REDS (spoilers, including THE DEFIANT ONES)

Friday night my historical movie watch party showed Warren Beatty's Reds. (I was seeing it for the first time since its original release forty years ago.) That's the one with him and Diane Keaton as John Reed and Louise Bryant, American leftists who witness the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia.  It's certainly well-made, and more intelligent than the usual 1981 Hollywood fare, let alone the "fast food" output of today's studios. But it was ultimately a Hollywood movie with those familiar romantic tropes.  

In The Player shrewd studio executive Tim Robbins says, "I have no problem with political movies, so long as they aren't political political!" Reds isn't exactly political political; it's about romance as much as politics. (Jack Nicholson has most of the best lines as Louise's other boyfriend, the playwright Eugene O'Neill.) As with Doctor Zhivago, it feels like a story of lovebirds dealing with something far bigger than them.  I thought of that famous line from Casablanca:  

It doesn't take much to see that the problems of three little people don't amount to a hill of beans in this crazy world.

I would have liked more about the period after Reed and Bryant returned to the USA and had to deal with wartime and postwar government repression and the US Socialist Party's playing dirty pool to keep out communists like Reed.  The scene where they try to infiltrate the Socialist convention from which they'd been banned (then retreat to the basement) feels hauntingly familiar.  It reminded me both of the Democratic Party cheating Bernie Sanders and of Keir Starmer's Labour Party barring elected delegates from their conference and mounting anti-heckler security!  This part could have been a whole movie in itself...

Later on Reed is back in Russia and hoping Louise will rejoin him.  Emma Goldman (one of my heroes, nicely played by Maureen Stapleton) says to him:

If Louise were to come here, she'd have to leave the United States illegally, then live in exile with you, and never go home again. All for the sake of a revolution she was never any part of. Why should she?

Because the audience wants her to, of course! So she returns (the real Louise didn't) and gets reunited with Reed in time for his deathbed scene... 

This ending reminded me of the ending in The Defiant Ones, where Sidney Poitier makes it onto the train that'll carry him to freedom, but Tony Curtis doesn't, so Poitier gets off and sits with Curtis and sings until the cops arrive to take them back to the chain gang. James Baldwin pointed out that this ending's purpose was to reassure the white audience that their friendship was stronger than Poitier's desire for freedom.  But suppose it had been the other way around?  If Curtis had got off the train rather than abandon Poitier, would the audience have believed it? They'd only believe the black man sacrificing himself for the white man, not vice versa. (Baldwin heard black men in the audience saying "Get back on that train, fool!")

Speaking of radical heroes of mine, on Sunday I saw the documentary Buffy Sainte-Marie:  Carry It On at the Bloor Hot Docs.  I remember when I was young hearing her song "Look at the Facts." There was something angry about it that I really respected! (I also admired the anger in punk rock...)