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Reds (1981)
Lookback/Review by Markdc
Throughout its history, the American film industry has usually reflected the society in which it exists, and the 1980’s was no exception. After the turbulent 1960’s and 1970’s, which witnessed the downfall of the once-dominant Liberal order that began with President Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal and reached its apogee with President Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society, Conservativism enjoyed an ascendancy in American politics and culture, and nothing signified this development more than the two landslide election victories of Ronald Reagan, a former movie actor, in 1980 and 1984. Reagan’s presidency, which nearly spanned the entirely of the Eighties, ushered in transformative change and political realignment that favored the Republican Party that he led and Conservatives generally. Hollywood, where the Gipper worked and lived for nearly three decades, followed suit and released a wave of films containing Conservative messages and themes.
Some of these movies, such as Ghostbusters, extoled the virtues of individualism and the free market while contrasting them with inefficient, overbearing, and counterproductive government bureaucracy. Others, such as Back to the Future, elicited feelings of nostalgia for a bygone Conservative era (the 1950’s in this case). And many movies presented a patriotic, often jingoistic, view of the United States’ decades-long conflict with the Soviet Union—which Reagan himself aptly called the “Evil Empire”—and the rest of the Communist Bloc. Some of the most popular pro-American, anti-Communist films from the Eighties include Red Dawn, Top Gun, and the second and third entries in the Rambo series. Suffice to say, this probably wasn’t an ideal time or environment in which to make a sympathetic cinematic depiction of the Bolshevik Revolution—let alone one that ran more than three hours long. Yet that’s precisely what actor/filmmaker Warren Beatty did with Reds. Released at the dawn of the Reagan Era, Reds focuses on the passionate and frequently turbulent romance between American journalists and radical Leftwing political activists John Reed and Louise Bryant; the pair covered the 1917 October Revolution, in which Russian Communists overthrew the Russian republic that had replaced the monarchy of Czar Nicholas II, who had abdicated his throne during the 1917 February Revolution. (Reed wrote about the October Revolution in his famous book Ten Days that Shook the World. Bryant also wrote about her experiences covering this epochal event in the lesser-known Six Red Months in Russia.)
The film begins two years earlier when the couple first meet in Portland, Oregon. Bryant, a feminist who’s bored and frustrated with her humdrum life, leaves her husband and travels with Reed to New York, where the two settle in Greenwich Village. There she becomes acquainted with Reed’s activist and artist friends, most notably the feisty Anarchist Emma Goldman and the alcoholic playwright Eugene O’Neill. The couple then move to Massachusetts, and Reed, anxious to bring about radical change, throws himself into labor activism and leaves to report on the 1916 Democratic National Convention. While he is away, Bryant has an affair with O’Neill, and when Reed learns about it upon his return home, he expresses his deep love for Bryan by proposing to her, and she accepts.
Now a married couple, they move back to New York and make a home in the village of Croton-on-Hudson. However, the two of them have incompatible goals and desires, and the growing tensions erupt one evening when Reed confesses to having dalliances with several women not named Louise Bryant. This revelation causes an infuriated Bryant to leave him and sail for Europe to cover the First World War on the Western Front. After spending some time in jail due to his unionizing efforts and having one of his kidneys removed, Reed goes to Western Europe and convinces Bryant to come with him to Russia and report on the historic events unfolding in that country. She agrees, and they witness the aforementioned October Revolution. This experience renews the intimacy between Reed and Bryant because, apparently, nothing revives a defunct romance like the sight of Communists toppling a democratic government.
Upon their return home, Reed becomes a forceful advocate for the adoption of Communism in America, though Bryant is more skeptical, and becomes involved in a dispute in the Socialist Party of America, which breaks up into two factions, the Communist Labor Party of America (co-founded by Reed) and the Communist Party of America. Against Bryant’s wishes, Reed travels to the new Soviet Union to obtain official recognition for his group from the Communist International (Comintern). When he tries to return home via Finland, he’s arrested by Finnish authorities and imprisoned. Bryant attempts to enlist the help of the American government in freeing Reed, but the latter refuses since he’s under indictment for sedition. Frustrated, she decides to go to Finland herself, but when she gets there, she learns that Reed has been released to the Soviets in a prisoner exchange, so she continues on to Russia.
Meanwhile, Reed is employed by the Bolsheviks as a propagandist for the Comintern and lives in Petrograd with Emma Goldman, who has been deported to Russia (her native land) by the U.S. government. While Reed is accompanying Soviet officials on a trip to the city of Baku in Azerbaijan, Bryant arrives in Petrograd. On the return journey from Baku, Reed’s train is attacked by White Russian forces. However, he escapes unharmed and finds Bryant—whom he believed had left him and moved on with her life—waiting at the train station. The two enjoy an emotional reunion, but their happiness is short-lived because Reed soon dies of typhus and leaves his wife mourning at his bedside, and the film informs us that he became one of only three Americans to be interred by the Soviets at the Kremlin Wall Necropolis.
