Reds (Special 25th Anniversary Edition)
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DVD Cover Information
Actor: Diane Keaton, Jack Nicholson, Noel Davis, Phil Brown, Warren BeattyBrand: PARAMOUNT HOME VIDEO
Cinematographer: Vittorio Storaro
Composer: Dave Grusin
DVD: Region Code 1
Audio: English (Subtitled); English (Original Language), Dolby Digital 2.0 Mono; Finnish (Original Language); French (Original Language), Dolby Digital 2.0 Mono; German (Original Language); Russian (Original Language)
Format: Color, Dolby, DVD, NTSC, Subtitled, Widescreen
Picture Format: 2.35:1
Running Time: 194 minutes
DVD Release Date: 2006-10-17
Audience Rating: PG (Parental Guidance Suggested)
Studio: Paramount
Movie Reviews of Reds (Special 25th Anniversary Edition)
Movie Review: Great period docudrama Amer Communist party, 1917 Russian Revolution
Summary: 5 Stars
This film is a docu-drama about the 1917 Russian Revolution that transferred political power from the Tsars (royal Romanov family) to a socialist / communist gov't under Vladimir Ilyich Lenin. Also chronicled the start of the Socialist labor and Communist parties in America.
Much of the film is about the American Socialist labor movement of the early teens in NYC as a rebellion against the Industrial Revolution during the late 19th century. The other third of the film shows John Reed in the Russia during the early Communist party formation, trying to get legitimacy from the RU party for the Amer party. While there he wears himself down physically. Then his left-behind wife, Bryant, crosses Finland to St Petersburg too, but too late where Reed dies of typhus ("Jail Fever," a sanitation disease caused by bacteria which attack the brain, spread by body lice, which was common in Russia. (only curable with the antibiotics tetracycline, occurs naturally in beer fermentation (Conover, Pfizer 1950 patent) and prevented with insecticide DDT (Muller, 48 Nobel) discovered in 1939).
As an adjunct film of history on the Industrial Revolution, watch the first half of PBS's TV epic by Jared Diamond's "Guns, Germs and Steel (05)." It shows how the agricultural and industrial revolutions profoundly affected world politics, including conquest, colonialism, and socialistic communities. Driving former agrarian peoples (serf sharecropper, slavery, feudalism) from the farm to cities and its centers for education was essential to create the artisan worker (middle-class). This also created the economically powerful capitalist-class. The socialistic counter-attack was German Karl Marx and Frederich Engels thesis "Das Kapital (1867)" which addressed the exploitation and alienation of the laboring class.
The industrial revolution started in the UK in the late 18th and 19th centuries starting with textile and steel making, canals and rail, and steam power. The Russian political revolution started in Petrograd (St Petersburg) then the largest city and capital of Russia at the time at the eastern-most edge of the Baltic Sea, next to Finland and closest port to W Europe's technology.
It became the industrial center of Russia, with canals cut in the former swamp and in 1718 to the headwaters of Volga River system which is 80 miles from Moscow, iron ore deposits south of Moscow near the Ukraine boarder, coal near Moscow, steam engine technology starting in 1837, Russian Academy of Sciences, Petrograd State U, Technology and Mining Institutes, Medical-Surgical and Naval Academies and migration of the serfs emancipated by Alexander II starting in 1861. The 1916 Petrograd population was 2.4 million housed in large community housing building projects.
Much of Beatty's Russia was filmed in Finland with expensive recreation of Russian sets, as he botched getting permission from the former USSR gov't in the late 70s, as they were in the midst of Soviet War in Afghanistan (79-89) with the US, UK, and PRChina supporting the Muslim Mujahideen rebels in a guerrilla war. This was a half-decade before Perestroika economic restructuring was starting in 1986 by Gorbachev, as centralized-management model of Soviet industry and agriculture was failing due, in part, with the debilitating Afghan war.
He initially went to visit Moscow's centralized film industry, MOSFilm, but started off on the wrong foot, calling the 1917 Oktoberist Revolution a mere "Bolshevik takeover." Did this backlash cause the film not adequately described in the "Reds" was the revolutionary proletariat (labor class), Vladimir Lenin, and the formation of the Marxist Russian Social Democratic Labor Party (RSDLP)? The RSDLP later formed the Russian Communist Party. Vladimir Lenin (as Roger Sloman) appearance in "Reds" was a mere look-alike in the background, even though he was elected Chmn of the Soviet Congress at 47 years old on 8 Nov 1917.
Instead Beatty's dialog emphasized Reed's conflict with Grigory Zinoviev (as Jerzy Kosinski) who was one of Lenin's closest aides. Before the Oktoberist 1917 revolution, he wrote a position paper against an armed revolution against the weakened, inbred Tsarist monarchy. This caused Zinoviev's temporary expulsion from the Soviet Central Committee and eventual imprisonment for treason.
Beatty's film did not have an epilogue where Stalin's rise to power after Lenin's (1870-1924) (Kazan U, LLB U StPetersburg, taught Geneva U) assassination attempt (1918), refusing hospitalization and resulting a long debilitating 6-year illness. Stalin emphasized industrial and agricultural development away from the vulnerable Baltic after WW I towards the interior Moscow, Volga River and Ural Mts dividing Europe and Soviet Asia.
Good thing that Beatty had essentially a blank check from Paramount / Gulf+Western coffers as filming took about a year and burned up over a million feet of film, that was specially processed in Rome, Italy, in order to get the special dark filming effects, pioneered by cinematographer Vittorio Storaro, who won 3 Oscars, including "Apocalypse Now (79)" (Coppola, dir, 2 Oscars) and "The Last Emperor (87)" (Bertolucci, dir, 9 Oscars).
ENR is a proprietary Technicolor process (originally developed for Vittorio Storaro by Technicolor-Rome by three employees with initials E, N & R). It is one of the many bleach retention processes: after the bleach bath in the pos process, the film is passed through a black and white developer which reconverts the bleached silver ions to silver, which is not removed in the fixer. The result is a very contrasty and desaturated image, with particularly rich blacks but subdued colors.
Overall, a great docudrama movie, well researched and well filmed. But too long, 3 1/4 hrs. In the movie marketplace it did poorly only grossing at the box office of $40M, with a production budget $32M. Paramount lost money on American Communist party history.
Summary of Reds (Special 25th Anniversary Edition)
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