"Reds" (1981) Warren Beatty, Diane Keaton, Jack Nicholson, Maureen Stapleton

Rating:	★★★★★
Category:	Movies
Genre:	Drama

Last night i watched this film for the first time in thirty years. I found it a daring tour de force by star-director-co-screenwriter Warren Beatty at the time. "A three-hour film about an American Communist who goes to Russia...and dies" as he puts it in the DVD commentary was not potentially the stuff of box-office gold in 1981, the first year of Ronald Reagan and the most heated time of Cold War America since the early Sixties.

But the film did do well enough at the box office to make a small profit and earn a number of awards, including an Oscar for Beatty as a director and Maureen Stapelton in her role as Emma Goldman.

The film follows early 20th Century American globe-trotting journalist and activist John "Jack" Reed and Louise Bryant as writers and political radicals. They fall in love and then, after moving from staid Portland, Oregon, to living a bohemian lifestyle in the Greenwich Village part of New York (and having some tumultuous old-fashioned Hollywood romantic complications) go to Russia to witness, report and (for Reed) participate in the October Revolution of 1917. Seeing the film the first time prompted me to go out and read John Reed's "Ten Days That Shook the World" and its a great piece of reportage, and historically significant even if some critics have found it too kind to one political movement in that revolution.

Written as it was at the beginning of such an epochal event in human history, Reed can be forgiven for being a bit too romantic about the possibilities of what was happening in Russia to empower workers and forgotten people all over the world.

The first half of the film shows us Reed's view of the Revolution and the growth of radical labor politics in World War II era America. The scene with the laborers in the barn in the clip is indicative of that.

The second half of the film shows how those around Reed (including Bryant and Emma Goldman) become more disillusioned with the chances of radical change in America and the high cost that Lenin's government is exacting on the Russian people. At the same time, Beatty and his fellow screenwriter, the British playwright Trevor Griffiths, make it clear that Reed is a man who is a man trapped between his own country (where he faces jail for sedition charges stemming from opposing the entry of America in World War One) and his lack of total revolutionary fervor for some in Russia who increasingly use him as a tool to promote their own ideas as the Bolsheviks desperately try to fight off the attempts by disenfranchised revolutionary parties, moderate and reactionary groups and foreign armies who mean to bring down their government. He seems a man without a country, chasing a revolution that has little use for his true reflections.


I couldn't help wondering what would have become of Reed's view of Russia had he lived longer? According to a quote attributed to Bryant, he felt at the end of his life he might have misjudged the Bolsheviks. But there is controversy there. What we do know without controversy is that John Reed at his best was courageous and had no tolerance for censorship or the lies of politicians or bureaucrats.

It's clear though his is a tale that would be little known outside formal history classes in America were it not for the box office clout of a American film star. No matter what you think about the beliefs of these two main people when you reflect upon them, I think most would say this is a tale well worth the telling.

"Darkness at Newt?": Former House Speaker Prisoner of Tea Party GOP

Some recent political unrest in the Republican Party this week brought back memories of a novel a read quite a few years ago called "Darkness at Noon", a book that about political torture and show trails that was an inspiration to other writers, including George Orwell when he came to write "1984" . There seems connection between that political tome and the former House Speaker and multi-term Congressman from Georgia--and old conservative--Newt Gingrich.

 

  Let me offer a brief summary of the book, courtesy of Wikipedia:

Darkness at Noon (German: Sonnenfinsternis) is a novel by the Hungarian-born British novelist Arthur Koestler, first published in 1940. His best-known work tells the tale of Rubashov, an Old Bolshevik and October Revolutionary who is cast out, imprisoned, and tried for treason against the very Soviet Union he once helped to create.

The novel is set in 1938 during the Stalinist purges and Moscow show trials.

I wonder if Gingrich ever read the book while an undergraduate? If he did,  he's likely feeling a bit like Rubashov, the Old Bolshevik.  Not that's he going to get literally tortured, make a false confession at a show trail and then face execution--well, not physically.  But he did just have a  near-death experience or two recently thanks to the fanatical wing of the "tea party" Republicans, the same Republican Party he once led his "Contract With America" to impressive  victories over the Democrats in 1994.

Now "Old Bolshevik" Gingrich wants to be the GOP nominee for President. The only problem is that he spoke honestly about the radical agenda of severe cuts in Medicare and Medicade brought forth by  "New Bolsheviks" under Paul Ryan. 