Reds was a labor of love for Beatty, who talked about making the movie as early as 1966. He finished a first draft of the script in 1969 but nearly a decade would pass before the final version was completed. (This was accomplished with the help of several other people, but only the English playwright Trevor Griffiths would receive official credit as Beatty’s co-screenwriter.) Getting any studio to finance Reds would seem like an impossible feat, considering the film’s controversial subject, epic scope and time length, and massive budget. (The final price tag came in at around $33 million, an enormous sum for a movie being made during the late Seventies and early Eighties.) However, the critical and commercial success of 1978’s Heaven Can Wait, for which Beatty performed duties as co-director, producer, lead actor, and co-screenwriter, granted him the clout he needed to convince the execs over at Paramount Pictures, the studio behind the film, to provide financial backing and distribution for Reds. The filming process, which began in late summer 1979, lasted over a year, and editing took nearly that amount of time. Beatty’s commitment to his dream project was so intense that he served as director, producer, lead actor, and screenwriter—much as he had done with his previous movie—and drove his fellow actors crazy by behaving on the set like a megalomaniacal autocrat.
Fortunately for Beatty and his team, all of this effort paid off big time when Reds was released on December 4, 1981. The movie received widespread acclaim from professional critics, who praised many aspects of its production. The end result of Beatty’s passion project was hailed by many as a great cinematic achievement and drew favorable comparisons to the celebrated epics of director David Lean. For example, Vincent Canby, writing for the New York Times, called Reds “an extraordinary film, a big romantic adventure movie, the best since David Lean's Lawrence of Arabia.” Meanwhile, Roger Ebert of the Chicago Sun-Times labeled Reds “the thinking man’s Doctor Zhivago.” (In a 2007 piece on the making of Reds, the film historian Peter Biskind hilariously described Beatty’s epic as “the movie David Lean would have made had Gillo Pontecorvo, director of The Battle of Algiers, put a knife to his throat.”) Perhaps somewhat surprisingly, audiences also reacted favorably. Despite its subject matter and running time (Reds was one of the last films to feature an intermission), the movie earned an impressive $40 million at the U.S. box office. And in early 1982, Reds received 12 Academy Award nominations, including one for Best Picture. Beatty also became the only person in Oscar history to twice receive four nominations for the same film. (He was nominated in the directing, producing, acting, and screenwriting categories for both Reds and Heaven Can Wait.) However, when Oscar night arrived, the movie only snagged three awards: Best Director, Best Supporting Actress, and Best Cinematography. (Although Reds was widely favored to win Best Picture, the underdog sports drama Chariots of Fire captured the award in an upset.) Today, Beatty’s epic about the Bolshevik Revolution is still highly regarded, though not as beloved as cinematic classics such as The Godfather and Casablanca. Reds currently holds an impressive 89 precent rating on the movie review aggregate website Rotten Tomatoes and was a nominee for the American Film Institute’s (AFI) “100 Movies…100 Years” list.
Given Reds’ politics, it should come as no surprise that reaction to the film from partisan media outlets fell largely along ideological lines. For instance, Robert Hatch, writing for the Progressive magazine The Nation, called Reds an “impressive work.” In a 2021 retrospective review marking the 40th anniversary of the movie’s release, Jim Poe, a writer for the Socialist magazine Jacobin, praised Reds as “one of the best movies of its era” and wrote that “the film still stands up today as one of the greatest and most faithful depictions of revolutionary politics.” Conversely, John Simon of the Conservative magazine National Review dismissed Reds as “frequently irritating and finally disappointing.” However, it should be noted that Beatty’s Bolsh-epic did have some fans on the Right, and one of these was none other than Ronald Reagan. Beatty had been close friends with the president and First Lady Nancy Reagan—who, like her husband, was a former actor—going all the way back to the couple’s Hollywood days, and he screened Reds for them at the White House. (Interestingly, the screening came at the Gipper’s request, not Beatty’s.) When the film was over, the 40th president, an anti-Communist hero to the Right, told Beatty that he liked Reds but expressed regret that it didn’t have a happy ending. Also, in a 2017 retrospective review, National Review writer Kyle Smith praised the movie and called it “a warning about the folly of utopian thinking and an inquiry into how Bolshevism went so spectacularly wrong.”
