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"Reds" to Release on DVD

By Jeralyn, Section Media
Posted on Fri Oct 13, 2006 at 04:54:45 AM EST
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One of my favorite movies of the 80's's, Reds, starring Warren Beatty, Diane Keaton and Jack Nicholson, which was nominated for 12 Academy Awards, is set for release October 17th on DVD. It is a 25th anniversary edition, and you can get it here.

It's hard to believe it's been 25 years since this movie was released. I've probably seen it 5 times (I have a VCR copy.)

It tells the fact-based story of two activist journalists, John Reed and Louise Bryant, who fall in love around 1915 to 1920, with WWI and the outbreak of the Bolshevik Revolution as a backdrop. Jack Nicholson plays playwright Eugene O'Neil who also is enamored with Diane Keaton. It's visually stunning and emotion-packed.

As a personal aside, shortly after the movie was released, I was at the Hotel Jerome bar in Aspen one afternoon with my then-spouse. Jack Nicholson and another man were seated at the next table. I walked up to Nicholson and told him that his 22 minutes on celluloid in Reds were my favorite of the film. He pulled out a chair and invited me to sit down.

We had a great talk, and his friend, an Italian artist or director named Willy Rizzo, mentioned he was trying to get married in Aspen that weekend but had been turned down for a marriage license because he and his wife-to-be (whose name I think was Dominique) didn't have blood tests. It was a holiday weekend, probably the 4th of July or Labor Day, and I told him I had a friend who owned a blood lab in Denver, and if he could get his blood taken, I could get it analyzed and back in 24 hours.

I must have left them the phone number for the condo we were staying at, because a few hours later the phone rang. My spouse answered and announced, with a heavy emphasis on the "J" and a curious look (he hadn't joined us at the table), "It's Jack."

It was indeed "Jack" who told me Willy and his bride-to-be had had their blood samples taken and they were ready to be tested. We made arrangements for Jack's assistant Annie to get them to me. I took the samples to the Aspen airport and put them on a flight to Denver, where the lab picked them up, tested them (on a Sunday) and had them flown back to Aspen the same day, with the analysis needed for the marriage certificate. Willy got married the next day.

I ran into Jack at parties in Aspen a few times after that, but I found that unless I said "I'm the one who got Willy Rizzo's blood tested so he could get married," he didn't remember me, and I quickly tired of re-introducing myself that way.

Nonetheless, I still love his performance in Reds and the entire movie, and if you haven't seen it, I highly recommend it. Here's a pretty good description of it:

A superbly acted and well-crafted film, Reds chronicles the relationship between American writers John Reed (Warren Beatty) and Louise Bryant (Diane Keaton) that took place during the period 1915 to 1920. During the early part of the movie, they live together as part of a bohemian circle of intellectuals in Greenwich Village. After Bryant has a fling with playwright Eugene O'Neill (Jack Nicholson) in Provincetown, she and Reed marry. But only months later Bryant leaves Reed and goes to Paris. While still estranged, they travel to Russia together, and there they reconcile while witnessing the October Revolution.

After the film's intermission, Reed and Bryant are back in the United States, and he becomes immersed in Marxist activism. When he decides to again visit Russia, she refuses to accompany him and tells him she's not sure where she'll be when he returns. But Reed ends up imprisoned in Finland, and Bryant sets out on a difficult journey to try to help him.

Another description:

This movie tells the true story of John Reed, a radical American journalist around the time of World War I. He soon meets Louise Bryant, a respectable married woman, who dumps her husband for Reed and becomes an important feminist and radical in her own right. After involvement with labor and political disputes in the US, they go to Russia in time for the October Revolution in 1917, when the Communists siezed power. Inspired, they return to the US, hoping to lead a similar revolution. A particularly fascinating aspect of the movie is the inclusion of interviews with "witnesses", the real-life surviving participants in the events of the movie.

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    "Reds" to Release on DVD | 11 comments (11 topical)
    Re: "Reds" to Release on DVD (5.00 / 1) (#11)
    by Andreas on Sat Oct 14, 2006 at 11:16:56 AM EST
    John Reed wrote:
    No matter what one thinks of Bolshevism, it is undeniable that the Russian Revolution is one of the great events of human history, and the rise of the Bolsheviki a phenomenon of world-wide importance. Just as historians search the records for the minutest details of the story of the Paris Commune, so they will want to know what happened in Petrograd in November, 1917, the spirit which animated the people, and how the leaders looked, talked and acted. It is with this in view that I have written this book. In the struggle my sympathies were not neutral. But in telling the story of those great days I have tried to see events with the eye of a conscientious reporter, interested in setting down the truth.
    Ten Days That Shook the World (Project Gutenberg edition) Ten Days That Shook the World (Bartleby.com edition, same text, but html-formatted)

    Re: "Reds" to Release on DVD (none / 0) (#3)
    by Talkleft Visitor on Fri Oct 13, 2006 at 08:39:52 AM EST
    I remember watching "Reds" with a mixture of awe and admiration, both at its political daring (even for that time) and the sweeping story it tells. I only knew about Jack Reed via a friend who was doing her doctoral dissertation on his work. The film moved me in so many ways: politically, visually and emotionally, it has remained one of my favorites all these years. I was stunned when it lost the Best Picture Academy Award to a limp film like "Chariots of Fire". I'll definitely be getting a copy of this timely and beautiful film! Thanks!

