Film

...And then, throughout the rich middle of the film, there is a sympathetic and stirring representation of the Russian Revolution, represented much as Reed reported it in Ten Days...

...Variety's reviewer thought Reds "bites off more than an audience can comfortably chew...

...Reed and Bryant immerse themselves in the heady life of leftist politics (centering around Max Eastman's The Masses) and avant-garde art in New York's Greenwich Village and Provincetown...

...John, Scott Nearing, Rebecca West, and George Seldes...

...Reds is a welcome anomaly, moreover, in the midst of what appears to be a conservative trend in American feature film-making...

...It also benefits from the superb cinematography and lighting (emphasizing earth tones and muted colors) of Vittorio Storaro, photographer for Bernardo Berto-lucci and for Apocalypse Now...

...Because it is a big movie with a love story played out against the turmoil of the Russian Revolution, Reds has been compared in initial reviews to David Lean's Doctor Zhivago...

...Part love story (unconvincing), part thriller (improbable), part social problem film (far fetched), it wholly fails to cohere and convince...

...Stunning photography (by Giuseppi Rotunno, photographer for Visconti and Fellini), and elegant production design (by George Jenkins) cannot compensate for a silly, cliche-ridden screenplay...

...Fonda has nothing to work with, and Kristofferson is a stiff...

...It might thus be characterized, as one observer has suggested, as something of a chamber epic...

...Reds takes seriously the ideological and political foundations of a considerable antiwar movement in America during World War I. ("What would you say that this war is about...

...The script apparently calls for a heart attack in the early going...

...But this comparison does not seem to me either fruitful or accurate...

...Perhaps...

...This is the worst and most reactionary film I saw in 1981...

...I thus went to a press screening of Reds expecting very little, and was surprised to find it quite the best American movie I've seen in the past couple of years...

...And they become, as one contemporary witness puts it...

...Reds traces the personal and public lives and involvements of Reed (Warren Beatty) and Louise Bryant (Diane Keaton) from the time of their first encounter (in Portland, 1915) to his premature death from typhus in Moscow in 1920...

...Beatty's film is notably more intelligent, more imaginative in its effort to realize a complex narrative in film, and historically more enlightening...

...O temporal O mores...

...Beatty, it's been reported, spent ten years on research...

...Credit is also due to the talented collaborators Beatty, as producer, brought into this project...

...But Reds is notable not only for retrieving a fascinating segment of the historical heritage of the Left and representing this material in a popular format—it is also a remarkably well-made film...

...M Hits and Misses Rollover This latest Jane Fonda vehicle (co-starring Kris Kristofferson)—and a certifiable miss—is set in the vertiginous world of high international finance...

...And while its screenplay takes a few liberties in its portrayal of the relationship of Reed and Louise Bryant, it is otherwise, so far as I can determine, faithful to the historical record...

...Reds acknowledges, too, that by 1920 some of those who initially welcomed the Revolution were already becoming disillusioned with the totalitarian character of Bolshevik rule...

...Although the ads give George C. Scott a star's billing, Scott has the good sense to disappear before the end of the first half hour...

...In one way or another it seeks to encompass just about all the major phenomena affecting American life in the last couple of decades: the generation gap, racism, the lunar landing, ethnicity, violence, the sexual revolution, and the confused search for personal fulfillment...

...These crisply edited insertions are fascinating, and the multiplicity of views they supply serves as a reminder that there is necessarily a subjective element in historical perception...

...It seemed Reds might turn out to be this year's Heaven's Gate: a spendthrift, overlong, and ultimately underwhelming Hollywood spectacular...

...Taps In Jean Vigo's masterpiece, Zero for Conduct (1933), and Lindsay Anderson's // (1968), school kids rebel against oppressive institutions and the abuse of authority...

...His passport is revoked, and he is stranded in Europe...

...This feeling is most forcefully articulated by Emma Goldman (Maureen Stapleton), who tells Reed that "It's not happening the way we thought it would...

...Although it impresses as a work of epic dimensions, much the greater part of it has been achieved in interiors, and no effort is made to awe the viewer with oceanic vastness or cast-of-thousands shots...

...Directed by Arthur Penn (Bonnie and Clyde, Alice's Restaurant) and written by Frank Tesich (Breaking Away), Four Friends is by no means all of a piece, but it is still an uncommonly compelling American movie—and admirable for its ambition...