 

 

Gingrich called the plan to end Medicare as a functioning entity for those who will be eligible for the program in roughly the next decade "too radical a jump" and "right-wing social engineering".  The program gut-tings are indeed too radical a jump and would leave millions of seniors more prone to economic distress, bankruptcy and penury if it's replaced with a voucher system, as Ryan and almost all other GOP Congresspeople want, that will not come near to covering medical costs that doctors, hospitals and private insurers would demand.

 

The very reason Medicare and later Medicade (a federal and state aid program for the poor of all ages ) was created was to give seniors and the poor medical security through a payroll tax program similar to Social Security.  The Ryan plan undermines programs that have boosted millions out of poverty and given them the treatment that would otherwise have been denied to them. 

 

Gingrich, unaware apparently that his party is now in the thrall of social Darwinist and  Ayn Rand objectivist cranks like Ryan made his statements on "Meet the Press" and later to the "Wall Street Journal". 

And, you guessed it, the new guard under the likes of Paul Ryan and Eric Cantor and company didn't take those "radical"  statements all that well.    

 

Here's a summary of the fallout, from today "The Note" put out by ABC's Michael Falcone and Amy Walter:

“In an attempt to conduct damage control in the opening days of his campaign, Newt Gingrich called Rep. Paul Ryan to apologize for comments he made criticizing the Medicare plan widely supported by GOP members of the House,” ABC’s Arlette Saenz notes. “‘I made a mistake and I called Paul Ryan today. He’s a very close personal friend, and I said to him, the fact is that I have supported what Ryan’s trying to do on the budget.’ Gingrich said on Fox News’ “On the Record” with Greta Van Susteren. ‘The budget vote is one that I am happy to say I would have voted for, I will defend, and I’d be glad to answer any Democrat who attempts to distort what I said.’ Gingrich said the two men ‘had a very good private conversation,’ and believes they will be able to ‘work together both to make sure Democrats can’t misuse information and can’t lie about where we are and also to make sure we work together.’” http://abcn.ws/lqXCFb

And what about calling Ryan’s plan “right-wing social engineering”?

“I was trying to say something that is really important. We are at the beginning of a process of solving the entitlement problems of the United States,” Gingrich said last night. “These are enormous challenges. I believe deeply that the American people have to be an integral part of it. I think that what Paul Ryan has done is he has started that process. He has begun the opportunity, something which President Obama failed to do, to have an honest conversation, to go to the American people, to share with them his current ideas.”

That's what I call some fast backtracking folks.  Almost like they had the guy in a vise.

 

 Gingrich is not a literal prisoner in an authoritarian gulag of course.  But if he wants to be President, he'd better learn from Koestler's book and recall Orwell's process of political "double think"--the art of holding two opposing views in your head at the same time--quickly if he wants to stay relevant in the party he helped boost the fortunes of not so long ago.      

Procession of the Nobles, Rimsky-Korsakov-Christopher Ocasek, Conductor

One of a group known as "The Five" of great composers to come out of Russia on the latter part of the 19th Century (along with Alexander Borodin, Modest Moussorgsky,et al) Nicolai Rimsky Korsakov (1841-1908) was initially a naval officer who became an inspector general of Russian Naval bands and later a professor of music at the St. Petersburg Conservatory of Music.

This selection of music is from a ballet opera called "Mlada" (1890) , a work spawned from tales of Russian folklore that concerned murder, revenge, romance and the supernatural.

During the 1905 Revolution, he, like many left-leaning intellectuals, supported the students at St. Petersburg University and other activists in their demands for a reformed curriculum and a national Duma (legislature) to check the powers of the Czar and his ministers. The reactionary authorities got him fired from his professorship and 300 student-activists leaders dismissed.

But so great was the outrage and so intense was the overall General Strike that crippled urban Russia in late 1905 that Professor Rimsky-Korsakov was restored to his university and the people got their National "Duma".

VE-Day

Start:	May 8, '09 5:00p
Location:	Wherever Goose-step Marching Is Considered 'Trey Declasse"

Fascism gets thumped--bombing people declared off-limits for a time!

What was left of the Nazi government surrendered on this date in 1945 to The British and Her Commonwealth Nations, The Soviet Union, Free French forces, and the United States, the last big power in the fray (better late then never) but with millions of "ordinary" men and women pulling their own weight!

Music is from Duke Ellington's "Jump For Joy" (1945)