Reds: Revisiting Warren Beatty’s Unforgotten Masterpiece

In fact, Warren Beatty is the only person who has been nominated for Oscars for acting, directing, writing, and producing in the same film - not once, but twice! Beatty first achieved this feat for his film Heaven Can Wait (with Buck Henry as co-director), and again for Reds - the film that we are revisiting today.

Reds, the 1981 film that Beatty co-wrote, produced and directed, fetched him the Academy Award for Best Director. The film stars Beatty as John Reed, the revolutionary American journalist who covered the 1917 October Revolution in Russia. The film also stars Diane Keaton as Louise Bryant, Reed’s wife, and Jack Nicholson as Eugene O'Neil.

Although critically acclaimed at the time, Reds seems to have been largely forgotten now - film scholars and critics do not talk about it anymore, and the film is not even screened by film schools. A revisit of the film is thus in order.

Reds tells the story of Reed, a maverick journalist and writer who supported the Soviet regime in Russia, and advocated for a communist revolution in his home country of the United States. Having briefly fought on the side of the Bolsheviks during the Russian Civil War, Reed, along with his wife Bryant, became dedicated Communists serving the Soviet government of Russia as translators and advisors.

However, Reed’s efforts to inspire a Communist revolution back in the US failed miserably. He found the Communists in the US divided and confused, and a return to trip to the USSR also led to the souring of his relations with the USSR government. Reed ultimately died of typhus while in Moscow, where he died and is buried. He remains one of only four Americans to be buried at the Kremlin Wall Necropolis, the former national cemetery of the Soviet Union.

In order to bring to the screen the extraordinary life of John Reed, nothing short of an extraordinary filmmaker would have done. And after watching the film, one is convinced of Beatty’s extraordinary genius - the film is mounted on an epic scale. Indeed, the film is more of an epic than a biography. It runs for an exhilarating 195 minutes, bringing to life dimensions of Reed’s life that range from his relationship with his wife, his method of writing, his squabbles with his editors and friends, his stepping into active politics and then his frustrations with how politics was being thought of and run in the US, his attitudes towards the common people and the urge to inform them. Although there are some exaggerations and creative freedoms taken in the story, the film does an impressive job of telling the story of a most interesting man.

The film also has a very special aspect to it- it has interviews with real persons, called ‘Witnesses’ in the credits, who knew Reed and Bryant. This also lends the film a documentary quality, something that brings the viewer closer to the characters and to what is happening to them on the screen.

Reds needs to be seen a lot more in our time. It needs to be talked about, and it needs to be shown to young filmmakers who are aspiring to make compelling human stories. Here was a man who was never ashamed of his beliefs and was brave enough to not only think unpopular thoughts (communism was considered taboo in the US at the time), but was also courageous enough to put these thoughts to paper and then act on these thoughts by setting up his own political party against the advice of his peers. The film also needs to be watched for its film craft - the acting, the costumes, the sets, the dialogues - everything is designed to bring the viewer into Reed’s world. And to bring Reed’s world into our lives as well.

Finding stories such as Reed’s is not hard. One only needs to look a little more diligently.