Forty years ago this month, Warren Beatty’s Reds exposed Communism through a self-destructively naïve American Bolshevik.
Forty years ago this month, Warren Beatty’s Reds exposed Communism through a self-destructively naïve American Bolshevik.
W arren Beatty makes you wait so long for it that it feels like a cloud of emotion opening after a drought. We’re three hours into his masterpiece Reds, one of the five best films of the 1980s, and the former fashion plate and New York journalist Louise Bryant (Diane Keaton) is now dressed like a woebegone Russian laborer as she drifts through a Moscow train station in 1920 searching for her husband John (Jack) Reed (Warren Beatty). The last time we saw Jack, he was getting fired upon in Azerbaijan by White Forces who didn’t want to be subsumed by Bolshevik Russia. Neither Louise nor the audience knows whether he survived the attack.
In the last couple of years, Reed has lost a kidney, been jailed in Finland, suffered scurvy, and been informed he is effectively a prisoner of the Bolsheviks because the movement needs his propaganda gifts. Bryant, for her part, is shown using her connection with the former merchant seaman Eugene O’Neill to obtain a nausea-inducing place in the grubby hold of a ship bound from New York to Norway, then crossing the last miles of Finland the only way available — on skis.
In the Moscow train station, the audience is left hanging for three solemn minutes as Bryant watches the train empty out. A door opens, and one last soldier emerges, closing the door with finality behind him. Then she watches in terror as a red-draped corpse is brought out on a stretcher. But Reed comes into focus just behind her, and she turns around.
The embrace that follows is not a tableau of love conquering all — Reed will shortly die anyway. It’s an acknowledgment of colossal misjudgment, Reed begging for forgiveness for his political obsessions and Bryant granting it. Unlike in the other great cinematic epic about lovers fighting against the tides of history, Dr. Zhivago, whose characters get helplessly caught up in what the Bolsheviks do to their homeland, in Reds, the lovers are foreigners who don’t belong here in the first place. Perverted ideals guided them willingly into this catastrophe of catastrophes. It’s fitting that the movie was released in the first year of the Reagan administration because the last hour of the movie might as well come with a bright, flashing chyron: Don’t do Communism, kids.
The last time I wrote about why conservatives should love Reds — a film that first celebrates but then resoundingly condemns Bolshevism from the point of view of its most ardent supporters — Jonah Goldberg said on a podcast that I should be beaten about the head and neck with a broken bottle. Consider this as me doubling down, but please don’t hand Jonah any bottles if you see us together.
The more I watch Reds, which I suppose I’ve seen about 15 times (it’s now streaming on HBO Max), the more I marvel at how brutal it is about the aftermath of the October Revolution that provides the film with a joyous, climactic conclusion — to its first half. (In theaters, there was an intermission after the montage of images set to the unofficial Soviet anthem “The Internationale.”)
Though the film ends in 1920 with Reed’s death, and battalions of Western intellectuals continued to wave the red flag until at least the Stalinist show trials (1928), the Molotov-Ribbentrop accord (1939), or even beyond, Reds emphasizes that its hero was completely wrong about everything and should have listened to the two women in his life, Bryant and the anarchist Emma Goldman (Maureen Stapleton in her Oscar role), each of whom give him an earful in the film’s second half.
This month marks the 40th anniversary of the film’s 1981 release, which Paramount has honored with a remastered Blu-ray of the film. To this day, few Hollywood films can compete with it for its frank confrontation of the Leninist nightmare that otherwise got mostly ignored, excused, or even defended by the movie industry.
Reed was among the first Champagne Socialists, born to one of the most prominent families in Portland, Ore. His fellow leftist Upton Sinclair derided him as the “playboy of the Revolution.” Bryant in the film seems primarily attracted to Communism because in 1917–18 she is a pacifist who wants the war to end. Reed believes that if there’s a workers’ revolution in Russia, there will be one in Germany, which will bring an end to the war. That was a plausible position at the time. (Even Jonah must enjoy the film’s many digs at Woodrow Wilson. How many movies offer that?)
