Reds · reception & legacy

1981 · Warren Beatty

How Reds has been received, argued over, and remembered.

The arc

A $35M pro-communist epic bankrolled by Paramount just as Reagan took office, it earned 12 Oscar nominations and Beatty the Best Director win — then famously lost Best Picture to Chariots of Fire, a result film fans have been re-litigating ever since. Today it's cherished as one of the last true old-Hollywood epics, the 'they literally could not make this now' movie.

What's debated

The perennial fight: was Chariots of Fire beating it one of the great Best Picture robberies, and is its 195-minute runtime a feature or a test of devotion?

Its footprint

Its 'witnesses' — real elderly contemporaries of John Reed (including Henry Miller) interviewed straight to camera and woven through the drama — became one of cinema's most admired and imitated docu-fiction devices.

Where it stands

A cinephile's beloved-but-underseen giant: constantly invoked as the last gasp of New Hollywood ambition, far more cited than actually watched.

★ Did you know? With Reds, Warren Beatty joined Orson Welles (Citizen Kane) in the tiny club of people Oscar-nominated for producing, directing, writing, AND acting in the same film — and Beatty had already done it once before, with Heaven Can Wait. Ronald Reagan saw the film and reportedly told Beatty he enjoyed it but wished it had a happy ending.