(1981; English, Russian, German, French) Thirty years ago I was captivated by this movie - "When you purge dissent, you kill the revolution! Dissent is revolution!" - and it continues to grip my radicalized imagination with relevant references today. Brief comments, from beginning to end, by dozens of witnesses - including Henry Miller, Rebecca West, Will Durant, George Jessel - struggling to recall the distant past, provide a documentary window into the action.

In his devotional biopic, director/producer Warren Beatty co-wrote (with Trevor Griffiths) the original screenplay and appropriated for himself the role of journalist and Communist activist John Silas Reed (1887-1920, three years after the Russian Revolution and five days before his 33rd birthday), who was born in Portland, Maine, and is the only American to have been buried in the Kremlin.

Sixteen years after Doctor Zhivago - the two films in some respects run on parallel tracks (both well over three hours long), with a triangular love affair, the First World War and the Bolshevik revolution, long train trips across the Russian landscape, an arduous journey through harsh winter weather, and a tragic conclusion - Beatty had intended for Julie Christie (who had long been involved with the producer and his project) to play the part of Louise Bryant, but ultimately she insisted he needed an American actress for the character.

At the Liberal Club in Portland, Louise Trullinger nee Bryant (Diane Keaton), an aspiring writer and the wife of a conservative dentist, first hears Jack Reed speak, a highly-regarded writer for The Masses, a Socialist magazine, voicing anti-war opposition (the sole purpose of war is profits) to the majority's enthusiasm for fighting the Hun in Europe. Immediately afterward she records an interview with him: "So, the real question is, why do we have an economy where the poor have to pay so the rich won't lose money?"

Also he tells her that economic freedom for women means sexual freedom, which means birth control. He encourages her to accompany him to Greenwich Village in New York City, where she's introduced to his artistic/politically radical friends: anarchist Emma Goldman (Maureen Stapleton), who says that "voting is the opium of the masses in this country"; writer Max Eastman (Edward Hermann), editor of The Metropolitan Horace Whigham (George Plimpton), author and critic Floyd Dell, labor organizer for the IWW ("one big union") Big Bill Haywood, and the poet/playwright Eugene O'Neill (Jack Nicholson).

While Jack's traipsing about the country ("Taxi's waiting, Jack"), covering the Democratic convention in Chicago and encouraging efforts at organizing American labor against the capitalists, Louise, alone and jealous, feels she's not taken seriously as a writer when Jack's around: "I'm just living in your margins." Taking his own work very seriously, he tells her that she has to get serious about serious things in order to write serious pieces for publication; he rebukes magazine editor Pete van Wherry (Gene Hackman): "You don't rewrite what I write."

Seizing an opening, O'Neill comes on to Louise: "Don't give me a lot of parlor socialism you learned in the village. If you were mine, I wouldn't share you with anybody or anything…. You'd be at the center of it all." Though they regard marriage as unimportant - instead relying on mutual independence, respect, and free love - Louise and Jack eventually marry quietly in 1916 ("What a heartbreaker," sighs Eugene), settling down for a short while at Croton-on-Hudson, but have no children.

After being jailed for his speeches and protests against the war in 1917, discovering he has a serious kidney ailment, and struggling through a contentious union with Louise, resulting in her leaving for Paris to report on the war in Europe, Jack departs for France to reach Russia, which in the throes of revolution is "on the threshold of history." On the way he convinces Louise to join him in a partnership; the two reporters, confronted by a language barrier while losing sight of objectivity, get caught up in the frenetic events of workers and peasants taking control of the government.

Back in New York in 1918, lecturing and book writing (during which time Jack composes Ten Days That Shook the World), they once again become subjects of political concern. Speaking to Senator Overman during a hearing before a Senate panel, Louise addresses questions of her allegiances to America and Christianity: "On the subject of decency, Senator, the Bolsheviks took power with the slogan, 'An end to war.' Within six months, they made good their promise to the Russian people. Now, the present President of the United States of America went to this country in 1916, on a 'no war' ticket. Within six months, he'd taken us into the war, and 115,000 young Americans didn't come back. If that's how decent, God-fearing Christians behave, give me atheists anytime."

As a romantic with a new faith in the possibilities of social transformation, Jack devotes more time to politics, advocating for the formation of the Communist Labor Party of America following expulsion of the leftwing from the Socialist Party; he insists on returning to Moscow to receive recognition from the Comintern. "You're not a politician," Louise argues, attempting to dissuade him from leaving, "you're a writer." "I'll be back by Christmas," he promises, though she says she's not sure she'll be there waiting for him.

In the meantime, the authorities charge Jack in absentia with sedition (traveling illegally without a passport or visa); but when Eugene makes another attempt to win favor with Louise, she scorns his cynical criticism of middleclass radicals from inside a bottle of booze.

"You can't leave us now," Grigory Zinoview (Jerzy Kosinski), head of the Communist International in Moscow, informs Jack, valuable for purposes of propaganda, as Christmas approaches: "You can never come back to this moment in history." His attempt to escape ends in a Finnish prison, where he suffers from scurvy, while Louise begins an odyssey as a stowaway to rescue him.

In Petrograd in 1920, Emma admits her disillusionment ("the dream is dying") in Russia's devolution into a militaristic police state, but not Jack - not until he realizes that someone else has been deliberately misrepresenting what he wrote.

Click here for links to places to buy or rent this movie in video and/or DVD format, or to buy the soundtrack, posters, books, even used videos, games, electronics and lots of other stuff. I suggest you shop at least two of these places before buying anything. Prices seem to vary continuously. For more information on this film, click on this link to The Internet Movie Database. Type in the name of the movie in the search box and press enter. You will be able to find background information on the film, the actors, and links to much more information.

Copyright © 2011 Patrick Ivers. All rights reserved.
Reproduced with the permission of the copyright holder.

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