Reds [Includes Digital Copy] [Blu-ray]

Director: Warren Beatty Warren Beatty

Overview

Few filmmakers other than Warren Beatty would have had the courage and vision to fashion an epic film from the life of famed American Communist John Reed (who is the only US citizen buried in the Kremlin). The film is an effort to humanize a political movement that has previously been depicted on screen in a series of unsubtle and prejudicial broad strokes. The film begins in 1915, when Reed (Beatty) makes the acquaintance of married Portland journalist Louise Bryant (Diane Keaton). So persuasive is Reed's point of view--and so charismatic is Reed himself-- that Bryant kicks over the traces and joins Reed and his fellow radicals. Among the famous personages depicted herein are Emma Goldman (Maureen Stapleton), Eugene O'Neill (Jack Nicholson) and Max Eastman (Richard Herrmann). The second half of this nearly-200-minute film skims through the years when Reed, now a Russian resident, becomes disillusioned by the harsh realities of Bolshevism. Despite the celebrity line-up of real-life "witnesses" to the events depicted in the film (ranging from novelist Henry Miller to comedian George Jessel!), historians took Reds to task for its oversimplification of events and its laundering of the notoriously promiscuous Louise Bryant.

Product Details

Release Date:	11/30/2021
UPC:	0191329207796
Original Release:	1981
Source:	Paramount
Language:	English
Time:	1:41:00
Sales rank:	4,436

Cast & Crew

Performance Credits

Warren Beatty	John Reed
Diane Keaton	Louise Bryant
Maureen Stapleton	Emma Goldman
Jack Nicholson	Eugene O'Neill
Edward Herrmann	Max Eastman
Jerzy Kosinski	Grigory Zinoviev
Paul Sorvino	Louis Fraina
Nicolas Coster	Paul Trullinger
Ian Wolfe	Mr. Partlow
M. Emmet Walsh	Speaker at the Liberal Club
Bessie Love	Mrs. Partlow
MacIntyre Dixon	Carl Walters
Noel Davis	Actor,Witness
Marion Dougherty	Actor
Pat Starr	Helen Walters
Eleanor D. Wilson	Mrs. Reed
Nancy Foy	Actor
Jane Jenkins	Actor
Max Wright	Floyd Dell
George Plimpton	Horace Whigham
Harry Ditson	Maurice Becker
Patsy Pollock	Actor
Leigh Curran	Ida Rauh
Kathryn Grody	Crystal Eastman
Brenda Currin	Marjorie Jones
Nancy Duiguid	Jane Heap
Norman Chancer	Barney
Dolph Sweet	Big Bill Haywood
Ramon Bieri	Police Chief
Jack O'Leary	Pinkerton Guard
Gene Hackman	Pete Van Wherry
Gerald Hiken	Dr. Lorber
William Daniels	Julius Gerber
Dave King	Allan Benson
Joseph Buloff	Joe Volski
Stefan Gryff	Gomberg
Denis Pekarev	Interpreter
Roger Sloman	Vladimir Lenin
Stuart Richman	Leon Trotsky
Oleg Kerensky	A. Kerensky/Himself/Witness
Nikko Seppala	Young Bolshevik
John J. Hooker	Sen. Overman
Shane Rimmer	MacAlpine
Jerry Hardin	Harry
Jack Kehoe	Eddie
Christopher Malcolm	CLP Member
Tony Sibbald	CLP Member
R.G. Armstrong	Agent
Josef Sommer	Official
Jan Triska	Radek
Ake Lindman	Escort
Pertti Weckstrom	Finnish Doctor
Nina Macarova	Russian Nurse
Hamilton Fish III	Witness
Jose DeFillippo	Russian Doctor
Andres LeCasa	Boy
Roger Baldwin	Witness
Henry Miller	Witness
Adela Rogers St. Johns	Witness
Dora Russell	Witness
Phil Brown	Actor
Scott Nearing	Witness
Art Shields	Witness
Heaton Vorse	Witness
Hamilton Fish	Witness
Isaac Don Levine	Witness
Rebecca West	Witness
Will Durant	Witness
Will Weinstone	Witness
Emmanuel Herbert	Witness
Arne Swabeck	Witness
Adele Nathan	Witness
George Seldes	Witness
Kenneth Chamberlain	Witness
Blanch Hays Fagen	Witness
Galina von Meck	Witness
Arthur Shields	Witness
Andrew Dasburg	Witness
Hugo Gellert	Witness
Dorothy Frooks	Witness
George Jessel	Witness
Jacob Bailin	Witness
John Ballato	Witness
Lucita Williams	Witness
Bernadine Szold-Fritz	Witness
Jessica Smith	Witness
Harry Carlisle	Witness
Arthur Mayer	Witness

