Reds

Make sure to check out Criterion’s Polaroid wall, located in the Walter Reade Theater’s lobby throughout the series. For attendees on Saturday, February 14 don’t miss your chance to have your own Polaroid taken and bring it home in a special Criterion-branded envelope.

Although more widely known for his work as an actor, Warren Beatty won his first and only Oscar for his second directorial effort, a long-gestating passion project whose particulars sound wholly improbable: this big-budget studio biopic about early-20th-century American Communists, helmed by a high-wattage movie star at the height of his powers, achieved robust box office success at the dawn of the Reagan administration, and was roundly celebrated by an industry that still bore the scars of McCarthy-era blacklists. Reds cannily couches its historically rigorous account of Russia’s 1917 October Revolution in the Hollywood-friendly framework of an epically scaled romantic drama, detailing the continent-hopping love story between radical journalists John Reed (Beatty) and Louise Bryant (Diane Keaton), and ingeniously alternating its fictional narrative with documentary testimonies from “witnesses” who knew and worked with the real-life pair. The critic David Thomson, praising Keaton’s Oscar-nominated performance for Film Comment, wrote that the actress “seems to shake and fidget with the threat of provincialism; but she is still uncertain enough to be on the point of giggling at her own outrageousness. It is an ingenious manner, suggestive of period even if it is invented, and a way of making Reds start out as the story of a woman on her way to suffrage and identity.”