TERRIFIC movie. Don't see it because it ticks off liberals. It does. Don't see it because conservative scribblers tell us to (like they urged us all to see that turkey Atlas Shrugged). See it because it's absolutely TERRIFIC! At my packed local bijou, it got reverential applause after several gotchas and a solemn ending.
Like some others here, I thought Reds was a cautionary tale. It portrayed the Western intellectual fellow travelers as useful idiots while showing communism's practical application as an unworkable sham even with oppression, brutality and dictatorship imposed from above. I've watched it many times - and would watch it again. I don't think that it's pro-communist agit-prop at all. Rather, it pegs the disillusionment of many early commies when they saw how poorly the theory worked in practice. Beatty may or may not be a lefty... He stood for Elia Kazan at the last Oscars I'll ever watch. That was a class move. And he gave communism a left uppercut in Reds.
Look at the big brain on Terry!
And this story is important, why? Did I stumble onto some Hollywood gossip site?!?
Great movie. Tickets sold out for every showing in my local Bijou, all weekend long. Go early!
Over the top Nazis?!? So how should someone play a concentration camp sadist, a Mengele-like character? The stain will be on Germany and all Germans until the grandchildren of the WWII adults are dead and buried, and no living German has an affectionate memory of the bloody butchers. Hitler ran a brutal police state; but, Germans in overwhelming numbers were willingly complicit in the Holocaust and millions of other daily atrocities large and small.
Great reprise of a classic American sit-com. It skewered as many liberal pieties as it promoted. Well, almost. In the context of the times, it changed many a viewer for the better. Can't say that about many tv programs since.
The Jim Crow South was a terribly hostile place for many good Americans. Americans who bled and died in French fields and forrests in 1918, and in every war before and since. Until the 60s they still came back to brutal injustice. God bless Robert E. Lee and Ulysses Simpson Grant. God bless George Washington and Abe Lincoln and Ronald Wilson Reagan. And, God bless Martin Luther King jr too. All key figures in American Independence and our endless quest for a More Perfect Union.
One of my favorite quotes from the Great Southern Author. In the Alabama of my youth this quote still rang true. The children of Confederate Soldiers were still alive. The Depression had been crushingly harsh on the South. Reconstruction's devastating effects lasted until WWII. I served the Red White and Blue for 25 yrs - and serve Old Glory still in my way - as a proud Southerner. But boy am I glad the Union held. The Confederacy was a terrible form of government and confirmed that there needs to be a good Constitutional balance between Federal and State powers. That balance is out of whack again - but we'll get our mojo back.
Early 'Lucy' with the original characters (Lucy, Ricky, Ethel, Fred) in the video is as funny as it gets even today. That's the test isn't it? Humor that is still fresh 60 years later... Fresh. And CLEAN - without so much as a sexual innuendo. How'd they do that? This would be in my top 5 - but to each his own.
JBaustian-You know nothing of war nor of the American fighting man except for what you see in tainted Hollywood leftist propaganda.