Technical Credits

Warren Beatty

Trevor Griffiths

Warren Beatty	Director,Producer,Screenwriter
Dede Allen	Executive Producer,Producer
Simon Relph	Executive Producer,Producer
Simon Kaye	Sound Mixer
Trevor Griffiths	Screenwriter
Peter Odabashian	Sound Editor

Editorial Reviews

The term "sprawling epic" was coined long before Warren Beatty produced this ambitious, richly detailed romantic drama set against the tumultuous backdrop of early-20th-century radical politics. But Reds, which was released theatrically in 1981 and comes now to DVD in a freshly spiffed-up 25th Anniversary Edition, is a sprawling epic like no other. Beatty, who also co-wrote and directed, plays radical American journalist John Reed, a part of New York's flourishing, Greenwich Village-based community of bohemians in the early 1900s. He’s in love with aspiring writer Louise Bryant (Diane Keaton), but with intense intellectual curiosity and a rabid desire to be in the thick of things, he ventures off to Russia to chronicle the October Revolution spearheaded by the newly minted Bolshevik movement. The idealistic Reed embraces many of the Bolsheviks' socialist principles and sees in them great hope for America. In the movie’s roughly eight-year arc -- Reed died just shy of his 33rd birthday in 1920, in Moscow, and is the only American buried in the Kremlin -- the screenplay frames his political disillusionment with his marriage to Bryant. It is a tumultuous relationship: The bored Bryant runs away from her first marriage in Oregon for the excitement of Greenwich Village, marries Reed, sees him off to Moscow, and embarks on an affair with the playwright Eugene O'Neill (Jack Nicholson). Reed and Bryant’s emotional reunion in a Russian train station ranks among the great romantic climaxes in modern film, in part because the chemistry between Beatty and Keaton is immediately evident (they were off-screen lovers as well at the time). While lavishly appointed, scrupulously accurate in its depiction of the period, and meticulously crafted, Reds is not a perfect film. But the film is powerful and forcefully told, (as well as highly acclaimed, scoring wins for Beatty as best director, and Stapleton as best supporting actress, among its 12 Oscar nominations); an idea-driven spectacle that, one expects, could never be made today. .

Barnes & Noble - Ed Hulse

An achievement in epic storytelling and historical romance, Warren Beatty's Reds (1981) combines American Communist John Reed's experience of the Russian Revolution and its aftermath with the intimate relationship between Reed and Louise Bryant, his match in progressive thinking. Structured through the reminiscences of two dozen actual witnesses, from Henry Miller to George Jessel, the film meticulously recreates the culturally volatile World War I period, from the bourgeois Portland abandoned by Diane Keaton's Louise to the passionate Greenwich Village bohemia of Beatty's Reed, Maureen Stapleton's no-nonsense Emma Goldman, and Jack Nicholson's cynically romantic Eugene O'Neill. Reed's final reunion with lover/comrade Bryant poignantly reveals the personal cost of his political beliefs. Praised as an impressive accomplishment, regardless of its historical liberties, Reds earned 12 Oscar nominations, including Best Actress, Best Supporting Actor for Nicholson, and four for Beatty as producer, director, actor, and co-writer. One of the last vestiges of artistically ambitious 1970s "auteur" Hollywood, Reds won Oscars for Vittorio Storaro's cinematography, Stapleton's supporting performance, and Beatty's direction, but it lost Best Picture to Chariots of Fire.

All Movie Guide - Lucia Bozzola