Interwar · Film · 1981
Reds
Journalists John Reed and Louise Bryant fall in love among American radicals and follow their ideals all the way to the Russian Revolution, where passion and politics pull them in opposite directions.
Where it happened
Follow the story across 5 places.
Stop 1: Portland, Oregon
Louise Bryant meets the radical journalist John Reed at a lecture and, dazzled by his idealism, decides to leave her marriage.
Stop 2: Greenwich Village, New York
In Greenwich Village the couple joins a circle of radicals and artists that includes Emma Goldman and Eugene O'Neill.
Stop 3: Provincetown, Massachusetts
On Cape Cod they write, stage plays with friends and slip into a painful triangle with O'Neill.
Stop 4: Smolny Institute, Petrograd
Key location
Reunited as correspondents, Reed and Bryant are swept up in the October Revolution and the crowds singing the Internationale.
Stop 5: Baku
Back in Soviet Russia to win recognition for his party, Reed is sent south on a propaganda train to a congress of the peoples of the East.
What really happened
John Reed and Louise Bryant were real American reporters who reached Petrograd in September 1917 and witnessed the Bolshevik seizure of power that November. Reed's account, Ten Days That Shook the World (1919), became the most famous eyewitness book on the revolution; he then helped found the Communist Labor Party in the United States and returned to Soviet Russia to seek recognition from the Comintern.
Warren Beatty intercuts the drama with interviews of real witnesses such as Henry Miller and George Seldes. The film simplifies the feuds of the American left and dramatises Bryant's 1920 journey to rejoin Reed, which she made partly in disguise. Reed died of typhus in Moscow in October 1920 and was buried by the Kremlin wall.
Where to watch
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Full details
- Original title
- Reds
- Directed by
- Warren Beatty
- Countries
- United States
- Languages
- English, Russian
- Released
- 1981
- Period
- –
- Theaters of war
- The Americas, Eastern Front
- Themes
- Politics
- Biography
- Romance
- True story