After the Armistice, though, as Reed continues to push for worldwide revolution, Bryant tells him he’s an ass and to stick with writing instead of politics. He and his fellow revolutionary Louis Fraina (Paul Sorvino) have a bitter dispute over which one of them is the true leader of American Communism, and Reed believes he can gain the upper hand by winning recognition from the Comintern in Moscow. Supposed idealism about the brotherhood of man and workers’ rights has already, in 1919, become nothing but a power play, and Bryant scolds him for not grasping this.
Reed’s return to Russia that year — based on a doubly fatuous belief that it matters which American Communist party is recognized by Moscow and that the U.S. is ready for revolution — will be his death sentence at age 32. Communism kills not just by the millions but also one by one. Reds zooms in on one hopelessly misguided fool who became an avatar for every Ivy League intellectual who throws away his life chasing utopian dreams.
When Reed says he has to go back to Russia in 1919, Bryant tells her husband, “You want to go. You want to go running all over the world ranting and raving and making resolutions and organizing caucuses. What’s the difference between the Communist Party and the Communist Labor Party except that you’re running one and he’s running the other?”
This turns out to be exactly the position of Moscow; after putting in a gargantuan effort to get back to Russia under a false name (one of the film’s “witnesses” estimates that only four or five Americans managed to enter it in 1919), Reed is dismissively told by Lenin’s lieutenant Grigory Zinoviev (Jerzy Kosinski) that the two American Communist parties should simply merge. For this, Reed upended his life? Reed’s New York intellectual squabbles are irrelevant to the Bolsheviks, and despite his loyalty to the cause, Zinoviev forbids him to leave the country. (He tries anyway, hence his capture and imprisonment in Finland, an enemy of Russia. A prisoner exchange sends him back to Russia.)
The hug in the Moscow train station functions as a bookend to the hug Bryant and Reed share before he leaves their house in suburban New York: “Don’t go. Don’t run away from what you do the best,” she tells him. “I’ll be back by Christmas,” he responds, sounding exactly like every misguided Great War soldier who allowed loyalty to his country to blind himself to the unfolding horror. Beatty himself — a liberal admirer of Robert F. Kennedy — was so naive that he was denied permission to film in the USSR after asking why Trotsky was not pictured in the Museum of the Revolution.
Reed and Bryant were products of a utopian period, and the film illustrates how one kind of destructive radicalism can transmute into another. In their lives, the personal certainly is the political, and this costs them greatly. Before the Revolution, the pair break up after Reed discovers a months-old poem to Bryant from O’Neill (Jack Nicholson). Her husband takes this as evidence that she and O’Neill are having an affair but pretends he isn’t upset by the information because both spouses are adherents of the then-voguish Free Love movement that rejected monogamy as a bourgeois fixation. He claims he is concerned about forthrightness, not adultery, but this is simply a manifestation of his capacity to let ideology lead him to self-delusion. As she does many times throughout the film, Bryant corrects him: “You don’t care that I had an affair with another man, you just care about dishonesty? Look who’s being dishonest.”
Reed’s hurt feelings are evident when he passive-aggressively strikes back by mentioning casually that he, too, has recently had other lovers. So she breaks up with him even as he pleads that he is simply sticking to the dogma to which they’re both committed. “Didn’t we say that people had to give each other freedom if they were gonna live together?” he asks. “We said a lot of things,” she replies. Like Bolshevism, free love is a product of idle theorizing that doesn’t work and can’t work.
As Bryant illuminates how free love creates wreckage, the other woman Reed loves, his mentor Goldman, explains in 1920 that the Revolution is already irredeemable. We observe in horror as Reed, the supposed devotee of peace, rationalizes the mass murder that inevitably accompanies Communism: “It’s a war, E.G., and we gotta fight it like we fight a war, with discipline, with terror, with firing squads, or we just give it up.” She rebukes him: “Those four million people didn’t die fighting a war. They died from a system that cannot work!” By the time Reed and Bryant embrace in the train station, that is obvious. A corrosive ideological commitment to the worst idea in history drove them apart, and now all they can do is share one last tender moment before Reed’s zealotry costs him his life.