Reds Movie Review
Reds (1981) opens in 1915, when John Reed (Warren Beatty) meets his future wife Louise Bryant (Diane Keaton) in Portland, Oregon. Reed was already a famous journalist at that time, having covered the Mexican Revolution and the First World War, while Louise was married to a dentist but hoping for a new career as a journalist. Reed persuades her to leave her husband and come to New York, where they live in the Greenwich Village as part of a Bohemian and radical circle that included Max Eastman, Emma Goldman, Eugene O'Neill and Margaret Sanger. Although they both claim to believe in the socialist ideal of free love and personal independence, their marriage was damaged by jealousy as a result of their affairs, including one that Louise had with O'Neill. In the film, the famous writer, played by Jack Nicholson, is in love with Louise and claims that he would never willingly share here with anyone. He is also portrayed as a cynical alcoholic and loner who is skeptical of the Bolsheviks in Russia and suspects that Communism is going to turn out to be just another substitute religion. Louise and Jack were both true believers in the cause, and opposed World War I as a capitalist and imperialist war. They are both involved in antiwar politics on the Left wing of the Socialist Party and with the radical International Workers of...
Louise then gets a job as a war correspondent in France, but then Reed arrives and persuades her to
travel to Russia with him in 1917, where the Tsar has recently been overthrown.
Once in Russia, Louise and Jack quickly joined the
Bolshevik Revolution against the Provisional Government of Alexander Kerensky, in hopes that the revolution would spread to Germany,
Britain, France and the United States, which of course did not occur. They were present at the storming of the Winter Palace by the Bolsheviks and Reed even gave speeches and handed out pamphlets to urge the workers on in their insurrection. World War I did not end in a Communist revolution all over the
Western world, but in the defeat of Germany and an Allied attempt to destroy the fledgling Communist state in Russia. Sixteen countries, including the United States, supported the White armies against the Bolsheviks, and the country was literally surrounded. Reed stayed on as an American representative of the new Communist movement, while Bryant returned to the U.S. To write and speak on behalf of the Soviet cause.
John Reed disagreed strongly with Soviet bureaucrats like Karl Radek and Grigory Zinoviev, who ironically would both later be executed in Stalin's purges. He thought that they did not understand the true situation in the United States, where conservative union led by the American Federation of Labor (AFL) had supported Woodrow Wilson and World War I,…
