Eleven Reels That Bored the World

...Keaton seems to have stepped straight out of a Woody Allen movie...

...She stows away on a tramp freighter for a couple of months and then, as her husband did, she mushes through Finland in the least sensible, most dramatic fashion-straight across those icecaps...

...Communists split into ever smaller factions, he takes off for the Soviet Union to gain recognition of his splinter group and also recover the revolutionary fervor he has somehow lost...

...A gag line ("The taxi's waiting") is reiterated whenever Jack hits the road, and without fail he brings Louise bouquets when he returns...

...I stuck it out, though, and my worst fears were not realized...

...I was in no mood to discover how Beatty's script (written with Trevor Griffiths) had revised thelifeof John Reed, whose romanticized account of the Russian Revolution and his own role in it, Ten Days That Shook the World, hardly needed to be fictionalized...

...This characterization, I suspect, owes less to the real-life Reed than to prototypes that have populated Hollywood movies for years...

...More likely, the desperate search for fresh material led him to the worn-out past...

...In 1919, as the U.S...

...The two lovebirds soon learn that married life has its problems, too...

...every time they make love, it scratches and whimpers at the bedroom door...

...Louise's affair with O'Neill, it seems, is enough to push Jack into...

...Of course, he's pretty disillusioned by now, and he'd sure like to see his honey again...

...The actor's toothy grin, modest stammer and engaging awkwardness (as in a tiresomely repeated sight gag involving a low-hanging chandelier that he keeps running into) turn Reed into a straying Ail-American boy whose idealism is nonetheless admirable...

...They have the best lines, while Jack winds up looking like a romantic fool...

...All are annoyingly unidentified (except for a listing in the final credits), so viewers unfamiliar with, say, Miller's distinctive face and Brooklyn accent will be missing most of the point of his spirited comparisons between America then and now...

...some merely fill in historical details that a less clumsy script would have taken the trouble to integrate into the narrative...

...While he's languishing in jail, Louise finally gives up trying to free him by conventional means and decides to take matters into her own hands...

...Once again, Louise does little besides anxiously wait for him to come home...

...why it requires over three hours, a huge cast of fine actors (like Gene Hackman) wasted in minuscule roles and location shooting in Spain, Finland, California, and New York?including a brief scene in front of The New Leader's offices-to tell this slushy love story is a mystery to me...

...no, not the arms of another woman, but matrimony...

...Hubby's always running off to lecture somewhere, leaving the little woman behind, unsatisfied intellectually as well as sexually...

...Neither is able to cope with the indiscretions of the other, despite their being advanced thinkers for their time...

...I don't think they mattered at all," one says...

...her tics and gasps are such a parody of bad Method acting that Louise appears less an old-time suffragette than a very contemporary neurotic...

...Perhaps it was Beatty's intention to wake up the audience so it wouldn't doze through the intermission and miss the chance to stock upon popcorn and other provisions for the long winter ahead...

...Reds cost so much to produce (over $30 million), features so many stars (Beatty, Diane Keaton, Jack Nicholson, Maureen Stapleton, among others), lasts so long (over three hours, plus an intermission), and has won the plaudits of so many people (including such different critics as Vincent Canby, Stanley Kauff-mann and David Denby) that it practically coerces you into the theater...

...Emma Goldman knows that Louise is in Russia searching for him...

...Which is only to say that the second half of Reds is livelier than the first, if otherwise not much better...

...He is a famous journalist...

...turns into "Jack and Louise Meet Dr...

...Some of the witnesses comment on the action, occasionally reading the audience' s mind ("Were they Socialists...

...And if your friends are like mine, they have probably been discussing it at greater length than any other recent work of popular culture (except perhaps The White Hotel and Nicholas Nickleby...

...Very shortly-Although long after the movie has expired-those years on the road take their toll on poor Jack, and he dies...

...he's far too valuable a publicist to be allowed to leave...

...In Coming Issues Iso Kapp on Soul Bellow's "The Dean's December" Barry Gewen on John Lewis Gaddis' "Strategies ol Containment" and Winston Churchill II's "Defending the West" As far as romance is concerned, Beat-ty employs every stale Hollywood device...

...Still, it isn't her fault that her role is badly conceived...

...Some of these figures are well-known (Henry Miller, Roger Baldwin, Adela Rogers St...

...So with Louise back in New York wondering what's going on, Jack flounders through a lot of boring Comintern meetings with Grigory Zinoviev (Jerzy Kosinski), and crew, and seeks a way out of Russia and partisan squabbles...

...I even considered leaving at the intermission...

...Zhivago...

