REDS, the Hollywood epic from Warren Beatty, depicting the relationship between John Reed and Louise Bryant, has played to millions of people in the United States. Its opening here has aroused a storm of controversy recently among the left and cinema critics alike. We publish two views.
Ric Sissons
Politics and popcorn
Reds is not an anti-communist film. Any movie that can sympathetically bring to the attention of millions the life and work of the author of Ten Days That Shook The World must be accorded a major plus. Running for three hours twenty minutes the stormy relationship between John Reed and Louise Bryant is played out against the background of Greenwich Village and the Russian Revolution. It is beautifully shot by Vittorio Storaro camera operator for Bertolucci's political classic 1900. But the film is not without problems. There is no explanation of why a young man from a wealthy, mildly progressive Oregon family who went to private school and Harvard should become a radical. Two events stand out as crucial and politically formative for Reed: the 1913 silk workers' strike at Paterson, where Reed was arrested and imprisoned with Wobblies' leaders Bill Haywood and Carlo Tresca; and the weeks Reed spent in Mexico in 1914 reporting on the revolution. The film fails to mention either. We are left with a fun-loving Reed having a good time in the Village with Louise Bryant recently arrived from Oregon. The serious political views and work of Reed and his friends, like Max Eastman, are downplayed although his opposition to American involvement in the first world war and his strong view that profit was the rationale behind war is presented forcefully.
Drawn by events in Russia both Bryant and Reed headed for Petrograd. Here, in some moving, romantic, footage the revolution and the Bryant/Reed relationship find at their zenith. Through this shared experience as Comrades and writers, their relationship reaches a passionate crescendo as the workers and peasants seize state power. Internationale. Intermission. A bag of popcorn later Bryant and Reed are back in New York. Although the film ignores it, Reed was detained en route, in Norway, where the American consul refused him a visa.
The film records the lives of Bryant and Reed in 1918 and 1919, including the writing of Ten Days. But it fails to show the wave of repression against radicals and socialists which was sweeping the country. Eugene Debs, whom Reed met and admired, was sentenced to 10 years in jail, while 101 Wobblies, including Haywood, had been given prison terms of between 5 and 20 years and fines totalling $2m. The left lived under the threat of violence. Reed found himself on trial under the Espionage Act, along with the other editors of the magazine The Masses.
To its credit the film does depict, with some accuracy, the split in the Socialist Party and the formation of the Communist Party led by Fraina, and the Communist Labour Party led by Reed. In an effort to secure the support of the Bolsheviks and the Communist international Reed returned to Moscow. The film records Reed's participation in the Second Congress of the Third International and the heated debates in which the Americans and the British found themselves in a minority over the trade union question.
Now, in the period up to the Second Comintern Congress, comes the most serious distortion of fact. Reed decided to return to America. In February 1918 he set off via Petrograd for Finland carrying among other things Lenin's introduction to Ten Days and 102 diamonds, a 'present' to help the cause of American communism. He was caught and imprisoned. Around this term of solitary confinement the film builds a dramatic episode in the relationship between Bryant and Reed. She can get no word on his fate and sets off for Finland. No communications pass between them.
After a terrible journey she arrives at the prison gates to be told he has been freed. She continues on to Moscow. Reed has lost contact with her. His telegrams to New York get no reply. The tension mounts. Reed [illegible] and is then sent to Baku for the Congress of the Peoples of the East as a representative of the Executive Committee of the Communist International.
When Bryant finally arrives in Moscow Reed is thousands of kilometres away. On the return trip the armoured, agitprop train is attacked and Reed throws himself into the fray. They win through. Zinoviev, Reed, et al arrive back. The train empties, the dead are carried away, the platform clears, and Beatty and Keaton fall into each others' arms. Unfortunately the stuff of history was not like that. During the stay in the Finnish prison they were in contact all the time, as they were upon Reed's return to Moscow and during the trip to Baku. According to Alfred Rosmer, also on the Baku train, there was no attack. Finally, according to Reed's biographer, the reunion took place in Bryant's room at the Diclovoy Dvor.
