Reeling Backward: "Reds" (1981)

"God, what a time it was, huh?"
                                --Jack Reed

Well, not really.

"Reds" has an impeccable cinematic resume. It was nominated for 12 Academy Awards and won three -- director Warren Beatty, supporting actress Maureen Stapleton and cinematography by Vittorio Storaro. It took a year to shoot and cost a bunch of money... and made a surprisingly decent amount, too. It occasionally crops up on various "best of" lists, including the American Film Institute's roster of best epics.

And it's a dreadful, overlong bore.

The film's greatest value is in highlighting the lives and work of two relatively unsung American writers and leftist activists, John "Jack" Reed and his erstwhile wife, Louis Bryant (Diane Keaton). They were unabashed socialists in the 1910s who not only wrote sympathetically about the Russian Revolution from a front-row seat -- including Reed's seminal book, "Ten Days That Shook the World" -- but advocated for its spread to American and other shores.

Reed founded a splinter communist party in the U.S. and traveled to Russia to beg for its recognition, wound up in a Finnish prison and traveled the globe on behalf of the nascent Soviet Union, trying to spread communism. He is one of only three Americans buried in the Kremlin.

It was (and still is) a touchy subject for a mainstream movie, especially arriving in theaters in the same year that Ronald Reagan's presidency began along with a resurgent sense of national patriotism. Although I think Beatty, who co-wrote the script with Trevor Griffiths, isn't so much advocating a specific political view as offering a portrait of people who were very passionate about their beliefs.

We can argue about whether history has borne out the value of Reed and Bryant's advocacy of Marxism/Leninism -- as a center-right guy, I would offer an emphatic "no" vote -- but ultimately the film is about the people, not the politics.

The movie's biggest problem is that it can't decide if it's Louise's story, Jack's story or the story of the American communist movement. It starts out as very much from Louise's perspective, as she abandons her stable, safe life in Portland, Ore., as the wife of a prosperous dentist to follow writer/rabble-rouser Jack to New York to live a bohemian life in Greenwich Village.

We've seen this sort of thing before in the movies: intellectuals gathered in cafes or stuffed into apartments, downing booze and talking, talking, talking. Everyone's supposed to be penniless yet they always have money for rent, lavish dinners, alcohol, posh clothes and white lilies, which Jack is continually lavishing upon Louise.

She's resentful of his constant comings and goings, to either write about the labor movement or actively participate in it. Louise feels she can't found her own identity as a writer in Jack's shadow. She hates being known as just "Jack's girl" -- especially since there's been a long line of them.

Louise is mortified when she's dismissed as an intellectual lightweight by Emma "E.G." Goldman (Stapleton), a notable anarchist and guiding light for the communist movement, who later became disillusion by its implementation in Russia.

Eventually, the film leaves along with Jack on his various excursions, and it becomes his movie. The part after the intermission is a long, interminable series of meetings and rallies as characters repetitively spout revolutionary jargon at each other. First it's in New York, then in Petrograd and later in the Mideast.

An attack by counterrevolutionary forces on the train Jack is traveling aboard seems tossed in just to give the film one bona fide action scene.

Louise more or less disappears during this part of the film, other than a few snippets that show her on various journeys to come to his aid. By the time she reaches Finland, he's been gone for months. She and Jack finally reconnect in the end, just in time for him to die of typhus and deliver the quote at the top of this article as his last words.

The film was marketed as a love story, focusing on the ménage à trois involving the pair and playwright Eugene O'Neill. He's played by Jack Nicholson in a sly performance, a man who very much wants to be seen as a hard-hearted intellectual but is really a vulnerable romantic at his core. 

In truth, Nicholson is barely in the movie. He essentially has one significant sequence in which he's romancing Louise, which mostly plays out as a wordless montage of canoodling. Then he shows up again for a couple more brief scenes near the end where Louise seeks his help in rescuing Jack from his accursed Russian adventure. He has perhaps a total of 10 minutes of screen time in a very languid 3¼-hour-long movie.

Stapleton has even less of a presence, and her beating out Jane Fonda for "On Golden Pond" for the Academy Award feels like a massive error in retrospect. But it's not the first time the Oscars have gotten it wrong.

The other noteworthy thing about the movie is the inclusion of "The Witnesses." These are various contemporaries of Bryant and Reed, now very elderly, who were brought in for video interviews. They chat about their affairs, their lifestyle, their politics, the significance of their actions in the broader historical context -- a lively mix of analysis, remembrance and gossip.

