Reds (1981)

Director:

Warren Beatty

Writers:

Warren Beatty (screenplay) &
Trevor Griffiths (screenplay)

Release Date:

4 December 1981 (USA)

Genre:

Biography | Drama | History | Romance

Tagline:

Not since Gone With The Wind has there been a great romantic epic like it!

Plot:

A radical American journalist becomes involved with the Communist revolution in Russia and hopes to bring its spirit and idealism to the United States.

Plot Keywords:

Cheating On Boyfriend | Arrest | Washington D.C. | Middle East | Revolutionary

Awards:

Won 3 Oscars. Another 18 wins & 21 nominations

Cast

Warren Beatty	...	John Reed
Diane Keaton	...	Louise Bryant
Edward Herrmann	...	Max Eastman
Jerzy Kosinski	...	Grigory Zinoviev
Jack Nicholson	...	Eugene O'Neill
Paul Sorvino	...	Louis Fraina
Maureen Stapleton	...	Emma Goldman
Nicolas Coster	...	Paul Trullinger
M. Emmet Walsh	...	Speaker - Liberal Club
Ian Wolfe	...	Mr. Partlow
Bessie Love	...	Mrs. Partlow
MacIntyre Dixon	...	Carl Walters
Pat Starr	...	Helen Walters
Eleanor D. Wilson	...	Mrs. Reed
Max Wright	...	Floyd Dell

Runtime:

194 min

Country:

USA

Language:

English | Russian | German | French | Finnish

Color:

Color (Technicolor)

Aspect Ratio:

1.85 : 1

Sound Mix:

Stereo

Certification:

UK:15 (cut) | Singapore:M18 | USA:PG (re-rating after appeal) | Australia:M | USA:R (original rating) | Argentina:Atp | Chile:TE | Finland:K-16 | Norway:12 | Sweden:11

Filming Locations:

1 Great George Street, Westminster, London, England, UK

Company:

Barclays Mercantile Industrial Finance

Trivia:

Over 130 hours of footage were shot, about 40 times more than the final cut of the film. It takes 2 days for everyday shooting dailies (shot in Europe except for London scenes) to reach editors Dede Allen and Craig McKay. This was accomplished by having a courier on standby round the clock. The courier would take the dailies to the Technicolor Lab in Rome for the special processing and would reach Los Angeles (where post-production is done) at the end of next day.

Goofs:

Factual errors: During the tram ride in Petrograd there is a modern traffic sign visible (a yellow line on red background: forbidden driving direction).

Quotes:

Eugene O'Neill: I'd like to kill you, but I can't. So you can do whatever you want to. Except not see me.

Movie Connections:

Referenced in George Stevens: The Filmmakers Who Knew Him (2001) (V)

Soundtrack:

Yankee Doodle Boy

Great movie

This movie was great, and I hope it comes out on DVD real soon. Beatty became Reed in more than one sense--not only did he act the part, but he directed the movie in a way reminiscent of the kind of "new journalistic" style that Reed and his fellow MASSES writers pioneered, mixing the drama with interviews of people who knew JR, Louise, etc.

The film also sort of puts forward the question, "What if, instead of running back to Russia (to die of kidney failure and mistreatment by the CP), Jack Reed had stayed in this country to build the CP? Would it have turned out to become Stalinist?" According to Howe and Coser, who wrote a good book on THE AMERICAN COMMUNIST PARTY, much like Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht in Germany, Reed was the ONLY leader who was independent, who had some real backbone.

The best part of the movie is when Emma Goldmann, played by Maureen Stapleton, tells Jack that "it doesn't work" (i.e. statist, bureaucratic socialism that the Bolsheviks were instituting as a grossly mistaken response to the economic crisis and Allied invasion of Russia after the Revolution). And then his rebellion against the lying propaganda of Zinoviev. Kind of hits me right now that Jerzy Kosinski should play Zinoviev--didn't he commit suicide when he was exposed as a plagiarist? Where is the line between art and reality, politics and life?

Of course I loved the romantic reality between Beatty, Bryant, and Nicholson (Reed, Bryant, and Eugene O'Neill). And the cynicism that Reed expresses about the Democrats and Wilson is certainly apropos today.