Warren Beatty is perhaps one of the most underrated actors
turned brilliant auteurs in the film business, having received numerous film
awards for his accomplishments and contributions to the cinema landscape. Even with some failures beneath his belt
including but not limited to Ishtar in 1987 and his final feature Rules
Don’t Apply, the actor has maintained a steady and largely enduring body of
work in acting and particularly directing.
Starting in 1978 with his fantasy dramedy Heaven Can Wait, his
debut in the producer-writer-director’s chair, Beatty became the second person
after Orson Welles with Citizen Kane to be nominated for producing,
directing, acting and writing for the same picture.
At a small budget of around $6 million, Heaven Can Wait took
in close to $100 million and cemented Beatty (at the time) as a formidable box
office draw and gave him carte blanche to pursue a longstanding passion project
Beatty had been working on since the early 1960s: a biographical drama of the
life and career of American journalist John Reed who detailed the October
Revolution in Russia with his 1919 book Ten Days that Shook the World. Originally titled Comrades, the
project originated in 1966 but screeched to a halt in 1969 before Soviet Ukrainian director Sergei Bondarchuk offered Beatty the role of John Reed in his two-film
epic Red Bells which ultimately went to Franco Nero after Beatty
declined in 1973. Despite not taking the
role, it reinvigorated Beatty’s interest in the project, now entitled Reds,
to compete with the Soviet version. With
the help of Trevor Griffiths following extensive rewrites with Robert Towne,
Peter Feibleman and Elaine May even after shooting began and some difficult
persuasion of financiers, Reds went into production.
Told largely from the perspective of Oregonian journalist/suffragist
Louise Bryant (Diane Keaton in her most complete performance), the story begins
in 1915 when she crosses paths with radical journalist John Reed (Warren
Beatty). Eager to exit an unhappy
marriage she joins Reed on his sojourn to New York where she becomes involved
with the community including but not limited to anarchist author Emma Goldman
(Maureen Stapleton) and playwright Eugene O’Neill (a mustached Jack Nicholson). Eventually moving to Massachusetts, she
becomes a radical feminist while her husband Reed is enmeshed with the Reds of
the Industrial Workers of the World labor strikes. Growing more involved in O’Neill’s local
theater scene and steadily unhappy with her new arrangement with Reed she
begins an affair with O’Neill. Despite Reed’s
awareness of the affair, they marry anyway but after a subsequent row which
unveils his own prior infidelities, Bryant travels to Europe to work as a war
correspondent. Eventually, Bryant and
Reed both wind up professionally in Russia and make amends as the Russian Revolution
of 1917 unfolds before them.
A mammoth, staggering historical political romantic epic
spoken of the same breath as Gone with the Wind, Children of Paradise,
Doctor Zhivago or more recently (at-the-time) Bernardo Bertolucci’s 1900
involving a multinational cast and utilizing the same grandiose cinematographer
Vittorio Storaro behind the camera, Reds is a rare feat of Hollywood
director-driven cinema as perhaps the last epic film of its kind before Michael
Cimino’s Heaven’s Gate ceased this practice entirely for awhile. A star-studded piece featuring numerous cast
members and cameos including Gene Hackman, Paul Sorvino, Edward Herrmann, Jerzy
Kosinski and M. Emmet Walsh as well as an ongoing interspersal of interviews
with real witnesses filmed as early as 1971 by figures who knew Reed and Bryant
personally, the scale of Reds and attention to minute details from
production design to the sheer amount of film shot for it (reportedly 2.5
million feet) is the kind of sprawling yet intimately focused epic that rarely
happens anymore.
--Andrew Kotwicki