The film's conclusion is very moving with Reed dying of typhus and Bryant's overwhelming grief. At his funeral, not in the film, Alexandra Kollontai speaking for the Bolshevik Central Committee said: 'We call ourselves communists, but are we really? Don't we rather draw life's essence from those who come to us, and when they're no longer of any use to us let them fall by the wayside, neglected and forgotten? Our communism and comradeship are dead letters if we don't give ourselves to those who most need us. Let us beware of such communism, for it slays the best in our ranks, and Jack Reed was one of the best'.
Reed is the only American to be buried in the walls of the Kremlin. Warren Beatty's production of Reds will, at least, mean for some time to come Reed will not be 'neglected and forgotten'.
Geoff Matthews
The selling of Reds
It took Warren Beatty ten years to complete Reds. Trevor Griffiths, who withdrew from the film after the second draft, chose to remain credited as co-author of the screenplay. Explaining this decision in Time Out, he provided an insight into the film's production: '... the film has been kept honest to a degree I did not anticipate. And I don't mean that I think it was made by dishonest people, simply that I got some sense of the heat of Hollywood when you're making a movie, the incredible pressure, the extraordinary amount of dealing that has to be done. To generate any kind of purity from that process is a triumph, I think. Hats off to him to the extent that he's done it. Pity. Nice story. It's his movie.'
Reds cost between $32m and $55m to produce and required a box office success the size of Grease or Raiders of the Lost Ark to break even. What were the terms of the deal? How did Beatty sell his film? Did he sell Jack Reed with it? I think he did. He doesn't develop.
Reds is packaged as a romance. Jack Reed's history becomes the love story of Jack and Louise Bryant, and in the process his politics are diminished by his personal life. The film shows Louise Bryant as consistently insipid. We are shown her sewing, cooking, supervising furniture removal after her marriage, and serving coffee while Jack has a political meeting. When she leaves the house she is usually embarrassed, inadequate, or simply a spectator. Only when she learns to accept Jack's advice does she begin to achieve some success as a journalist.
Her progressive ideas are made to seem a neurotic cover for her insecurity. As soon as Jack confesses infidelity, she rushes upstairs to pack her suitcase. Eugene O'Neill, a friend of Jack's with whom she has an affair, silences her with the accusation that she talks revolutionary politics with him before sex in order to absolve herself from guilt.
Opposite her, Jack Reed is played, in what Griffiths refers to as a 'wildly modest performance', as a genial, bumbling, American boy, who bumps his head on chandeliers, burns the dinner, and can't master the Russian language.
The [illegible] impression of professional competence we are given of the reactionary alcoholic playwright O'Neill is incongruous. He has a strange stillness and solidity beside Jack and Louise.
The film looks through Louise's rounded eyes at the meeting which sends Jack as a delegate on his final journey to Russia. It sides with her uninformed polemic against the rift in the American left, and agrees with her that the most sympathetic version of Jack Reed is the artist and not the politician.
The facts of Reed's short life recall a similar, lesser, English figure — George Orwell. He left a life of privilege to report on Catalonia. The artistic flaws of Reds recall problems raised by Orwell's work too: the relation between the observer and the observed, between politics and literature, and the nature of history.
The only attempt to resolve these problems is made through the device of the witnesses — a succession of famous contemporaries recalling Jack and Louise with varying degrees of lucidity. Their anonymity is crucial. Who are they? What were they doing in 1917? What was their relation to the two protagonists? If we don't know, how can we judge the value of their testimony? They function as ghostly chorus figures, providing authenticity for the actors.
This is a distorted, ahistorical version of the past. Where is the indecision, conflict, and learning Jack Reed must have gone through? His life is polarised between political and personal — neither informs or influences the other. Where, too, are the voices of the thousands of workers who were on strike, who do remember these events — voices like those so tellingly used in Rosie the Riveter?
Above all, when are we shown Reed making choices, making his own future, instead of chasing a military wagon? Beatty reneges on the responsibility of understanding and interpreting the past, in order to let himself off the hook of acting responsibly in the present. What do you expect from the maker of Shampoo?