I am a Center-Right Conservative who considers the now-defunct Soviet Union to be—along with Nazi Germany—the most evil, tyrannical, and murderous regime in human history. As such, I detest Reds’ radical Leftwing politics and sympathetic view of the birth of the U.S.S.R. and its American Communist champions like John Reed and Louise Bryant. However, as a cinephile, I consider Reds to be one of the greatest historical/romantic epics to ever come out of Hollywood—right up there with Gone with the Wind. Politics aside, I’m just crazy about this movie. In addition to being a great actor, Warren Beatty is a phenomenal director (his 1990 film Dick Tracy is one of the best comic book adaptations I’ve ever seen), and there’s no doubt in my mind that Reds will always stand as his magnum opus. I’ve always admired filmmakers who put their careers on the line in order to make movies they feel passionate about, even if I disagree with their personal views.
Hollywood has a graveyard filled with passion projects that went horribly wrong (Exhibit A would be Battlefield Earth, John Travolta’s labor of love to Scientology, which surely has its own mausoleum in this forlorn cemetery), but Reds succeeded because of Beatty’s exceptional intelligence, talent, and determination. However, it should be noted that he also had luck and timing on his side, for Reds was made and released at the tail end of the New Hollywood era. This period, which began in the mid-1960’s and ended in the early 1980’s, is widely considered a golden age of filmmaking during which movie studios gave young hotshot directors like Francis Ford Coppola, Steven Spielberg, and Martin Scorsese generous budgets and near-total creative freedom. The result was a flood of cinematic masterpieces, including many films now regarded as among the greatest ever made, such as The Godfather, Taxi Driver, and Apocalypse Now. (Ironically, one of the first films to kick off the New Hollywood was Bonnie and Clyde, which Beatty produced and starred in.) Alas, the massive critical and financial failure of several ambitious, big-budget films, most notably Michael Cimino’s notorious 1980 flop Heaven’s Gate, signaled the twilight of this golden age, but Beatty was able to get Reds greenlit at the close of the 1970’s, and his movie proved to be one of the New Hollywood’s last glorious hurrahs.
Reds has a stellar cast, led by Beatty and Diane Keaton, who play John Reed and Louise Bryant respectively. Though Beatty was clearly enamored with these real-life figures, I appreciate that he resisted the temptation to lionize them. Rather, Beatty presents the couple as idealistic but flawed human beings who get swept up in the seismic historic events unfolding around them. The size and scope of Reds, which runs three hours and fifteen minutes and takes place on two continents, is awesome, but one of this movie’s greatest strengths is that it never loses sight of the close personal intimacy between its central characters. (The reunion scene at the train station in Petrograd that occurs near the end of the film always brings tears to my eyes.) In addition to the Bolshevik Revolution and the beginnings of the Soviet Union, Reds also deals with the United States’ entry into the First World War and the factional conflicts that took place on the American Left during this period. These are enormous and complex subjects for one film to tackle effectively, but Beatty accomplishes this challenging task with skill, in large part because he uses the romance between Reed and Bryant as an anchor to hold the narrative firmly in place and prevent it from going in all different directions.
I’m also fascinated by the paradox of two free-spirited individuals supporting a political movement that ended up destroying both freedom and individuality. And speaking of this couple, I find it interesting that most of the synopses of Reds that I came across during the course of my research for this retrospective review, from sites like Wikipedia and the Internet Movie Database (IMDB), present the movie as being primarily about John Reed, with little or no mention of Louise Bryant. I would argue that Reds, to its great credit, is just as much about Bryant as it is about Reed, and I think this is indicated by the film’s title. When a historical movie is primarily about one person, usually a man, that person’s name is almost always in the title. For instance, David Lean’s biopic about T.E. Lawrence is called Lawrence of Arabia; Richard Attenborough’s biopic about Mahatma Gandhi is called—appropriately enough—Gandhi; Oliver Stone’s biopic about President Richard Nixon is called—you guessed it—Nixon. And yet John Reed’s name is nowhere in the title of Beatty’s epic. Instead, the movie is called Reds, and I believe it’s a reference to both Reed and Bryant. Among the supporting players, the two standouts are Maureen Stapleton as Emma Goldman and Jack Nicholson as Eugene O’Neill. Stapleton, who won the film’s only acting Oscar (Beatty, Keaton, and Nicholson were also nominated for their performances), portrays Goldman as a fiery radical who—as NeoConservative intellectual Irving Kristol might have put it—gets mugged by Bolshevik reality. As for Nicholson, few actors play a cynic and a drunk as well as he does, and his character provides a stark counterweight to the naïve idealism of his friends Reed and Bryant. I also want to note here that Jerzy Kosiński, a Polish author, gives a convincing performance as Grigory Zinoviev, leader of the Comintern, and this is ironic because Kosiński was himself a staunch anti-Communist.
