Producer-director-star Warren Beatty (he's also co-writer with Trevor Griffiths) set himself a gargantuan task—to show the 1917 Russian Revolution through the eyes of American journalist John Reed, who witnessed the events and came back to write Ten Days That Shook the World. The $33.5 million film, which runs three hours 20 minutes plus an intermission, also details Reed's romance with Louise Bryant, a writer and feminist. Diane Keaton, in the performance of her life as Bryant, is the film's emotional center. Married to a dentist, she meets Reed and seduces him; later, when Reed's cronies such as anarchist Emma Goldman (Maureen Stapleton) and editor Max Eastman (Ed Herrmann) snub her, Bryant drifts into a sordid affair with playwright Eugene O'Neill, done to a cynical turn by Jack Nicholson. Bryant finally rejoins Reed in Russia, and together they vow to bring the Revolution home. It's here, when the film is at its most doctrinaire, that Reds collapses. Beatty and Keaton, once involved offscreen, make the love story compelling. But in the film's heavy second half, Beatty plumbs the American Communist Party while political theory flies so thick that the uninitiated will find their eyes glazing over. Yet Reds is far from a Heaven's Gate, for Beatty has made a passionate, coherent thrust at illuminating a crucial period of history. (PG)
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