Reds is a 1981 American epic historical drama film co-written, produced, and directed by Warren Beatty, about the life and career of John Reed, the journalist and writer who chronicled the October Revolution in Russia in his 1919 book Ten Days That Shook the World. Beatty stars in the lead role alongside Diane Keaton as activist Louise Bryant and Jack Nicholson as playwright Eugene O'Neill.
The supporting cast includes Edward Herrmann, Jerzy Kosiński, Paul Sorvino, Maureen Stapleton, Gene Hackman, Ramon Bieri, Nicolas Coster and M. Emmet Walsh. The film also features, as "witnesses", interviews with the 98-year-old radical educator and peace activist Scott Nearing, author Dorothy Frooks, reporter and author George Seldes, civil liberties advocate Roger Baldwin and writer Henry Miller, among others. George Jessel, who died shortly before the film was released, appears as one of the contemporaries of Reed and Bryant who were interviewed.
Reds was released on December 4, 1981, to widespread critical acclaim. Beatty was awarded the Academy Award for Best Director and the film was nominated for Best Picture, but lost to Chariots of Fire. Beatty, Keaton, Nicholson, and Stapleton were nominated for Best Actor, Best Actress, Best Supporting Actor, and Best Supporting Actress, respectively, with Stapleton winning her category. Beatty became the third person to be nominated for Academy Awards in the categories Best Director, Actor, and, with co-writer Trevor Griffiths, Original Screenplay—losing again to Chariots of Fire—for a film nominated for Best Picture.
In June 2008, the American Film Institute revealed AFI's 10 Top 10—the best ten films in ten "classic" American film genres—after polling over 1,500 people from the film community. Reds came in ninth in the epic genre.
Plot In 1915, married journalist and suffragist Louise Bryant encounters the radical journalist John Reed for the first time at a lecture in Portland, Oregon, and is intrigued with his idealism. After meeting him for an interview on international politics that lasts an entire night, she realizes that writing has been her only escape from her frustrated existence. Inspired to leave her husband, Bryant joins Reed in Greenwich Village, New York City, and becomes acquainted with the local community of activists and artists, including anarchist and author Emma Goldman and playwright Eugene O'Neill.
Later, they move to Provincetown, Massachusetts, to concentrate on their writing, becoming involved in the local theater scene. Through her writing, Bryant becomes known as a feminist and radical in her own right. Reed becomes involved in labor strikes with the "Reds" of the Industrial Workers of the World. Obsessed with changing the world, he grows restless and heads for St. Louis to cover the 1916 Democratic National Convention.
During Reed's absence, Bryant falls into a complicated affair with O'Neill. Upon his return, Reed discovers the affair and realizes he still loves Bryant. The two marry secretly and make a home together in Croton-on-Hudson, New York, but still have conflicting desires. When Reed admits his own infidelities, Bryant takes a ship to Europe to work as a war correspondent.
After a flareup of a kidney disorder results in his having one removed, Reed is warned to avoid excessive travel or stress, but decides to take the same path as Louise and goes to Europe. Reunited as professionals, the two find their passion rekindled as they travel to Russia and are swept up in the fall of the czarist regime and the events of the 1917 Revolution.
After returning to the United States, Reed writes Ten Days That Shook the World, while Louise is called to testify in front of the Overman Committee. In order to implement the communist ideals he saw in Russia, Reed becomes active in the Socialist Party of America's new Left Wing Section. The Socialist Party soon undergoes a major political shift, with Reed and the Left Wing elected to 12 of its National Executive Committee's 15 seats, but the sitting members of the Committee prevent a takeover of the party by invalidating the election and expelling the entire Left Wing. Differing ideology among the expelled members causes them to splinter into two rival organizations, with Reed forming the Communist Labor Party of America. Anxious to establish his group as the United States' true Communist Party, Reed plans to return to Russia to secure official recognition from the Soviet Comintern. Having grown tired of the political infighting, Bryant threatens to end their relationship if he goes, but he does so anyway, promising to be home by Christmas.
As it was now illegal to travel to Russia, Reed enters the country by traveling to Finland and sneaking across the border. His endorsement is rejected by the Comintern while Zinoviev tries to keep him in Russia. Reed tries to leave on his own and return to Bryant, but is imprisoned in Finland after being caught at the border. After learning of his arrest, Louise seeks the U.S. government's help in securing his release, but it refuses, as in his absence, he has been indicted on charges of seditious conspiracy.
With no other recourse, Louise illegally travels to Finland herself, but by the time she arrives, Reed has been returned to Russia as part of a prisoner exchange between the two countries.
Now living in Petrograd, Reed is employed as a propagandist with the Comintern, and shares an apartment with Emma Goldman, who had been deported from the U.S. Unaware that Louise has traveled to Finland, he repeatedly tries to make contact with her by sending telegrams to New York and becomes increasingly frustrated by the lack of response. Louise makes her way to Petrograd, where she is found by Emma, who tells her Reed was sent to deliver a speech in Baku.