One of the things I love most about Reds is that Beatty intersperses his narrative with clips of interviews from 32 people who were alive during the period in which the movie is set (1915 to 1920, the year of Reed’s death) and knew the film’s two protagonists. These individuals, known simply as “The Witnesses,” include American Communist Party organizer Will Weinstone, author Henry Miller, and New York Republican Congressman Hamilton Fish (a Harvard classmate of John Reed’s), and their recollections are crucial to Reds’ success because they serve as helpful “bridges” that link sections of the narrative together, provide important personal and historical context to the scenes unfolding before the audience, and give the film the feel of a documentary. And all the movie’s elements—such as the acting, script, costumes, etc.—place the viewer squarely in its setting and allows him or her to see events exactly as the characters do.
According to Richard Grenier, who penned a mostly negative review of Reds for the NeoConservative magazine Commentary shortly after the film’s release, in the years following John Reed’s death, a debate raged between Communists, such as the Soviets, who argued that the author of Ten Days that Shook the World remained a loyal comrade until the day he died and anti-Communists, including former Communists like John Reed’s friend Benjamin Gitlow, who maintained that the radical journalist had become disillusioned with the Bolsheviks by the end of his life. I greatly appreciate that Beatty, himself a lifelong Progressive Democrat who has supported Democratic politicians like George McGovern and Bobby Kennedy, chooses to treat this matter with ambiguity. During the second half of Reds, Reed does display some signs of disillusionment, particularly in a scene near the end where he berates Zinoviev after the latter changed a crucial word in a propaganda speech he had written and delivers a brief but inspiring monologue about the need to maintain one’s individuality while simultaneously working for a cause greater than oneself. But then Reed dies shortly afterward, and any questions concerning his continued loyalty to the Soviet cause are left unresolved. (The only character in the movie that signals an impending break with Communism is Emma Goldman, who at one point lambasts the Bolsheviks for enacting harsh measures in order to crush dissent and asks, “Is any nightmare justifiable in the name of defense against counter-revolution?”) One of the most fascinating things about Reds is that it presents a tragic twist on Joseph Campbell’s Hero’s Journey. John Reed does indeed venture forth from his common, everyday world and goes on a thrilling adventure in a faraway place, where a great victory is won. But what he seeks to bring home to his fellow man is not a boon but a scourge—and one that brings about countless deaths, including his own.
As is the case with all movies, Reds isn’t perfect, of course, and possesses some flaws. As I indicated above, I dislike the movie’s overall sympathetic treatment of the birth of the Soviet Union and consider it akin to a sympathetic look at the rise of Nazi Germany. Also, the scenes during the second half of Reds portraying factional infighting within the Socialist Party of America grow a bit tedious, and when the film was first released, I suspect that more than a few moviegoers were confused by the argument depicted onscreen over which group should be considered the “true” representative of American Communism, the Communist Party of America or the Communist Labor Party of America. And there’s another scene where John Reed is saying goodbye to Emma Goldman, who has been scheduled for deportation back to Russia, and she requests that he ask a mutual friend of theirs to put a photo of her face in a magazine with the words “Deported in 1919: The government of the most powerful country in the world is afraid of this woman” below it. This scene is disingenuous because it implies that Goldman was just some harmless old woman with radical ideas who was being needlessly persecuted by the Big Bad Government. To be sure, President Woodrow Wilson, a Progressive Democrat, and A. Mitchell Palmer, his attorney general, did commit un-Constitutional excesses and trample on civil liberties in their zeal to go after political radicals, but the movie fails to mention that Goldman, an Anarchist, allegedly incited violence and was involved in a plot to assassinate a factory manager who worked for the Carnegie Steel Company.
However, these criticisms of Reds are minor quibbles that are far outweighed by the movie’s considerable qualities. It goes without saying that a film like Reds could never be made in today’s Hollywood, where studios, which seek to maximize profits and are loath to take significant risks, spend most of their time cranking out conventional, crowd-pleasing blockbusters, sequels, and reboots. Although I think it’s a travesty that Reds didn’t win the Oscar for Best Picture nor make it on either version of the AFI’s “100 Years…100 Movies” list, I’m very grateful that this epic masterpiece got made at all and received critical and commercial success upon release. As Beatty noted during his Oscar acceptance speech following his win for Best Director, the fact that a private company financed a cinematic homage to Communism and Socialism was a tribute to American Capitalism and political freedom, and in the final analysis, that is one of Reds’ greatest ironies and lasting achievements.
