Reds

The Best…

…Movie I Watched This Week

Reds (1981) — Directed by Warren Beatty

I was smitten with Reds (1981) the first time I saw it as a teenager.

The film, starring, co-written by and directed by Warren Beatty, is about the love affair between radical left-wing American journalists Jack Reed (Beatty) and Louise Bryant (Diane Keaton) in the 1910s — with the Russian Revolution as its backdrop.

Repeated viewings only deepened my appreciation to the point that when I was a senior in college, after reading Reed’s influential book Ten Days that Shook the World (1919) and Robert A. Rosenstone’s Romantic Revolutionary: A Biography of John Reed, I decided I wanted to write my senior essay about him.

As the title of Rosenstone’s book indicates, there was something so romantic about Reed, his story, and the era. To my 20-year-old self, it was all irresistible: the Greenwich Village bohemian lifestyle; writers dashing off to foreign places to document historic events in first-person accounts for magazines and newspapers; parties, booze, free love, feminism, socialism, JOURNALISM.

These stories of people not much older than me seemed so much more colorful and exciting than the life I was living in the 1990s. I wasn’t sailing off to Petrograd to cover any revolutions — I was riding a bus for seven hours from New Haven to Potsdam, N.Y., to write about college hockey games.

But in watching Reds, I could live vicariously through Reed, Bryant, and their friends and contemporaries.

It’s a huge historical epic, told across more than 3 hours (it came in one of those double VHS boxes back in the ’80s), with a big-name cast and crew, and featuring occasionally-interspersed documentary-style interviews with dozens of people who knew Reed and Bryant, adding a real-life Greek chorus to the narrative.

Reds was a critical and commercial success and was nominated for 12 Academy Awards, winning three (Beatty for Best Director, Vittorio Storaro for Best Cinematography, and Maureen Stapleton for Best Supporting Actress). Jack Nicholson also appears as a smoldering Eugene O’Neill, and Stephen Sondheim wrote the music.

Like I said, big stars. Which meant a big budget: $32 million, which is around $117 million today. (It grossed $40 million domestically.)

Beatty was coming off the blockbuster hit Heaven Can Wait, and this movie was proof that in that era, a hot star could get just about anything made.

I was recently on a long flight and got to see the film again for the first time in years. It still holds up, though I see it a bit differently through my 45-year-old eyes. As a teenager, I was swept up by the romance of the period and the exciting possibilities that life could hold. But in middle age, I see it more as a love story between two people who had to work hard to figure out how to be lovers, friends, colleagues, and yes, comrades, all at the same time.

I didn’t end up writing my senior essay about Reed. Turns out, when you’re getting a history degree from Yale, you’re supposed to uncover something new, not write about someone who was famous enough to be the focus of a major Hollywood motion picture.

Instead, I wrote about a mostly-forgotten journalist named Arthur Bullard who played a U.S. diplomatic role in Moscow during the Bolshevik Revolution. It was a pretty good paper. I got an A-. But it wasn’t as good as Reds.