Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #14062 in VHS
• Released on: 2001-09-03
• Rating: Suitable for 15 years and over
• Number of discs: 1
• Formats: HiFi Sound, PAL
• Original language: English, Finnish, French, German, Russian
• Number of tapes: 1
• Running time: 187 minutes

Amazon.co.uk Review
In 1980, as President Reagan commenced his loony rhetorical war on the "the evil empire" ofSoviet Russia, thoughtful heartthrob Warren Beatty was labouring over Reds, a three-hour homage to the Bolshevik revolution, backed to the tune of $33 million by the Gulf + Western-owned Paramount Pictures. Beatty had long admired John Reed, the American journalist who witnessed Lenin's finest hours and was buried in the Kremlin after his death in 1920. To Beatty's great credit, he delivered a picture that is both epic pageant and tragic romance, replete with affectionate respect for the best traditions of socialism.

Reds begins in 1915 in Portland, Oregon, where Reed (Beatty), budding radical and chronicler of Pancho Villa's Mexican uprising, makes the acquaintance of Louise Bryant (Diane Keaton), proto-feminist and aspiring writer. He and Louise become lovers amid the intellectual ferment of Greenwich Village and Provincetown, but her affair with the brilliant, melancholy Eugene O'Neill (Jack Nicholson) cleaves them asunder. Still, inspired by tumultuous events in Russia, they re-team for a mission to Moscow, where they rekindle their ardour and wind up storming the Winter Palace. Back in the US, Reed composes Ten Days That Shook the World while Louise discovers her own formidable voice. But Reed's factional feuds within the American Socialist Party lead him back to Moscow, where disillusion and heartbreak lie in store.

Two years in production, shot across six countries, Reds was a massively risky undertaking. Producer-director Beatty hired the brilliant Trevor Griffiths as screenwriter, but other hands massagedthe script. Still, this is an epic in which the dialogues are as thrilling as the panoramas. Reed's dialectical tussles with Emma Goldman (Maureen Stapleton) and Grigory Zinoviev (writer Jerzy Kosinski) are worth the cost of a video, as are Keaton's stinging exchanges with Nicholson. This rathermagisterial endeavour won Beatty the Best Director Oscar in 1982. --Richard Kelly

Synopsis
The story of a young couple's love affair in a war-torn world and how the Russian Revolution shook their lives.

From the Back Cover
An instantaneous classic, Warren Beatty's Reds was nominated for more Academy Awards in 1982 than any other film for the previous 15 years. The recipient of numerous critical "Best Picture" prizes throughout the world, it won every major directorial award of 1981-1982 for Beatty.

Reds is the story of the love affair of John Reed and Louise Bryant in a war-torn world and how the Russian Revolution shook their lives. Warren Beatty is John Reed, American Communist, journalist and activist who was buried in the Kremlin Wall. Diane Keaton is Louise Bryant, writer and feminist, whose love for Reed carries her across continents. Jack Nicholson is Eugene O'Neill, America's greatest playwright, whose life intertwines romantically with Bryant's. Maureen Stapleton is anarchist and feminist Emma Goldman and Jerzy Kosinski is Bolshevik leader Gregory Zinoviev.

Customer Reviews

Beatty's wonderful epic .
Reds is the brilliant biopic of journalist/radical John Reed that Warren Beatty directed in 1981. This was a labour of love for Beatty, who had built up power in Hollywood to make this suitably epic film on such films as Shampoo and Heaven Can Wait.

The film is very long, which could put off many- though it shouldn't as the material is of immense interest. This highly ambitious film opens with Reed living among bohemians/radicals in New York & Provincetown and charts his love affair with both Louise Bryant and communism. The first part of the film is more successful, where Bryant/Reed's affair goes up & down and Jack Nicholson comes between them in a brilliant portrayal of playwright Eugene O'Neill. This section is wonderfully photographed by Vittorio Storaro, the photographer of such brilliant films as The Conformist and Apocalypse Now Redux. Then as the relationship develops into marriage, various spectres rise: the conflict between love & principles, World War I and the complex world of socialism in America at that time (the so-called red decade).

The latter half of the film, which sees Reed and Bryant go to Russia, where the revolution occurred and Reed wrote his classic account of it Ten Days That Shook the World. Again, Moscow looks stunning- though the film descends into a more conventional form- we get a sub-Zhivago reunion , Keaton's proto-feminist character is neutueured by devotion and we even get an action sequence (though this does end with the symbolic Reed chasing after a cart- the same shot as we saw from the opening shot of Reed in Mexico). The final scenes, where Reed is TB afflicted and Bryant sees a young child (the obligatory one they never had) is extremely conventional and melodramatic.

The best feature of the film is the use of the 'witnesses'- people from the contemporary life of Bryant & Reed who offer opinions and perceptions on them. These are wonderful as they contradict each other and can be seen as Beatty stating that the sections where he & Keaton play Reed & Bryant it is fiction and the definitive notion of truth & realism in the biopic is impossible. Though Robert Rosenstone in Visions of the Past questions this technique- which could just be a result of being 'used' by Beatty for research purposes. The film was even satirised by Keaton's ex-lover Woody Allen with 1983's Zelig.

Reds is one of the great films of American cinema, that would influence later directors such as Oliver Stone- the only criticism is that it tries to be too many things. Still, when was the last time you saw a high-budget film that tackled communism,sexual equality ,feminism, revolution and socialism? At this price it would be offensive not to watch this film- though to read behind the film, it might be pertinent to read the books Romantic Revolutionary & Ten Days that Shook the World. Having said that, the latter (Reed's masterpiece) fictionalised actual events- which puts into question the historian's frequent criticism of this film and the biopic in general. I suppose the equivalent film to Reds in the 1990's was Titanic, which demonstrates how far American cinema has sunk regarding ambition. Reds is one of Beatty's finest works also and a labour of love that was well worth making - even if it caused Beatty to vanish from cinema for several years following. A true classic.

A must see
For anyone who loves the romance and backdrop of Dr Zhivago, or the poltics and idealism of Ghandi - this film is a "must see". An intelligent and beautiful film...

pioneering, satisfying drama & documentary
Thia is a great film which recalls a time when there was generally more patience and respect for intelligent political dramas without predominant 'thriller' or 'action' elements to maintain the viewer's attention.

Love story, satisfyingly detailed political drama, documentary, all elements of the film are satisfied and none dominate. It's beautifully shot also, with some great locations in Europe serving the period detail.

In case you're worried about that fabled 'liberal bias', the film is a model for attempting to represent the real complexity of the 'balanced truth', showing, in both drama and documentary, both idealism and the inevitable disillusionment with it. There is absolutely no sense of that all-too-common 'take home message' here. The documentary elements in particular show more balance than many 'true' documentaries, and do so with great humour and warmth. It gradually becomes very clear Beatty didn't want to heavily edit these to 'bury' contradictory accounts, but instead pay patient tribute to the memories of those surviving members of the original events.

Although, as mentioned in the review above, Reed wrote the undeniably biased 'Ten Days That Shook The World', the drama of this film goes well beyond the idealism of that work, and is admirable in showing at length his colleagues' disillusionment, even when it risks exposing Reed's naivity.

I should finally advise that this film is actually split over two Blu-ray discs (BD-25's) here, so you have to insert the second disc to continue the film.
If you have a computer with a Blu-ray drive, though, it's relatively easy to copy and rename the largest MPEG-2 '.m2ts' files from each disc to hard disk (with programs like 'AnyDVDHD') and join them together.