"Go On

By RICHARD CORLISS

REDS Directed by Warren Beatty; Written by Warren Beatty and Trevor Griffiths

Jack Reed! Trotsky called him "observer and participant, chronicler and poet of the insurrection," and Lenin urged that Ten Days That Shook the World, Reed's report of the Russian Revolution, be "published in millions of copies and translated into all languages." Max Eastman said, "He had a reckless equilibrium in walking life's tightropes"; Walter Lippmann called him "one of the intractables," possessed with "an inordinate desire to be arrested." Max Lerner praised his "Faustian thirst for life"; Upton Sinclair dismissed him as a "playboy of the social revolution." Journalist and playwright, Harvard cheerleader and Moscow radical, consciousness-and hellraiser, Reed embraced contradictions as he ran like an Ivy League halfback through an archetypal American life--full, frustrated, tragically short. He knew everybody, did everything. His life was a passionate sonnet scrawled on a Wobbly poster--and when he finished the poem he died, in 1920, three days before his 33rd birthday. Jack Reed: artist-adventurer.

Like Reed, Warren Beatty is an oversize kid with dreams to match. In a timid movie era, when most film makers are retreating to the safety of Boys' Life remakes and lectures in High Humanism, Beatty has spent four years and a sum estimated at anywhere from $32 million to $57 million as producer, director, co-author and star of a 3-hr. 20-min. movie about a nearly forgotten American Communist and his troubled, tempestuous wife Louise Bryant. These Reeds never pretend to be ordinary people; this Reds boasts not a single mechanical toy as a major character. Reed's life said this: Not only can you hop the express train of history, you can help steer it into a new age. With Reds Beatty says: I'm not just a movie star, a minimogul, a hot gossip item; I've got a great film in me and here it is.

It just about is. Reds is a big, smart movie, vastly ambitious and entertaining, full of belief in Reed and in the ability of a popular audience to respond to him. It combines the majestic sweep of Lawrence of Arabia and Doctor Zhivago--David Lean and Robert Bolt's mature and exhilarating epics--with the rueful comedy and historical fatalism of Citizen Kane. Resisting the megalomania that attends the making of blockbusters, Beatty plays it not safe but careful, stocking the movie with ingratiating motifs: Christmas trees, old songs, dogs, hats, chandeliers, white lilies, waiting taxis and one adorably solemn child. Dispensing with period photos or newsreel clips in which the historical John Reed might compete with Beatty's Jack, the film instead takes testimony from 32 "witnesses"--old friends and colleagues like Henry Miller, Adela Rogers St. Johns and Rebecca West, who offer a Kane-like kaleidoscope of memories. The rest of Reds is a nonstop narrative that climaxes with skyrockets over Red Square and finds its denouement in a lovely Liebestod. The script, by Beatty and British Playwright Trevor Griffiths (with help, reportedly, from Elaine May and Robert Towne), is a series of small quick steps that deftly transport Reed from Pancho Villa's Mexico to Emma Goldman's Greenwich Village to Eugene O'Neill's Provincetown to everybody's Petrograd--and take Louise with him.

At first, Louise looks like a prettier, more cunning version of Kane's Susan Alexander. She has left her husband and come East to make her own way as a writer, but to the socialists and socialites of New York City, she is just Jack's dancing partner. Slack-mouthed and high-strung, isolated by her feelings of resentment and inferiority toward the Village intellectuals who fill the air with the helium of their ideas and egos, Louise becomes (as she tells Jack) "a boring, clinging, miserable little wife. Who'd ever want to come home to me?" Jack does. Rogue male and loving husband, he forgives her tantrums, ignores her affair with O'Neill, sees through her to the spine of pride and loyalty. And Louise learns that her destiny is to be Jack's partner in the curious dance life has choreographed for them--to be his exciting, independent, essential wife.

Finding Louise in France, Jack tells her he is off to cover the Russian Revolution and exclaims, with the fervor of a talent scout who has just spotted a bright-eyed starlet, "You ought to be in Petrograd!" Reds is all about star quality, its power and limitations--the way a person like Reed can light up a generation of American social history, the way a shooting star can become a falling star when Reed collides with the true "intractables" of the infant Soviet bureaucracy. To carry the moviegoer through the passionate debates on socialism, organized labor and the right of the Comintern to establish a proletarian dictatorship as rigid as the Tsar's, Beatty banks on star quality--and it works.

Under Beatty's direction, Jack Nicholson proves how resourcefully sexy an actor he can be. His Gene O'Neill stalks the shrouded Provincetown beach in search of the eloquence of fog people; lounges lynxlike and purrs out a denunciation of political commitment; walks slowly toward Louise and waits as she steps up into their first illicit kiss--the most erotic moment in a movie that is as much about comrades as about lovers. Maureen Stapleton makes a flinty, domineering, humane Emma Goldman and, with just a hint of Bella Abzug brassiness, underlines Reds' straddling of two periods of American ferment: the late teens and the late '60s. As Reed's Soviet nemesis, Novelist Jerzy Kosinski acquits himself handsomely--a tundra of Russian ice against Reed's all-American fire.

Despite these and other sharp performances by Gene Hackman, Gerald Hiken and Jack Kehoe, Reds is essentially the story of Jack and Louise. Diane Keaton's performance shows a species of heroism: unafraid to seem shrill or pouty, she allows Louise's strength to emerge through her decisions to follow Jack and fight him, to walk out of his life and fight to get back in, to be his and still be herself. Beatty, the master charmer, uses a torrent of words and his sweet-faced stare to persuade us that have Jack and his brand of robust idealism have meaning for a world--and a movie world--mired in cynicism and reaction. Beatty's soaring spirit infected the Reds crew, from Cinematographer Vittorio Storaro to Production Designer Richard Sylbert to Editors Dede Allen and Craig McKay. This is a young man's movie, vi tal, confident, itching to meet the challenges of life and art.

A few days after arriving at Harvard in 1906, young Jack Reed determined to write a history of the place. When the fellow he had chosen to illustrate the book remarked that neither of them knew a thing about Harvard, Reed cried: "Hell, we'll find out doing the thing!" Beatty has shown himself equally fearless. Hell, he found out about producing movies by making Bonnie and Clyde, about writing them by co-authoring Shampoo, about directing them by sharing that job on Heaven Can Wait--and with each try won an Oscar nomination. But none of these films prepares one for his achievement here. It is as if he had the taken Reed's credo as his own:"Go on--the limit!" Warren Beatty: artist-adventurer.

--By Richard Corliss

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.