[Marxism] "Reds" at New York Film Festival: From the New York Times

[Sayan Bhattacharyya]

The New York Times

October 4, 2006
 Film on a Revolution Was a Revolution Itself

By A.O. SCOTT


"What kind of lunatic would make a movie like this and ask someone to
invest in it?" asked Warren Beatty, reached by telephone recently at
his home in Los Angeles. It was a rhetorical question, since the movie
he was talking about was "Reds," the three-and-a-half-hour historical
epic he wrote (with Trevor Griffiths), directed and starred in 25
years ago.

The point he was making had less to do with his own sanity than with
the movie business, which he is not alone in believing to be far more
risk-averse — and less willing to spend money on the potential follies
of ambitious directors — than it was back then, when Paramount put up
the money for "Reds." Large-scale costume dramas are still undertaken
from time to time, but the scope, the seriousness and the subject
matter of "Reds," which immerses the audience in the factionalism of
the early-20th-century American left, as well as in the spectacle of
the Bolshevik Revolution and the love lives of obscure intellectuals,
make it unusual.

To revisit the film — it will be shown tonight at the New York Film
Festival in advance of its DVD release on Oct. 17 (and for one week,
starting Friday, at the Village East Cinemas in Manhattan) — is to
acknowledge that they don't make them like that anymore, and that they
didn't make very many even when they did. According to Mr. Beatty,
"Reds" was the last Hollywood picture to be released with an
intermission, and it does, in retrospect, seem to come at the end of a
line of grand, sometimes grandiose movies that stretches back from the
"Godfather" series, through "Lawrence of Arabia," to "Gone With the
Wind."

"Reds" was generally admired when it first came out. The New York Film
Critics Circle named it the best picture of 1981, and it was nominated
for 12 Oscars, winning three (best supporting actress for Maureen
Stapleton, best cinematography for Vittorio Storaro and best director
for Mr. Beatty).

Full text: <http://www.nytimes.com/2006/10/04/movies/04reds.html?ref=arts>