    Re: "Reds" to Release on DVD (none / 0) (#4)
    by cpinva on Fri Oct 13, 2006 at 08:39:52 AM EST
    i saw this when it was first released. i had never heard of either jack reed or louise bryant up to that point (they aren't poster children for american history classes), and had to do some quick research. i remember thinking, as i watched the movie, and later, when i read more about the two of them, "how could two reasonably intelligent people get sucked into the BS that was lenin & trotsky?" i was amazed at how easily they were able to rationalize the obvious tyrannical aspects of communism as being for the greater good of the people. in fairness, they weren't alone. it still astonishes me that so many smart, educated people were swept up by a false, romanticised version of communism, able to suspend disbelief, as though it were some kind of play, instead of real life and death. great camera work and costuming too.

    Re: "Reds" to Release on DVD (none / 0) (#5)
    by Talkleft Visitor on Fri Oct 13, 2006 at 08:39:52 AM EST
    Thanks for sharing that story!! I will definitely check out the movie.

    Re: "Reds" to Release on DVD (none / 0) (#1)
    by Talkleft Visitor on Fri Oct 13, 2006 at 08:48:48 AM EST
    Jeralyn, That's a great story about Nicholson. One of my all-time favorite movie scenes is one from Reds, where O'Neill has pledged his love to Bryant, only to to have her tell him that she's married Reed. As someone highly prone to unrequited love at that time in my life, O'Neill's pain really resonated with me. Looking back, I think it's the only time I've had unalloyed sympathy for a Nicholson character.

    Re: "Reds" to Release on DVD (none / 0) (#2)
    by Talkleft Visitor on Fri Oct 13, 2006 at 08:48:48 AM EST
    He pulled out a chair and invited me to sit down. At which point he said he wanted some whole wheat toast and the waitress said "no substitutions." Sorry, I couldn't resist. Great story, Jeralyn. I ran into Warren Beatty in a bar in Manhattan shortly after the film came out. I got a chance to tell him how much I enjoyed the film and he was very cordial. A great think about the DVD release is that for a film being released for the first time in a 2-disc set, the retail price is remarkably low: $19.98.

    Re: "Reds" to Release on DVD (none / 0) (#8)
    by jimakaPPJ on Fri Oct 13, 2006 at 10:35:00 AM EST
    cpinva - God, I hate it when we agree.

    Re: "Reds" to Release on DVD (none / 0) (#6)
    by Dadler on Fri Oct 13, 2006 at 11:18:13 AM EST
    cpinva, It's true, though many Americans (like my father) quit the socialist movement because the official party was becoming too lockstep with Stalinist b.s.. And also remember Russia was getting rid of a pretty destructive and careless monarchy. We threw off ours and had a slave nation instead, for a hundred years. Hell, ask yourself how many smart, educated, intelligent people today blindly support their own government's military excesses and failures and crimes with nary the bat of an eye. I'd say it's clear that we are all pretty full of sh*t when it comes to the supposed purity of what power and whose we support through our consumption of resources, products, food, through our votes or non-votes, our actions or apathetic inactions. And the movie is an American classic, hands down. Beatty's signature work. Well except for the Madonna documentary when they were dating and he was always in the background looking horrified or severely uncomfortable. Joking.

    Re: "Reds" to Release on DVD (none / 0) (#7)
    by kdog on Fri Oct 13, 2006 at 11:18:13 AM EST
    "how could two reasonably intelligent people get sucked into the BS that was lenin & trotsky?"
    I'd surmise you had to be alive at that time. We've all grown up in the age of OSHA, minimum wages, overtime pay, unions, workers rights, etc. The plight of the working and peasant classes was pretty grim around 1915...workers needed something to believe in besides "take what they give you". Only after the revolution did we see what a tyrannical disaster it was.

    Re: "Reds" to Release on DVD (none / 0) (#9)
    by AmericanDrugStorm on Fri Oct 13, 2006 at 07:08:52 PM EST
    Yeah, & I ran into Jack at about that same time, skiing down Ajax in a total blizzard with my camera, near white out, I stopped at the ski lift at the base of Bell Mt near a man in dark green overalls and I just strated babbling about something to this stranger, can't even remember about what now, then he turned around and, It Was Jack! So I immediately told Jack how much i liked his performance in Reds. He just looked at me, just like he did in the shining and the time I was pissing right next to him in the men's room in the OLD Jerome Bar, long before it was remodeled, when it was still painted in the Bauhaus Herbert Bayer white on the outside. Jack doesn't remember me, either, Jeralyn.... Speaking of remember, anybody here have some memories they want to share about my old pal Wilk who recently passed?

    Re: "Reds" to Release on DVD (none / 0) (#10)
    by Che's Lounge on Sat Oct 14, 2006 at 09:03:33 AM EST
    "how could two reasonably intelligent people get sucked into the BS that was lenin & trotsky?" The story is the same today. Only the names have changed, to Bush and Cheney.

    "Reds" to Release on DVD | 11 comments (11 topical)