May 3, 2020 – Reds (1981) Kanopy
It was nice to show Henry this classic film. Reds’ power is undiminished 29 years later. The movie is still a compelling love story of true-life radical journalists/activists John Reed and Louise Bryant, set against the backdrop of radical politics in the U.S. and the Russian revolution. It is a long movie – over 3 hours – but it holds your interest the whole time (though we did watch it over two nights). The cast is great, including the leads Warren Beatty and Diane Keaton and the supporting cast Jack Nicholson (Eugene O’Neil), Maureen Stapleton (Emma Goldman), Jerzy Kosinski (Russian bureaucrat Grigory Zinoviev), and many more. This was a movie that all three of us liked a lot.
I was most interested this time in watching how Reds talked about radical politics. The film name-checks a lot of true-life figures and events, without much explanation of what they mean. I wanted to know more: what was the trajectory of the Socialist Party in the U.S. that lead them to support WWI; how did the two different U.S. communist parties created in the movie feed into the U.S. Communist Party led by Gus Hall in the 1980s; what was the relationship between the International Workers of the World (IWW) and the U.S. Socialist and Communist parties? If you know nothing about the history of left-wing politics in the United States before you watch Reds, you won’t come away knowing much more afterwards.
The politics of the movie itself are unclear. While Reed and Bryan, and to a lesser degree Emma Goldman, are sympathetic figures in the movie, their support for the Soviet Union and their larger politics come off as misguided. The movie does not clearly show that after the promise of the Russian Revolution was betrayed, left activism continued because it was always based on something more than what was happening in the Soviet Union. A fervent right-winger watching Reds may be uncomfortable with the idolization of Reed and Bryant, but they will come out satisfied with the message in the end that left-wingers are power-hungry, unprincipled, petty, or naive (or all four) and left-wing politics are doomed to end in failure and totalitarianism.