the sentiments expressed in this song is difficult to argue with, but the troubles it leads to are arguably no-goodVIDEO VIDEO VIDEO VIDEO VIDEO Maureen Stapleton is Emma Goldman—which is a difficult sentence to type. No screenplay could do real justice to Goldman without centering on her, but, in proportion, she's moderately well drawn in this script. Then the role of this Lithuanian-Jewish anarchist, this plowing battleship of a woman, was given to an Irish-American sentimentalist who seems to have trouble with long words. newrepublic.com Stanley Kauffmann December 16, 1981Reds is both an accurate and a possibly misleading title. It's accurate because the two leading characters devote much of what we see of their lives to Communist activities. It's possibly misleading because the focus is on the people, not the activities. This is not, in essence or intent, a political work; it is biographical. Solanas's Hour of the Furnaces, Pontecorvo's Battle of Algiers, Wajda's Man of Marble are political films, which posit and explore political questions, then strongly support particular action about them: Reds is a patently different order of work. The people in it are politically inspired, but their convictions are explored only sufficiently to validate them. The film concentrates on the beings who gave themselves to certain issues, rather than the issues themselves.Reds is to communism and the Bolshevik revolution what Hamlet is to Danish foreign policy: the work is inconceivable without its political context, but context is what it remains. All this is by way of explanation, not indictment. What Reds sets out to do, it does—in a number of ways—with power. Warren Beatty is the name with which critical comment must begin. Beatty produced Reds , collaborated on the screenplay (with the English playwright Trevor Griffiths), directed, and plays the leading male role. If Reds were not as good as it is, those facts about a three-and-a-half-hour film would still be impressive merely in terms of energy. But Red5 surges past statistical praise— and past the defects that I'll note. This film about John Reed and Louise Bryant is extraordinarily stirring.The New Republic (November 4, 1967), I began with a summary of his life and said, "The story might have been contrived by a clever popular novelist." Reds proves that my term was wrong: as Beatty presents it, the story might have been written by F. Scott Fitzgerald if Fitzgerald had ever developed the political sense that Edmund Wilson tried to inculcate in him. Not just the period but the flavor, the hurts and mendings, the sense of golden yearning are fundamental Fitzgerald. Reds begins in 1915 when Reed is 28, five years out of Harvard, has already been a war correspondent in Mexico and Europe, has written a book of poems in Greenwich Village, has been the lover and companion of Mabel Dodge. He visits his native city of Portland, Oregon, where he meets Louise Bryant, then 21 and married to a dentist. The events of his life before their meeting are barely sketched: but to deal with only Reed's last five years, the picture needs every moment of the time it takes. It splashes through the roaring social and political currents of the day; it treats radical clashes as the hero's personal challenge; and (a true Fitzgerald theme) it shows the American hero's face turned often toward Europe—in Reed's case, toward European intellectual and ideological tradition, with even a hint of envy for the European miseries that had ultimately produced revolution.Reds (before intermission), ending with the ten days in Petrograd, is about two lovers whose personal life is stormy and whose public life is increasingly bound up with radical politics. The second section is about two people in political life—especially the man—who are lovers. This transition is conveyed by the finish of the first section. There are magnificent shots of the Petrograd masses marching up a wide street, carrying banners and singing the "Internationale," and these are intercut with shots of Jack and Louise making love in their Petrograd apartment while the march is going on. This juxtaposition seemed to me quite the opposite of cheap or sensational: it was emotionally and dramatically just, and it prepared for the shift of emphasis in Part Two.Reds that I must get my objections out of the way. Chief is the choice of cinematographer, Vittorio Storaro, possibly selected for his work on Bertolucci's The Spider's Stratagem, The Conformist, and 1900, helped to make those political pictures look like confectionery. Perhaps Beatty wanted to underscore that his two leading characters were "romanticists," but the romantic colorings don't stop with them. Everything looks a bit too lush, and this hampers the historicity that Beatty achieves so well in other ways.Maureen Stapleton is Emma Goldman—which is a difficult sentence to type. No screenplay could do real justice to Goldman without centering on her, but, in proportion, she's moderately well drawn in this script. Then the role of this Lithuanian-Jewish anarchist, this plowing battleship of a woman, was given to an Irish-American sentimentalist who seems to have trouble with long words. Reds , as noted at the start, is not a revolutionary film. (Anyway, the very term "revolutionary film" is almost an oxymoron. Film is an expensive art; private capital or government subsidy is not often forthcoming for work intended to upset the status quo. With a few exceptions, the famous so-called revolutionary films are not insurrectional, they celebrate revolutions already made: e.g., the work of Eisenstein, Pudovkin, Vertov, Riefenstahl, Jancso.) Reds is not politically revolutionary, it's about two people caught up in revolutionary politics. It doesn't even ask, let alone answer, basic radical political questions. 