...Then comes the Big Event-the Tsar falls, the Bolsheviks rise, and Jack and Louise reunite in order to head for Russia, where their romantic and political passions will burn brightly against the backdrop of the Revolution...

...You and Jack have a lot of middle-class dreams for a couple of radicals," O'Neill sneers to Louise at one point, and the gist of his remark is repeated by other skeptics throughout Reds...

...After returning from Russia as the prophet of the new age, Reed rides a wave of success with the publication of Ten Days and plunges into the murky waters of Communist Party politics...

...Finally, to the relief of everyone concerned, she decides to leave him and pursue her own career as a journalist, chasing ambulances on battlefields in France...

...Jack and Louise are suffering the trials and tribulations of "Free Love...

...By the time she reaches Moscow, he's off in hostile border countries, a goodwill ambassador spreading the Communist word...

...It's the story of two crazy kids, John Reed and Louise Bryant (Keaton), caught up in the turbulence of the post-Armory Show, early World War I, Golden Age of American Innocence and Native Radicalism...

...with Russia torn by civil war and surrounded by hostile armies, Jack has to inch his way along wind-swept icecaps to cross the Finnish border...

...Between these interludes...

...In transit, she has several picturesque, Zhivagoesque encounters with Lapps, reindeer and other furry creatures (though no wolves, thank God...

...There is an adorable little dog, for instance, that Jack gives Louise for Christmas...

...Film buffs have noted Beatty's various hommages in Reds (to Eisenstein, for starters), but a more telling influence may be his own previous roles-the recent Heaven Can Wait, for example, where he plays a similar overgrown adolescent hero...

...They even get to hang out with all the "in" people-max Eastman (Edward Herrmann), Emma Goldman (Maureen Stapleton) and particularly Eugene O'Neill (Nicholson...

...Instead, I was...well, bored...

...The first two hours of the film can best be characterized as "Annie Hall in Greenwich Village, 1915, Complete with Greek Chorus...

...She helps Louise locate her lost love, and there is the big teary reunion you've seen in that poster showing the couple embracing...

...The first half of t he movie ends on a rousing note-the storming of the Winter Palace to the stirring strains of the "Internationale...

...I confess that I was prepared to dislike Reds on ideological grounds...

...I didn't embarrass myself or annoy my neighbors by falling asleep and snoring...

...The cinematography and the all too carefully detailed period sets, intended to be romantic, actually work against the principal characters, who are gratingly anachronistic...

...It should be pointed out that he could hardly have known when he started the project four years ago that there would be a Republican President and Senate...

...If it was Beatty's intention to show how Reed's and Bryant's political convictions were little more than disguised personal problems, he has succeeded...

...Beatty's Jack is an equally incongruous figure...

...Upon reaching the Finnish prison, she finds that Jack has already been released in an exchange worked out by the Bolsheviks...

...Beatty has been praised for "daring" to make a film about old American radicals in these new conservative times...

...Yet the failings of Reds are not political...

...To boot, the entire film is photographed in the most embarrassingly lush style by Vittorio Storaro...

...He almost doesn't make it into the land of promise...

...Pan Two is silly on a grander scale than Part One, albeit less boring: "Annie Hall, Etc...

...After "meeting cute" ("I'd like to see you with your pants off," she tells him), they run off together and then laugh and love and fight their way from Oregon to Lower Manhattan to Provincetown and beyond...

...You said you'd be back Tuesday," Louise crabs at one point, and then adds, anticipating our reaction, "I'm sounding like a boring, clinging, miserable wife...

...Beatty punctuates this tale of fun-loving Village intellectuals with the testimony of a series of "witnesses," who stare at the camera and reminisce about good old Jack and Louise...

...Nor was I looking forward to watching Beatty, under his own direction, play America's first participant-journalist...

...John, Rebecca West, Will Durant, George Jessel), others are not...

...Like Louise, she is now in Russia, and like Jack, she has begun to have her doubts about the regime...

...Let Reed's body lie in peace, I thought, inside the walls of the Kremlin where it belongs...

...What's being recycled in Reds is not really history, simply old movies...

...Once he arrives, the Party wants him to stay...

...Attempting to steal back into the west, he is imprisoned by the Finns, who don't approve of their neighbors' politics...

...she, the frustrated wife of a Portland dentist, is full of intellectual pretensions...

...I wasn't offended by any radical sentimentality and naivete...

...to Beatty and Griffiths, Louise, supposedly a writer, is never anything more than a whiner...

...Before he makes his way back to Russia, even Louise sarcastically comments that his faction of the American Communist Party consists of a handful of intellectuals bickering in a basement, and that's about the sharpest political perspective anyone offers...