Beatty weaves these interviews into the narrative cleverly, at times acting as segues from one sequence to the next, but even as narration that sets up or comments upon scenes as they're happening. They range from author Henry Miller to congressman Henry Fish, the son of Alexander Kerensky, various socialists, journalists and proto-feminists.

At times I wondered if Beatty's vision to tell the story of Jack Reed would have worked better as a documentary. If they were going to stick with a narrative work in today's cinematic climate, I'm sure the project would've ended up as a Netflix or HBO limited series. 

For me, the movie's highlight is the time Louise and Jack spend in Russia during the revolution, as they reconnect as writers and as lovers. They live, breathe and eat journalism, firing off first-hand accounts of one of mankind's most pivotal moments in history. They edit each other's stories, insisting they keep the good stuff in and cut the weaker prose out.

I can only wish the filmmakers had followed this model themselves. A much shorter movie that focused on this period would have been considerably more effective, I think. 

In addition to those I've mentioned, "Reds" has a superlative cast of supporting performers, many of whom only get a brief moment on camera. They include Edward Hermann, Paul Sorvino, M. Emmet Walsh, Gene Hackman and George Plimpton.

Beatty never intended to star in the film -- he was already 12 years older than Reed was at the time of his death when "Reds" came out -- and reportedly wanted to cast John Lithgow in the lead. (If you look at photos of Reed, his soft, cherubic features are nearly a perfect match for Lithgow's.) 

After the tremendous success of his directorial debut, "Heaven Can Wait," Beatty was a man who found himself at that rare moment in Hollywood where he could write his own ticket. In this context, "Reds" registers much as the "very important artist" moment of his career. 

He wouldn't act in another movie until 1987's notorious "Ishtar," then had a bit of a career resurgence in the '90s with "Dick Tracy," "Bugsy" and "Bullworth," and then has more or less disappeared from filmmaking and the public view while very much remaining a pop culture figure. His more recent forays, with the barely-seen "Rules Don't Apply" in 2016 and flubbing at the Oscar ceremony for "Moonlight," have somewhat dimmed the luster of his star.

Personally, I don't blame Beatty for his itinerant work. It's better to do things you truly believe in, rarely, than a whole bunch of mercenary stuff for a paycheck. But just because you have a lot of passion doesn't ensure the work is going to be any good.

Perhaps that's the ultimate, unwitting message of "Reds."

Reeling Backward: "Bite the Bullet" (1975)

I retain many disconnected images of cinema I saw in my youth, like jigsaw puzzle pieces scattered far afield of the set. Usually, they don't ever get fitted back together again with their movie.

One of the most vivid is of an exhausted cowboy climbing off his lathered horse right before the finish line of a grueling race, pausing to give the poor animal a drink of water from his canteen before taking one himself. I had no idea of its provenance, until I recognized it from "Bite the Bullet," a largely unremembered 1975 Western written and directed by Richard Brooks.

Letting the horse drink before he does is simply the way of Sam Clayton, a former Roughrider and ranch hand who joins the 700-mile race at the last minute, seemingly on a whim. He takes his time dawdling through most of the contest, usually near the back of the pack. After awhile we get the sense he's only there to watch over the horses, and to a far lesser extent the people riding them.

Sam is introduced by another pivotal character as a "defender of dumb animals, damsels in distress, champion of lost causes." He expresses his true feelings about the race just before the jump-off:

"Mister, did you ever see a horse run himself to death just to please the man on his back? What's the horse get out of it? Cracked bones? Colic? See his picture in the paper? Horse doesn't give a damn who wins a race. Me neither," Sam snorts.

Played inimitably by Gene Hackman, Sam reminded me in a lot of ways of Tom Smith, the horse trainer so memorably portrayed by Chris Cooper in "Seabiscuit." Both are very much disciples of the range, at home among hard men and hard living, yet standing apart from them in many ways -- not the least of which being their genuine compassion for the animals who serve them.

(Though Smith does obviously care about winning races.)

Sam is entirely capable of cruelty, returning abuse when he sees it visited upon horses by humans. In the opening scene he is appalled to find an abandoned glue wagon with several horses left for dead, including a pair that have been trussed up as bait for vultures. After setting free a still-living horse and rescuing a new foal, he is choked up by a mare that has essentially been crucified, its body held down and pierced by thick wire.

