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    Home»Movies»Movies by Decade»Movies - 1980s
    Movies - 1980s Movies - R 3 Mins Read

    Reds (1981)

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    This nearly four-hour-long political saga about Communist journalist John Reed and his neurotic wife Louise Bryant was meticulously directed by Warren Beatty, who clearly had an obsession with the man – the only American to be buried in the Kremlin.

    The film begins when Reed (Warren Beatty) visits Portland, Oregon, in 1915, and meets Louise Bryant (Diane Keaton), feminist writer, nude photography model, dentist’s wife, and dilettante.

    She follows him to Greenwich Village, where she finds herself thrown into the company of radicals, intellectuals, Bohemians, poets, and rebels in the days of Margaret Sanger and Isadora Duncan, when the weirder you were the better copy you made.

    reds_000

    Reed’s journalistic travels take him away from her most of the time, leaving her alone in the clutches of men like Eugene O’Neill (Jack Nicholson). In ‘Nicholson’s performance, the brooding playwright emerges as a sullen, moody, hard-drinking romantic who seduces her easily.

    Later, when she gets involved in communism, too, there’s a kind of Clark Gable/Carole Lombard rivalry as John and Louise travel to Russia to file stories.

    Behind the Iron Curtain, we are plunged into more talk of Trotsky politics, Leninism, strikes, and Bolsheviks. They seem to be the only Americans covering the Revolution, although it is never clear what papers they’re working for.

    Later, as a representative of the American Communist party, he gets sent to Russia, wounded, and imprisoned. She searches for him on tramp steamers, on skis, and on snowshoes.

    But anarchist Emma Goldman (beautifully played by Maureen Stapleton) is really the only revolutionary in the film who ever realises that the dream was a dying ideal.

    In Russia, nothing worked, human rights were squashed, and everything was drowning in chaos and bureaucratic red tape. Goldman is the only character who reveals the foolishness of this calling when she articulates her frustration at being persecuted in Russia for the same things she was persecuted for back home.

    John Reed never does come to such a moment of truth and dies in a charity ward in filthy and depressing conditions. The point is that a man is a hero as long as he dies for what he believes, even if nobody else does.

    John Reed
    Warren Beatty
    Louise Bryant
    Diane Keaton
    Eugene O’Neill
    Jack Nicholson
    Max Eastman
    Edward Herrmann
    Grigory Zinoviev
    Jerzy Kosinski
    Emma Goldman
    Maureen Stapleton
    Pete Van Wherry
    Gene Hackman
    Louis Fraina
    Paul Sorvino
    Paul Trullinger
    Nicolas Coster
    Mr Partlow
    Ian Wolfe
    Mrs Partlow
    Bessie Love
    Julius Gerber
    William Daniels
    Allan Benson
    Dave King
    Joe Volski
    Joseph Buloff
    MacAlpine
    Shane Rimmer
    Police chief
    Ramon Bieri

    Director
    Warren Beatty

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