Reds (1981)

John "Jack" Reed was born in Portland, Oregon in 1887, he died in 1920 and is buried in the Kremlin Wall Necropolis in Moscow, the only American so interred. A journalist best know for his 1919 book Ten Days That Shook the World about his first hand experience observing the Russian revolution of 1917, the movie Reds chronicles the last five years in his life. The film both stars and is directed by Warren Beatty who won the best directing Oscar for it, best picture that year going to Chariots of Fire, which was directed Hugh Hudson whose best known film subsequent to that win was Greystoke: The Legend of Tarzan in 1984, so his carrier didn't go as planed. But I digress.

Being directed by a left leaning Hollywood pretty boy I was expecting this film would unduly white wash its subject, it didn't. While applauding Reed's courage of his convictions, an advocacy journalist who joined the revolution he was covering because he believed in it, the film non the less shows how that conviction was misplaced, and how while the Soviet experiment was clearly not working as planed, Reed could not bring himself to see it. Ironically his wife and fellow journalist Louise Bryant (nicely played by Diane Keaton) could see it, but could not convince her husband. The film works chiefly because it is a love story set against an epic backdrop, the scenes about internal political divisions among American communists are less universal in their appeal.

One of the more interesting stylistic elements of the film is its uses of "witness", people who knew Jack and Louise back in the day inserted throughout the film (chiefly in its first half) as "talking heads", commenting on the story. Some of these "talking heads" were quite prominent, including ACLU founder Roger Nash Baldwin and New York Congressman Hamilton Fish III (who went to Harvard with Reed), and all of them are very elderly, the writer and activist Scott Nearing would have been 98 when he was interviewed. The actual cast of the film is padded with impressive names as well, including Edward Herrmann, Paul Sorvino, Maureen Stapleton (who won an Oscar as Russian anarchist Emma Goldman), Gene Hackman and Jack Nicholson as Eugene O'Neill. Reds, a film about the radical leftists of 60 years previous was actually the 13th highest grossing American theatrical release of 1981, its hard to imagine a film of this type duplicating that performance with todays audiences, not so much because of the politics but because they would find it boring, I found it fascinating. ****