The look in Sam's eye leaves us certain that if the men who committed this atrocity were at hand, murders would be in the making.

Later, Sam encounters a stupid young cowpuncher, Carbo (Jan-Michael Vincent), attempting to knock out a jackass with one blow. Sam gives the boy the exact same treatment with his own fist, leading to a running feud that culminates with Sam whipping Carbo as punishment for riding his horse to death.

He makes the kid bury the beast, using his bare hands to sift the desert sand over the carcass -- an almost religious ritual in which the boy must tend to the flesh he has abused.

In a typical movie narrative, the punk cowboy would become the villain of the piece. Instead, the stern hand of Sam actually leads to Carbo's rehabilitation. His bravado finally falling, he admits to Miss Jones, the sole female contestant played by Candice Bergen, that despite the fancy pistol rig he wears he's never been in a gunfight, or even worked as a cowboy.

When Sam experiences that glorious moment at the end, the shared slaking of thirst by man and horse, it's Carbo's face the camera cuts to, teary-eyed. He witnesses this tender example of a symbiotic relationship between partners, not servant and served, and is overcome.

We sense the youngster will go on in life, a fake cowboy who turns into a real one, and take up Sam's mantle as a true defender of the West.

The race may sound like Hollywood hooey, but it's based on an actual events. In this telling set in 1908, the contest is sponsored and promoted by the "Western Press," mostly as a vanity project for magnate J.B. Parker (Paul Stewart) on behalf of his champion horse. He and his pompous son, Jack Parker (Dabney Coleman), ride around in a luxury train along the race route, applying cajoling and pressure as needed.

Sam worked for the Parkers, and his job was to bring their horse to meet the train gathering the contestants for the race. But he screwed up by stopping to help the glue horses and missed the train, and finds himself fired.

It's a little unclear if Sam was intended to ride the Parkers' horse in the race or merely fetch him, but either way he's out of a job. We would expect the fellow who does ride the rich man's horse to be a boastful fool, but he actually describes his opponents with great respect and delivers a cagey analysis of their abilities. They include:

• Miss Jones -- A prostitute turned rider, whose exact motives remain somewhat of a mystery until the end. Interestingly, although the reporter covering the race and many observers regard her participation as a stunt, the other racers treat her like one of their own. She's not the best rider but probably has the strongest horse, if only she would ever let it go full-out.
• Luke Matthews -- A fellow Roughrider, friend of Sam's, gambler and con man played by James Coburn, Luke has laid all his fortune on the line with a private bet against the Parkers. He's dismayed when Sam throws in right before the start, because that means only one of them can win. And he's not above trying to bribe his friend to throw the race. Luke is a smart rider, takes lots of chances and is lucky.
• Sir Harry Norfolk -- A British gamesman played by Ian Bannen, Norfolk has traveled the globe for the sake of sport. He relishes competition for its own sake, and his steed is the fastest in the open field. Unfortunately for him, the race course is mostly mountains, gulches, steep ravines and scorching deserts.
• Carbo -- He's got hay for brains, but his mustang is a tough beast and Carbo is willing to flay him alive to keep him moving.
• Mister -- We never even learn the old-timer's name, played by Ben Johnson. He's got a stiff back and a "bad pump," to use his own words, and by his own appraisal is 30 years past his prime. But after a lifetime of making any kind of living he can on the back of a horse, he dreams of winning the race and finally becoming a "top man... a man to remember."
• Mexican -- We never get a name for him either, played by Mario Arteaga. But that's perhaps appropriate as he's dismissed as "the Mexican" by the largely Caucasian cast of characters. Plagued by a bad tooth, he actually provides the film's title, when a bit of ad-hoc dentistry results in him using a bullet casing as a crown. He's possibly the best natural horsemen of the bunch.
• Sam -- What he lacks in horse, he more than makes up for in experience and patience. Parker's man calls him "the sleeper," the one racer he's truly worried about.

"Bite the Bullet" is a character piece that's not really driven by story. Indeed, beyond the framework of the race, there really isn't much of a narrative at all. The riders start out as individual competitors and gradually find out more about each other, eventually coming together in a bond of their own small, shared little community.