Lookback/Review by Markdc
Throughout its history, the American film industry has usually reflected the society in which it exists, and the 1980’s was no exception. After the turbulent 1960’s and 1970’s, which witnessed the downfall of the once-dominant Liberal order that began with President Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal and reached its apogee with President Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society, Conservativism enjoyed an ascendancy in American politics and culture, and nothing signified this development more than the two landslide election victories of Ronald Reagan, a former movie actor, in 1980 and 1984. Reagan’s presidency, which nearly spanned the entirely of the Eighties, ushered in transformative change and political realignment that favored the Republican Party that he led and Conservatives generally. Hollywood, where the Gipper worked and lived for nearly three decades, followed suit and released a wave of films containing Conservative messages and themes.
Some of these movies, such as Ghostbusters, extoled the virtues of individualism and the free market while contrasting them with inefficient, overbearing, and counterproductive government bureaucracy. Others, such as Back to the Future, elicited feelings of nostalgia for a bygone Conservative era (the 1950’s in this case). And many movies presented a patriotic, often jingoistic, view of the United States’ decades-long conflict with the Soviet Union—which Reagan himself aptly called the “Evil Empire”—and the rest of the Communist Bloc. Some of the most popular pro-American, anti-Communist films from the Eighties include Red Dawn, Top Gun, and the second and third entries in the Rambo series. Suffice to say, this probably wasn’t an ideal time or environment in which to make a sympathetic cinematic depiction of the Bolshevik Revolution—let alone one that ran more than three hours long. Yet that’s precisely what actor/filmmaker Warren Beatty did with Reds. Released at the dawn of the Reagan Era, Reds focuses on the passionate and frequently turbulent romance between American journalists and radical Leftwing political activists John Reed and Louise Bryant; the pair covered the 1917 October Revolution, in which Russian Communists overthrew the Russian republic that had replaced the monarchy of Czar Nicholas II, who had abdicated his throne during the 1917 February Revolution. (Reed wrote about the October Revolution in his famous book Ten Days that Shook the World. Bryant also wrote about her experiences covering this epochal event in the lesser-known Six Red Months in Russia.)
The film begins two years earlier when the couple first meet in Portland, Oregon. Bryant, a feminist who’s bored and frustrated with her humdrum life, leaves her husband and travels with Reed to New York, where the two settle in Greenwich Village. There she becomes acquainted with Reed’s activist and artist friends, most notably the feisty Anarchist Emma Goldman and the alcoholic playwright Eugene O’Neill. The couple then move to Massachusetts, and Reed, anxious to bring about radical change, throws himself into labor activism and leaves to report on the 1916 Democratic National Convention. While he is away, Bryant has an affair with O’Neill, and when Reed learns about it upon his return home, he expresses his deep love for Bryan by proposing to her, and she accepts.
Now a married couple, they move back to New York and make a home in the village of Croton-on-Hudson. However, the two of them have incompatible goals and desires, and the growing tensions erupt one evening when Reed confesses to having dalliances with several women not named Louise Bryant. This revelation causes an infuriated Bryant to leave him and sail for Europe to cover the First World War on the Western Front. After spending some time in jail due to his unionizing efforts and having one of his kidneys removed, Reed goes to Western Europe and convinces Bryant to come with him to Russia and report on the historic events unfolding in that country. She agrees, and they witness the aforementioned October Revolution. This experience renews the intimacy between Reed and Bryant because, apparently, nothing revives a defunct romance like the sight of Communists toppling a democratic government.
Upon their return home, Reed becomes a forceful advocate for the adoption of Communism in America, though Bryant is more skeptical, and becomes involved in a dispute in the Socialist Party of America, which breaks up into two factions, the Communist Labor Party of America (co-founded by Reed) and the Communist Party of America. Against Bryant’s wishes, Reed travels to the new Soviet Union to obtain official recognition for his group from the Communist International (Comintern). When he tries to return home via Finland, he’s arrested by Finnish authorities and imprisoned. Bryant attempts to enlist the help of the American government in freeing Reed, but the latter refuses since he’s under indictment for sedition. Frustrated, she decides to go to Finland herself, but when she gets there, she learns that Reed has been released to the Soviets in a prisoner exchange, so she continues on to Russia.
Meanwhile, Reed is employed by the Bolsheviks as a propagandist for the Comintern and lives in Petrograd with Emma Goldman, who has been deported to Russia (her native land) by the U.S. government. While Reed is accompanying Soviet officials on a trip to the city of Baku in Azerbaijan, Bryant arrives in Petrograd. On the return journey from Baku, Reed’s train is attacked by White Russian forces. However, he escapes unharmed and finds Bryant—whom he believed had left him and moved on with her life—waiting at the train station. The two enjoy an emotional reunion, but their happiness is short-lived because Reed soon dies of typhus and leaves his wife mourning at his bedside, and the film informs us that he became one of only three Americans to be interred by the Soviets at the Kremlin Wall Necropolis.
