Lenin, Beatty and a roomful of Reds
One dreary night in Hollywood in 1981, when the Soviet Union was still an evil empire, I watched the hit movie 'Reds' with some of communism's oldest fans.
Off into the rainy Hollywood night I drove, hunting Communists.
Down Melrose Avenue, past Canter's Deli on Fairfax to where the Society for Cultural Relations USA/USSR was meeting.
The night's topic was the movie "Reds," Warren Beatty's paean to John Reed and Louise Bryant, America's photogenic progressives of yesteryear.
Maybe I'd seen too many bad movies, but I suspected that the society devoted to promoting friendship between America and Russia was really a communist front, maybe even a cancerous cell of revolution-fomenting radicals.
I hoped it was, anyway.
I was anxious to hear the official party line on "Reds," Hollywood's version of the Great October Revolution of 1917.
"Reds": 12 Oscar nominations. People storming the box offices. Praised by just about every critic this side of that bourgeois New Yorker Pauline Kael and that nasty conservative John Simon. But what did real Reds think?
I parked. Visions of smoky rooms packed with dedicated bomb-throwers with Jerzy Kosinski faces and funny Lenin hats danced in my capitalist head.
But entering the lobby of the Great Western Savings and Loan building, I met instead a troika of gray-headed grandmas wearing raincoats and balancing plastic-wrapped plates of nutbread.
Are you going to hear the talk on "Reds"? I asked incredulously. Yes, they said, and before I could retreat, up we went on the elevator to the second-floor community room.
There, 20 more grandmothers and grandfathers, a movie projector, a table of books for sale and the night's main speaker, a lady who'd seen "Reds" twice and read John Reed's book about the Russian Revolution, greeted us.
These people aren't Commies, I realized. The only cards they're carrying are library cards. I wanted to leave, yet I couldn't be rude. I was trapped. What if they started playing canasta?
Then I noticed a biography of Lenin for sale. He was a "warmhearted and unpretentious man," it said. I saw travel brochures for a Peace Cruise on the Volga and a trip to Cuba.
A children's book that called the lion, the king of beasts, the chairman of beasts. Back issues of Soviet Life, a reprint of a Brezhnev interview. All published in Moscow.
I decided to stick it out. Pinkos are almost as good as Reds. The movie projector was for the documentary, "Lenin's Life." It was a Moscow Television release, KGB-TV, I think.
Lenin was the star. In 20 minutes he overcame insurmountable odds to single-handedly forge a new Soviet Society and a new Soviet Man. Socialism triumphed in the end, of course, though Lenin died.
John Reed played himself in a cameo, but Louise Bryant didn't appear. Neither did Leon Trotsky. Perhaps they were edited out for dramatic purposes, suffering the same cutting-room fate Emma Goldman met in "Ragtime."
I thought they overdid the factory scenes and Lenin's virtues, but I think I got some of the jokes. Everyone else seemed to enjoy the KGB-TV documentary, and the applause was unanimous.
Lenin's a tough act to follow, but speaker Mary Katz was equal to the challenge. She discussed Reed's brilliant career as a journalist, his great book "Ten Days That Shook the World," and moved smoothly into "Reds," which everyone except one person in the room already had seen.
"Reds" was a beautiful movie, a wonderful love story, she thought. The acting was great. Beatty was masterful in putting it all together. As California magazine put it, she said, Reed's life was fitted into the Hollywood mold.
The movie was no threat to the status quo. It wouldn't stir revolutionary activity, yet Reed's political beliefs came through, as well as his great character and know-how. It wasn't perfect, mind you.
"Reds' " failure to identify the 32 “witnesses” of the Revolution who were interviewed had been criticized, Katz said. Louise Bryant's trek across frozen Finland never took place. And Katz admitted Beatty chose Hollywood over history in other instances, too, although the "fudging wasn't bothersome."
During the discussion that followed, many rose to present their opinions: The dramatic license taken in "Reds" was well worth it, since the American people will get the information about Reed, progressivism, etc.; Reed was a genius, the equal of Paul Robeson, Picasso and Pablo Neruda, the Chilean poet.
A man with a Russian accent said, "The movie came just in time, just as the Revolution came just in time." Another asked, "Didn't you get a thrill when you heard 'The Internationale'? I heard voices humming along in the theater."
He enthusiastically sang a bar or two and said, "Putting that song in was very strategic." One woman said she recommended "Reds" to her grandchildren and another said, "Some of our people saw 'Missing' at a screening. It's an excellent film, too."
No one wondered what I thought of "Reds." Which is just as well, since I didn't like it much and I didn't want to spoil the fun. But on the way out a retired capitalist started telling me how swell life was in Russia, and in Cuba, where there aren't hundreds of bag ladies as there are in Hollywood.
I asked him if there were any great film makers in Moscow like Warren Beatty who are free to raise 35 million rubles to tell their versions of the Revolution. He looked at me funny.
The Nation magazine wrote this about “Reds” in 2008. And critic Roger Ebert thought this about “Reds” in 1981.
I had other first-person encounters with Soviet Communism. In 1977 I tried to collude with a Russian woman working at the Soviet National Exhibition in LA. And in 1988 I survived a day living under Communism when I visited gray, sad East Berlin in search of a metaphorical cafeteria that was so popular, the story went, that polizei with machine guns were posted outside to keep the customers in line.