better yet, just skip the first hour. It's filled with Louise and Greenwich Village posers.)

3. The Russian Revolution: After that dreadful first hour, Jack and Louise arrive in Russia just in time for the October Revolution. This is the best part of the movie, beautifully filmed, capturing the intense energy of the moment, and revealing the collective awareness of the participants and observers that important history was being made.

4. The Witnesses: The main narrative is supplemented with documentary-style, talking-head cut-ins and voice overs by 32 elderly, mostly left-wing, political and literary "celebrities" who were around at the time of the revolution, some of whom knew Jack or Louise. They are uninhibited and often informative, with on-point anecdotes, bitchy gossip (wow, lefty women have really long memories), and out-of-the-blue non sequiturs. I particularly enjoyed a still sex-addled Henry Miller, the astute Dame Rebecca West, and Georgie Jessel singing his favorite World War One tunes.

Available by DVD or streaming for a fee from Amazon and Netflix.

Source:  Originally presented in the May 2020 St. Mihiel Trip-Wire