Reds was a labor of love for Beatty, who talked about making the movie as early as 1966. He finished a first draft of the script in 1969 but nearly a decade would pass before the final version was completed. (This was accomplished with the help of several other people, but only the English playwright Trevor Griffiths would receive official credit as Beatty’s co-screenwriter.) Getting any studio to finance Reds would seem like an impossible feat, considering the film’s controversial subject, epic scope and time length, and massive budget. (The final price tag came in at around $33 million, an enormous sum for a movie being made during the late Seventies and early Eighties.) However, the critical and commercial success of 1978’s Heaven Can Wait, for which Beatty performed duties as co-director, producer, lead actor, and co-screenwriter, granted him the clout he needed to convince the execs over at Paramount Pictures, the studio behind the film, to provide financial backing and distribution for Reds. The filming process, which began in late summer 1979, lasted over a year, and editing took nearly that amount of time. Beatty’s commitment to his dream project was so intense that he served as director, producer, lead actor, and screenwriter—much as he had done with his previous movie—and drove his fellow actors crazy by behaving on the set like a megalomaniacal autocrat.
Fortunately for Beatty and his team, all of this effort paid off big time when Reds was released on December 4, 1981. The movie received widespread acclaim from professional critics, who praised many aspects of its production. The end result of Beatty’s passion project was hailed by many as a great cinematic achievement and drew favorable comparisons to the celebrated epics of director David Lean. For example, Vincent Canby, writing for the New York Times, called Reds “an extraordinary film, a big romantic adventure movie, the best since David Lean's Lawrence of Arabia.” Meanwhile, Roger Ebert of the Chicago Sun-Times labeled Reds “the thinking man’s Doctor Zhivago.” (In a 2007 piece on the making of Reds, the film historian Peter Biskind hilariously described Beatty’s epic as “the movie David Lean would have made had Gillo Pontecorvo, director of The Battle of Algiers, put a knife to his throat.”) Perhaps somewhat surprisingly, audiences also reacted favorably. Despite its subject matter and running time (Reds was one of the last films to feature an intermission), the movie earned an impressive $40 million at the U.S. box office. And in early 1982, Reds received 12 Academy Award nominations, including one for Best Picture. Beatty also became the only person in Oscar history to twice receive four nominations for the same film. (He was nominated in the directing, producing, acting, and screenwriting categories for both Reds and Heaven Can Wait.) However, when Oscar night arrived, the movie only snagged three awards: Best Director, Best Supporting Actress, and Best Cinematography. (Although Reds was widely favored to win Best Picture, the underdog sports drama Chariots of Fire captured the award in an upset.) Today, Beatty’s epic about the Bolshevik Revolution is still highly regarded, though not as beloved as cinematic classics such as The Godfather and Casablanca. Reds currently holds an impressive 89 precent rating on the movie review aggregate website Rotten Tomatoes and was a nominee for the American Film Institute’s (AFI) “100 Movies…100 Years” list.
Given Reds’ politics, it should come as no surprise that reaction to the film from partisan media outlets fell largely along ideological lines. For instance, Robert Hatch, writing for the Progressive magazine The Nation, called Reds an “impressive work.” In a 2021 retrospective review marking the 40th anniversary of the movie’s release, Jim Poe, a writer for the Socialist magazine Jacobin, praised Reds as “one of the best movies of its era” and wrote that “the film still stands up today as one of the greatest and most faithful depictions of revolutionary politics.” Conversely, John Simon of the Conservative magazine National Review dismissed Reds as “frequently irritating and finally disappointing.” However, it should be noted that Beatty’s Bolsh-epic did have some fans on the Right, and one of these was none other than Ronald Reagan. Beatty had been close friends with the president and First Lady Nancy Reagan—who, like her husband, was a former actor—going all the way back to the couple’s Hollywood days, and he screened Reds for them at the White House. (Interestingly, the screening came at the Gipper’s request, not Beatty’s.) When the film was over, the 40th president, an anti-Communist hero to the Right, told Beatty that he liked Reds but expressed regret that it didn’t have a happy ending. Also, in a 2017 retrospective review, National Review writer Kyle Smith praised the movie and called it “a warning about the folly of utopian thinking and an inquiry into how Bolshevism went so spectacularly wrong.”