...Four Friends An overreaching, uneven bildungsroman of a film, depicting the coming of age of a young Yugoslav-American in the 1960s and 1970s...

...And while Reds is not tied together by a dominating, emotionally charged musical theme, it has been endowed with a wonderfully varied and evocative score (original music by Stephen Sondheim, supplemented by a number of songs and rags from World War I and, in the sequences devoted to the Revolution proper, rousing use of the "Internationale...

...We see Reed becoming radicalized through contact (and arrest) with Wobbly militants...

...But their relationship is difficult and peculiarly modern, marked by infidelities and separations, and their love is tempered by mutually exclusive commitments and needs for self-fulfillment...

...She leaves her dentist husband to live with Reed and pursue a career in New York journalism...

...Diane Keaton, as Louise Bryant, gives her strongest and most complex performance to date...

...He stands up, pauses, and replies: "Profits...

...In the aftermath of the Revolution Reed and Bryant become the prey of witchhunters at home...

...Reds' portrays the passion—and the bitterness Reds also deals with the advent of bitter factionalism on the radical Left, and the breakup of the Second International (Reed played a significant role in leading pro-Soviet partisans of revolution out of the Socialist Party, and in the formation of the American Communist Labor Party...

...Reed is asked at a meeting of the Portland Liberal Club...

...Especially effective use is made of overlapping and asynchronous sound (sound not in unison with the visual image...

...She is brought before a Congressional committee and asked if she believes in God...

...The out-of-control power of Saudi Arabian money and the catastrophic irresponsibility of bankers bring about the end of the world as we know it...

...The word was that this depiction of the life of John Reed (author of the much acclaimed firsthand account of the Russian Revolution, Ten Days That Shook the World, and member of the Comintern) was being depoliti-cized and fashioned into a love story...

...And the film, produced, co-written, and directed by its star, Warren Beatty, was said to be in trouble and running way over budget...

...While most Hollywood movies make a travesty of such material, the devotion to ideas and ideological commitment are rendered here with uncommon credibility...

...The film illuminates, at the same time, an exceedingly interesting period in American and world history (one rarely dealt with in domestic cinema) and, despite much of Paramount's publicity, does not reduce the social and political conflicts of the period to mere background for "a passionate love story...

...a couple...

...The film's dramatized narrative is anchored in reality through the interspersing of cinema verite reminiscences and commentary by a number of aged contemporary "witnesses" who include Roger Baldwin, Henry Miller, Adela Rogers St...

...but I'd like to think that there are masses of movie-goers who will find more pleasure (and nourishment) in a rich, multi-course feast of this sort than in the cinematic equivalent of a Big Mac...

...It is a daring and stunningly realized work, at once romantic and modernist in spirit, encompassing both a personal drama and a significant chunk of Twentieth Century history...

...Although Reds runs for more than three hours, masterful editing by Dede Allen (The Hustler, Bonnie and Clyde) and Craig McKay keeps the narrative moving at a brisk pace and compels attention...

...And the well-known actors in the film's many supporting parts—Stapleton, Jack Nicholson (Eugene O'Neill), Gene Hackman (editor Pete Van Wheery), Paul Sorvino (Communist Party leader Louis Fraina)— perform in admirable harmony, instead of delivering the sort of "cameo" performances ordinarily found in star-laden movies...

...While I have a qualm or two about Beatty's portrayal of Reed (he brings to the part some behavioral tics from other roles, and seems a bit too eager to please), the cast is generally superb...

...There is also a suggestion, apparently based on historical record, that Reed himself felt some disenchantment with the Soviets in the final year of his life...

...The Lean movie has always seemed to me self-indulgent, pretentious, and less than coherently scripted—a work which invariably substituted mere spectacle—vast panoramic shots—for cinematic thoughtfulness...

...One is surprised, in the end, that so much has been realized in a mere three and a quarter hours...

...The first several minutes of the film, depicting the frenzied activity in the trading room of a major New York bank, are exciting, but as the narrative unfolds, disappointment takes over...

...Much of the credit for this must go to Beatty, co-author of an unusually intelligent screenplay distinguished by some of the best dialogue to be found in recent motion pictures...

...The students in Taps (set in an illustrious military academy) engage in armed rebellion in the name of "Honor, duty, and country...

...The sound editing (supervised by Richard Cirincione) is no less impressive...