Sam sets the tone by repeatedly stopping to assist other racers, and soon it becomes infectious. Luke helps Norfolk when he tumbles down a ravine, and Miss Jones attends to Mexican with almost maternal sympathy. As mentioned, even the mercenary Carbo softens in the end.

Richard Brooks is a giant of midcentury cinema who doesn't have nearly the reputation he deserves. Often writing his own screenplays as well, his credits include "Cat on a Hot Tin Roof," "In Cold Blood," "The Professionals," "The Last Time I Saw Paris," "Blackboard Jungle," "Lord Jim" and "Sweet Bird of Youth." He was nominated for the Academy Award six times, and won once for "Elmer Gantry."

I think what I most appreciated about "Bite the Bullet" was the sheer atypicalness of it. The movie never moves in a conventional direction. I would call it a neo-Western or revisionist one, which harkens back to the pillars of the genre while also questioning and undermining them.

Sam Clayton is tough, ornery loner, but his value system is decidedly askew from that of the Saint Johns of the Western, Wayne and Ford. At one point Sam actually declares himself un-American, casting competition and the desire to be the first or the best or the richest as unworthy endeavors.

The dialogue is whip-smart and memorable, with so many great throwaway jokes and asides. Other notable characters include Rosie (Jean Willes), the world-wise madam who brings her operation along with the race, happily inflating prices. Sally Kirkland plays Honey, her main whore. Walter Scott plays Steve, Miss Jones' husband, estranged by circumstances that will become important. Robert Donner plays the reporter who acts as the audience's stand-in, questioning and chronicling.

For a movie that depicts its main event as pointless and cruel, "Bite the Bullet" is a surprisingly effective film that is much more than the sum of its dust-coated parts.

Reeling Backward: "A Bridge Too Far" (1977)

Recently this column focused on "Theirs Is the Glory," a fairly unique film in which the actual participants of the failed Allied stratagem to end World War II by Christmas 1944, Operation Market Garden, returned to the site of the battles one year after the fact to recreate the action for a motion picture. The same military operation later became the basis for the 1977 feature film, "A Bridge Too Far."

In my essay on "Theirs Is the Glory," I mostly concentrated on the similarities between it and "Bridge," wondering if screenwriter William Goldman or author Cornelius Ryan, on whose book the latter film is based, were influenced by the earlier picture. That inspired me to go back to "A Bridge Too Far," and see how it has held up to my memory.

It only reinforced my opinion: "A Bridge Too Far" is one of the great WWII epics, and an incredible marriage of narrative structure, inspired direction, gritty performances and technical mastery from the support crew, particularly the musical score by John Addison (who himself served as a soldier in Market Garden).

Market Garden would remain a forgotten bit of history for 30 years until Cornelius Ryan wrote his book about the adventure, in which the Allies dropped 35,000 paratroopers behind enemy lines to capture a series of bridges. The plan was to have XXX Corp, the British armor column, punch up the road to connect the bridges, thus creating a hole directly into Germany.

Except, the Allies ignored evidence of a great deal of German resistance along the route, including an entire Panzer tank division near Arnhem, the last and most important of the bridges, since it spanned the Rhine River and the border into Germany itself. The British paratroopers, who were only supposed to have to hold the bridge for two days, gave up after nine, leaving behind 80% of their men as casualties or prisoners of war.

That's a lot of story to cram into a feature film, even a three-hour one, but Goldman's screenplay is an exercise in elegant structure. The story begins and ends with generals, both Allied and German, as they plan bold stratagems and then later try to pick up the pieces of where things went wrong. The middle section focuses on the lower ranks of soldiers, the dogfaces who actually have to carry out the fight their superiors dreamed up.

You've heard of "all-star casts," but this one is simply jaw-dropping. For the Brits: Anthony Hopkins, Dirk Bogarde, Michael Caine, Edward Fox, Sean Connery. For the Germans: Hardy Krüger, Maximilian Schell, Wolfgang Preiss. For the Americans: Robert Redford, Elliot Gould, Gene Hackman, James Cann, Ryan O'Neal. Not to mention Liv Ullman and Laurience Olivier  as Dutch civilians. And Denholm Elliott and John Ratzenberger turning up in bit roles.

Redford, arguably the biggest movie star in the world at the time, doesn't even show up until after the two-hour mark. 

