Reds
Paramount Pictures, 1981
Warren Beatty & Diane Keaton
195 minutes

This is a romance movie centered on John Reed and Louise Bryant that is a big plus for the 
communist movement because of its highly useful historical background. While MIM has not
bothered to check every historical detail of the film, the main issues discussed in the film as
the background to the love story are all real.

Readers may be interested in some of the finer points of the film and MIM's observations, so
we will list some quickly here. One is that we believe Emma Goldman, the anarchist has her views 
presented fairly. The important thing is that she ended up pissing on the Russian Revolution from 
the sidelines, thereby undertaking the misanthropic intellectual approach to be taken by Trotsky
and countless others oscillating between conservatism and nihilism seen later.

We also see Max Eastman in the film repeatedly, but not much by way of political differentiation
from him. Max Eastman is one of the many people revealing the true nature of Trotskyism by
passing through it on the way to conservatism and getting published in the "National Review."

With regard to the depiction of Zinoviev, we have no reason to complain. Zinoviev was still 
playing a revolutionary role as assistant to Lenin in 1920 when John Reed died. We do not 
know whether John Reed really argued with Zinoviev over editing individual writers in the
bourgeois Liberal way depicted in the film.

Finally, the dispute at the Comintern regarding joining the reactionary American Federation of
Labor (AFL) and leaving behind the IWW (International Workers of the World) is also generally 
represented well. The British and American delegations fought the Comintern on the subject of
the labor bureaucracy, labor aristocracy and racism.

"Reds" is a great gift to the communist movement and we heartily recommend it for entertainment.