“Reds” came out 40 years ago: Warren Beatty’s political blockbuster with an extraordinary cast and a very long gestation

by time news

On December 3, 1981, Warren Beatty’s political / intimate blockbuster “Reds” on the life of the communist journalist John Reed (the only American buried in the Kremlin) was released in a very few and selected American theaters (we distributed it in April 1982). ideological and his love for his colleague Louise Bryant, the surprising second direction of the hugely popular star who had made his debut behind the camera three years earlier (paired with screenwriter Buck Henry) with the less ambitious “Heaven Can Wait”. However, the real carpet distribution of the film in the United States began (provocatively?) On December 25: as if the “ten days that shook the world”, that is the birth of the Russian revolution of 1917, the main theme of the film, wanted to overlap ideally with the coming to Earth of Jesus Christ. The American critics were displaced, the public responded surprisingly well (costing the beauty of 35 million dollars at the time, easily recovered all of his budget at home), the Academy had to bow to the hitherto unsuspected mastery of Beatty’s Author ( twelve Oscar nominations, of which three “transformed”: best director, best supporting actress to Maureen Stapleton in the role of the anarchist philosopher Emma Goldman and best photography to the Italian Vittorio Storaro). Fourteen months of filming, which began in August 1979 and ended in October 1980, or one month before the presidential elections that saw Jimmy Carter fall and Ronald Reagan, who took office in January 1981, take office. An almost symbolic and titanic undertaking in its own way. and prescient, in a moment of epochal turning point in the history of the country that in the two mandates of the former actor made a clean sweep of any ideological residue of the great libertarian battles of the previous two decades. Film “of life” for Beatty (who obtained nominations for best actor, producer, director and screenwriter in one fell swoop; a record shared in Hollywood with only Orson Welles who had them for Fourth Estate), “Reds” inevitably also scored a breaking point in his career: in the following twenty-five years he returned to the screen as an actor only five times and behind the camera on just three other – and less fortunate – occasions (“Dick Tracy”, 1990; “Bulworth – The Senator “, 1998;” The exception to the rule “, 2016).

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