I am a Center-Right Conservative who considers the now-defunct Soviet Union to be—along with Nazi Germany—the most evil, tyrannical, and murderous regime in human history. As such, I detest Reds’ radical Leftwing politics and sympathetic view of the birth of the U.S.S.R. and its American Communist champions like John Reed and Louise Bryant. However, as a cinephile, I consider Reds to be one of the greatest historical/romantic epics to ever come out of Hollywood—right up there with Gone with the Wind. Politics aside, I’m just crazy about this movie. In addition to being a great actor, Warren Beatty is a phenomenal director (his 1990 film Dick Tracy is one of the best comic book adaptations I’ve ever seen), and there’s no doubt in my mind that Reds will always stand as his magnum opus. I’ve always admired filmmakers who put their careers on the line in order to make movies they feel passionate about, even if I disagree with their personal views.
Hollywood has a graveyard filled with passion projects that went horribly wrong (Exhibit A would be Battlefield Earth, John Travolta’s labor of love to Scientology, which surely has its own mausoleum in this forlorn cemetery), but Reds succeeded because of Beatty’s exceptional intelligence, talent, and determination. However, it should be noted that he also had luck and timing on his side, for Reds was made and released at the tail end of the New Hollywood era. This period, which began in the mid-1960’s and ended in the early 1980’s, is widely considered a golden age of filmmaking during which movie studios gave young hotshot directors like Francis Ford Coppola, Steven Spielberg, and Martin Scorsese generous budgets and near-total creative freedom. The result was a flood of cinematic masterpieces, including many films now regarded as among the greatest ever made, such as The Godfather, Taxi Driver, and Apocalypse Now. (Ironically, one of the first films to kick off the New Hollywood was Bonnie and Clyde, which Beatty produced and starred in.) Alas, the massive critical and financial failure of several ambitious, big-budget films, most notably Michael Cimino’s notorious 1980 flop Heaven’s Gate, signaled the twilight of this golden age, but Beatty was able to get Reds greenlit at the close of the 1970’s, and his movie proved to be one of the New Hollywood’s last glorious hurrahs.
Reds has a stellar cast, led by Beatty and Diane Keaton, who play John Reed and Louise Bryant respectively. Though Beatty was clearly enamored with these real-life figures, I appreciate that he resisted the temptation to lionize them. Rather, Beatty presents the couple as idealistic but flawed human beings who get swept up in the seismic historic events unfolding around them. The size and scope of Reds, which runs three hours and fifteen minutes and takes place on two continents, is awesome, but one of this movie’s greatest strengths is that it never loses sight of the close personal intimacy between its central characters. (The reunion scene at the train station in Petrograd that occurs near the end of the film always brings tears to my eyes.) In addition to the Bolshevik Revolution and the beginnings of the Soviet Union, Reds also deals with the United States’ entry into the First World War and the factional conflicts that took place on the American Left during this period. These are enormous and complex subjects for one film to tackle effectively, but Beatty accomplishes this challenging task with skill, in large part because he uses the romance between Reed and Bryant as an anchor to hold the narrative firmly in place and prevent it from going in all different directions.
I’m also fascinated by the paradox of two free-spirited individuals supporting a political movement that ended up destroying both freedom and individuality. And speaking of this couple, I find it interesting that most of the synopses of Reds that I came across during the course of my research for this retrospective review, from sites like Wikipedia and the Internet Movie Database (IMDB), present the movie as being primarily about John Reed, with little or no mention of Louise Bryant. I would argue that Reds, to its great credit, is just as much about Bryant as it is about Reed, and I think this is indicated by the film’s title. When a historical movie is primarily about one person, usually a man, that person’s name is almost always in the title. For instance, David Lean’s biopic about T.E. Lawrence is called Lawrence of Arabia; Richard Attenborough’s biopic about Mahatma Gandhi is called—appropriately enough—Gandhi; Oliver Stone’s biopic about President Richard Nixon is called—you guessed it—Nixon. And yet John Reed’s name is nowhere in the title of Beatty’s epic. Instead, the movie is called Reds, and I believe it’s a reference to both Reed and Bryant. Among the supporting players, the two standouts are Maureen Stapleton as Emma Goldman and Jack Nicholson as Eugene O’Neill. Stapleton, who won the film’s only acting Oscar (Beatty, Keaton, and Nicholson were also nominated for their performances), portrays Goldman as a fiery radical who—as NeoConservative intellectual Irving Kristol might have put it—gets mugged by Bolshevik reality. As for Nicholson, few actors play a cynic and a drunk as well as he does, and his character provides a stark counterweight to the naïve idealism of his friends Reed and Bryant. I also want to note here that Jerzy Kosiński, a Polish author, gives a convincing performance as Grigory Zinoviev, leader of the Comintern, and this is ironic because Kosiński was himself a staunch anti-Communist.