I found it interesting how the script is laid out into essentially four sections. The first is the planning of Operation Market Garden, in which British heads are swelled and the first seeds of doubt creep in. Frank Grimes has a terrific role as a nervous major who unsuccessfully points out the presence of tanks, and is sent on medical leave as a result. The second section is the actual drop, a beautiful and daunting ballet of parachutes -- more than 1,000 men jumped out of planes for the sequence -- and the Allies' initial success in taking their objectives. The third is what I call the "American vignettes," and the last act is when everything goes to hell.

The vignettes are a quick succession of three stories centered around American characters. Elliott Gould is up first in a semi-comedic bit about his regiment failing to take the first bridge before the Germans blow it up, necessitating the building of a claptrap "Bailey bridge" to get the tanks across -- but not before delaying them 36 hours. Gould is terrific and charismatic, chomping on a cigar and shouting jokes in between the orders. Addison's music goes into a jazzy, bouncy mode.

Then we get James Caan as a nearly monosyllabic sergeant who protects his young captain -- he doesn't put on his coat at first, so we think he's just a punk private or something -- even guaranteeing the officer that he won't die. He appears to fail in his mission, as the captain is left for dead after being shot in the head. But the sergeant carries the body in a jeep through enemy lines to a mobile Army hospital and, at gunpoint, forces the surgeon (a spot-on Arthur Hill) to examine the wounded lad, revealing that he's still alive. 

(This may sound like Hollywood bullshit, but other than the part about being chased in a jeep by German soldiers, it really happened.)

The last and most harrowing of the vignettes is Redford as the major tasked with crossing the Waal River and taking the bridge at Nijmegen. Due to logistical snafus, they had to make a daytime crossing in flimsy portable boats, the wind blew away their smoke cover, and the unit was cut to pieces. Watching Redford with his helmeted head tucked down, pulling his rifle butt through the water like an oar, all the while chanting "Hail Mary, full of grace..." remains one of my seminal cinematic moments. (Again, this really happened.)

Sean Connery also gets a mini-vignette of his own as Major General Roy Urquhart, commander of the British airborne division dropped near Arnhem, who gets cut off from his own command and has to hide out in a little Dutch enclave, dodging from house to house, during which time he is presumed dead.

Lieutenant-General Frederick Browning, played by Dirk Bogarde, more or less acts as the heavy, playing the gung-ho Brit general who will not cancel the operation for any reason. Those who "rock the boat" are encouraged to clam up or suffer the consequences. 

At the end of the film Browning is depicted as duplicitously claiming to always have been skeptical about the operation -- "As you know I've always thought we tried to go a bridge too far" -- rather than an unreserved booster. In reality, Browning raised his doubts prior to the operation, and he and his family -- Bogarde actually served alongside Browning during the war -- were outraged at his villainous portrayal.

It being only three decades and a bit after the events depicted, many of the actors had an opportunity to talk with and even befriend the men they were playing. Edward Fox knew Lt. Gen. Brian Horrocks, commander of XXX Corp, prior to filming and later cited it as his favorite movie role. Michael Caine changed some of his dialogue after asking his counterpart how he would have issued orders, and the real Lt. Col. Johnny Frost had to explain to Anthony Hopkins that he would never have run too quickly between cover, because he had to show his men how contemptuous he was of enemy fire.

The production of "Bridge" is a Homeric story unto itself, and one others have already told better than I could -- notably by Goldman himself, who wrote a making-of book, "Story of a Bridge Too Far," and also included an entire chapter about it in his seminal showbiz tome, "Adventures in the Screenwriting Trade." 

(Extremely short version: Joseph E. Levine, a lifelong maverick producer, personally financed the film's $22 million budget -- about $86 million in today's dollars -- himself, then convinced some of the biggest global movie stars to participate by all accepting the same weekly pay rate. He recruited Richard Attenborough (him again) to direct, undertaking an incredible logistical and artistic challenge. Then as some of the amazing footage of the airdrops and battle scenes started to come back in, Levine showed the rushes to distributors who bid on the international distribution rights to the film. As a result, "Bridge" was already in the black before the first ticket was sold.)

The ultimate result was surprising, and not. Everywhere but the U.S. the film was a smash hit. Here, American and audiences and critics used to rousing pro-Allies depictions of the war collectively shrugged their shoulders at a massive production about a colossal military screw-up. Thus, "A Bridge Too Far" is barely known on these shores.

Their loss; "A Bridge Too Far" was perhaps the last of the great World War II epics.