During his return to Petrograd, the czarist White Army attacks Reed's train. Reed survives the attack and is reunited with Louise at the train station. Soon thereafter, he is admitted to the hospital with typhus, and Louise cares for him. On his last day, they have loving words for each other. Louise goes down the hall to get him water and returns to find him dead. She enters his room, takes his hand, and sits by his bed.
Cast
Production
Development Warren Beatty came across the story of John Reed in the mid-1960s. Executive producer and film editor Dede Allen remembers Beatty's mentioning making a film about Reed's life as early as 1966. Originally titled Comrades, the first script was written by Beatty in 1969, but the process stalled. In 1973, Beatty was offered the role of Reed in Sergei Bondarchuk's Soviet film production Red Bells, but declined, and felt further driven to make his own biopic about Reed to compete with the Soviet version.
In 1976, Beatty found a suitable collaborator in Trevor Griffiths, who began work but was delayed by his wife Janice Stansfield's death in a plane crash. The preliminary draft of the script was finished in 1978. Beatty still had problems with it and he and Griffiths spent four and a half months fixing it. Beatty also collaborated with his friends Robert Towne, Peter Feibleman, and Elaine May to continue polishing the script after shooting had begun.
Financing Beatty achieved tremendous success with 1978's Heaven Can Wait, which he produced, starred in, co-wrote and co-directed for Paramount Pictures. The success gave Beatty the clout to seek funding for his long nurtured Reds project, which was difficult to secure because of the controversial communist subject matter and high price tag. Beatty succeeded in interesting both Warner Bros. and Paramount, before the head of Gulf & Western (Paramount's parent company), Charles Bluhdorn, agreed to finance the project. Bluhdorn soon had second thoughts, and attempted to dissuade Beatty with the promise of underwriting a $25 million alternative to Reds of Beatty's choice, but Beatty remained committed.
Casting Beatty originally had no intention of acting in the film or even directing it because he had learned on projects such as Bonnie and Clyde (1967) and Heaven Can Wait (1978) that producing a film alone is a difficult task. He briefly considered John Lithgow for the part of John Reed because the two were similar in appearance, but eventually Beatty decided to act in the film and direct it himself. Jack Nicholson was cast as Eugene O'Neill over James Taylor and Sam Shepard. Nicholson was older than the young O'Neill he was playing, and having just completed work on Kubrick's The Shining (1980), was in a "most shambolic" and "grotesque" physical state, according to producer Simon Relph. But Nicholson was committed to the role and appeared at the start of filming four months later having lost the weight he had gained and looking much younger.
Beatty also chose to cast non-actors in supporting roles, including George Plimpton, the editor of The Paris Review, who played the character of Horace Whigham. Jerzy Kosiński, a Polish American novelist, was asked to play the role of Grigory Zinoviev, but he initially refused because he was a fierce anti-communist and feared that he might be abducted by the KGB if he went to Finland to film.
The Witnesses To gain perspective on the lives of Reed and Louise Bryant, Beatty filmed interviews with a group of men and women, referred to only as "The Witnesses", as early as 1971. American Film identified the witnesses in its March 1982 issue.
In a capsule review for The New York Times, film critic Vincent Canby refers to them as "more than two dozen very, very old people, billed only as The Witnesses, whom Mr. Beatty interviewed about the Reeds and their long-gone times." He went on to say, "More than anything else in Reds, these interviews give the film its poignant point of view and separate it from all other romantic adventure films ever made." "The most evocative aspect of the presentation is a documentary enhancement – interviews with a number of venerable 'witnesses,' whose recollections of the period help to set the scene, bridge transitions and preserve a touching human perspective", wrote Gary Arnold of The Washington Post.
Jacob Bailin, labor organizer Roger Nash Baldwin, founder, American Civil Liberties Union John Ballato, early socialist Harry Carlisle, writer, teacher Kenneth Chamberlain, political cartoonist for The Masses Andrew Dasburg, painter Tess Davis, cousin of Louise Bryant's first husband Will Durant, historian Blanche Hays Fagen, member of the Provincetown Players Hamilton Fish, congressman, Harvard classmate of John Reed Dorothy Frooks, recruiting girl, World War I Hugo Gellert, artist for The Masses Emmanuel Herbert, student in Petrograd, 1917–1918 George Jessel, entertainer Oleg Kerensky, son of Alexander Kerensky Isaac Don Levine, journalist, translator for Reed Arthur Mayer, film historian, Harvard classmate of Reed, also film distributor Henry Miller, novelist Adele Nathan, member of the Provincetown Players Scott Nearing, sociologist, pacifist Dora Russell, delegate to Comintern George Seldes, U.S. journalist in Moscow Art Shields, political activist Jessica Smith, political activist Lucita Squier, screenwriter and widow of Albert Rhys Williams, who was an American participant in the Russian Revolution, pro-Soviet author, friend and biographer of Lenin Adela Rogers St. Johns, journalist Arne Swabeck, member, Communist Labor Party Bernadine Szold-Fritz, journalist Galina von Meck, witness to Russian Revolution Heaton Vorse, son of Provincetown Playhouse founder Mary Heaton Vorse Will Weinstone, organizer, U.S. Communist Party Rebecca West, writer, novelist
Filming