One of the things I love most about Reds is that Beatty intersperses his narrative with clips of interviews from 32 people who were alive during the period in which the movie is set (1915 to 1920, the year of Reed’s death) and knew the film’s two protagonists. These individuals, known simply as “The Witnesses,” include American Communist Party organizer Will Weinstone, author Henry Miller, and New York Republican Congressman Hamilton Fish (a Harvard classmate of John Reed’s), and their recollections are crucial to Reds’ success because they serve as helpful “bridges” that link sections of the narrative together, provide important personal and historical context to the scenes unfolding before the audience, and give the film the feel of a documentary. And all the movie’s elements—such as the acting, script, costumes, etc.—place the viewer squarely in its setting and allows him or her to see events exactly as the characters do.
According to Richard Grenier, who penned a mostly negative review of Reds for the NeoConservative magazine Commentary shortly after the film’s release, in the years following John Reed’s death, a debate raged between Communists, such as the Soviets, who argued that the author of Ten Days that Shook the World remained a loyal comrade until the day he died and anti-Communists, including former Communists like John Reed’s friend Benjamin Gitlow, who maintained that the radical journalist had become disillusioned with the Bolsheviks by the end of his life. I greatly appreciate that Beatty, himself a lifelong Progressive Democrat who has supported Democratic politicians like George McGovern and Bobby Kennedy, chooses to treat this matter with ambiguity. During the second half of Reds, Reed does display some signs of disillusionment, particularly in a scene near the end where he berates Zinoviev after the latter changed a crucial word in a propaganda speech he had written and delivers a brief but inspiring monologue about the need to maintain one’s individuality while simultaneously working for a cause greater than oneself. But then Reed dies shortly afterward, and any questions concerning his continued loyalty to the Soviet cause are left unresolved. (The only character in the movie that signals an impending break with Communism is Emma Goldman, who at one point lambasts the Bolsheviks for enacting harsh measures in order to crush dissent and asks, “Is any nightmare justifiable in the name of defense against counter-revolution?”) One of the most fascinating things about Reds is that it presents a tragic twist on Joseph Campbell’s Hero’s Journey. John Reed does indeed venture forth from his common, everyday world and goes on a thrilling adventure in a faraway place, where a great victory is won. But what he seeks to bring home to his fellow man is not a boon but a scourge—and one that brings about countless deaths, including his own.
As is the case with all movies, Reds isn’t perfect, of course, and possesses some flaws. As I indicated above, I dislike the movie’s overall sympathetic treatment of the birth of the Soviet Union and consider it akin to a sympathetic look at the rise of Nazi Germany. Also, the scenes during the second half of Reds portraying factional infighting within the Socialist Party of America grow a bit tedious, and when the film was first released, I suspect that more than a few moviegoers were confused by the argument depicted onscreen over which group should be considered the “true” representative of American Communism, the Communist Party of America or the Communist Labor Party of America. And there’s another scene where John Reed is saying goodbye to Emma Goldman, who has been scheduled for deportation back to Russia, and she requests that he ask a mutual friend of theirs to put a photo of her face in a magazine with the words “Deported in 1919: The government of the most powerful country in the world is afraid of this woman” below it. This scene is disingenuous because it implies that Goldman was just some harmless old woman with radical ideas who was being needlessly persecuted by the Big Bad Government. To be sure, President Woodrow Wilson, a Progressive Democrat, and A. Mitchell Palmer, his attorney general, did commit un-Constitutional excesses and trample on civil liberties in their zeal to go after political radicals, but the movie fails to mention that Goldman, an Anarchist, allegedly incited violence and was involved in a plot to assassinate a factory manager who worked for the Carnegie Steel Company.
However, these criticisms of Reds are minor quibbles that are far outweighed by the movie’s considerable qualities. It goes without saying that a film like Reds could never be made in today’s Hollywood, where studios, which seek to maximize profits and are loath to take significant risks, spend most of their time cranking out conventional, crowd-pleasing blockbusters, sequels, and reboots. Although I think it’s a travesty that Reds didn’t win the Oscar for Best Picture nor make it on either version of the AFI’s “100 Years…100 Movies” list, I’m very grateful that this epic masterpiece got made at all and received critical and commercial success upon release. As Beatty noted during his Oscar acceptance speech following his win for Best Director, the fact that a private company financed a cinematic homage to Communism and Socialism was a tribute to American Capitalism and political freedom, and in the final analysis, that is one of Reds’ greatest ironies and lasting achievements.