Before Mamdani... There was John Reed

Warren Beatty is playing John Reed in the 1981 movie Reds.

It got the usual treatment from the left.

Awards and nominations
Award Category Nominee(s) Result
Academy Awards[24][25] Best Picture Warren Beatty Nominated
Best Director Won
Best Actor Nominated
Best Actress Diane Keaton Nominated
Best Supporting Actor Jack Nicholson Nominated
Best Supporting Actress Maureen Stapleton Won
Best Screenplay – Written Directly for the Screen Warren Beatty and Trevor Griffiths Nominated
Best Art Direction Richard Sylbert and Michael Seirton Nominated
Best Cinematography Vittorio Storaro Won
Best Costume Design Shirley Ann Russell Nominated
Best Film Editing Dede Allen and Craig McKay Nominated
Best Sound Dick Vorisek, Tom Fleischman and Simon Kaye Nominated
American Cinema Editors Awards Best Edited Feature Film Dede Allen and Craig McKay Nominated
Boston Society of Film Critics Awards Best Supporting Actor Jack Nicholson Won
British Academy Film Awards Best Actor in a Leading Role Warren Beatty Nominated
Best Actress in a Leading Role Diane Keaton Nominated
Best Actor in a Supporting Role Jack Nicholson Won
Best Actress in a Supporting Role Maureen Stapleton Won
Best Cinematography Vittorio Storaro Nominated
Best Costume Design Shirley Ann Russell Nominated
David di Donatello Awards Best Foreign Producer Warren Beatty Won
Best Foreign Actress Diane Keaton Won
Directors Guild of America Awards Outstanding Directorial Achievement in Motion Pictures Warren Beatty Won
Golden Globe Awards Best Motion Picture – Drama Nominated
Best Director – Motion Picture Warren Beatty Won
Best Actor in a Motion Picture – Drama Nominated
Best Actress in a Motion Picture – Drama Diane Keaton Nominated
Best Supporting Actor – Motion Picture Jack Nicholson Nominated
Best Supporting Actress – Motion Picture Maureen Stapleton Nominated
Best Screenplay – Motion Picture Warren Beatty and Trevor Griffiths Nominated
Los Angeles Film Critics Association Awards Best Film Runner-up
Best Director Warren Beatty Won
Best Actress Diane Keaton Runner-up
Best Supporting Actor Jack Nicholson Runner-up
Best Supporting Actress Maureen Stapleton Won
Best Screenplay Warren Beatty and Trevor Griffiths Runner-up
Best Cinematography Vittorio Storaro Won
National Board of Review Awards Best Film Won[d]
Top Ten Films Won[d]
Best Director Warren Beatty Won
Best Supporting Actor Jack Nicholson Won
National Society of Film Critics Awards Best Film 2nd Place
Best Actress Diane Keaton 3rd Place
Best Supporting Actor Jack Nicholson 3rd Place
Best Supporting Actress Maureen Stapleton Won
Best Screenplay Warren Beatty and Trevor Griffiths 3rd Place
Best Cinematography Vittorio Storaro Nominated
New York Film Critics Circle Awards Best Film Won
Best Director Warren Beatty Won
Best Actress Diane Keaton Runner-up
Best Supporting Actor Jack Nicholson Runner-up
Best Supporting Actress Maureen Stapleton Runner-up
Best Cinematography Vittorio Storaro Nominated
Writers Guild of America Awards Best Drama Written Directly for the Screen Warren Beatty and Trevor Griffiths Won
The film is recognized by the American Film Institute in these lists:

AFI’s 100 Years...100 Passions – #55
AFI’s 10 Top 10 – #9 Epic Film

Yes and an entirely believable “down for the Revolution” girlfriend boring “Olive Oil” character...Diane Keaton. Amazing how Un believable her play of many of her characters were— to wit: Crappy Shakespearean actress recruited by Mossad to kill the Red Brigade mastermind bomber (Little Drummer Girl), Corleone,Jr’s WASP “don’t know nuttin” wife in Godfather (sure, he’d marry such a thing), and in “Reds”, a writer in the Worker’s revolt in Russia with Jack Reed (an equally moronic real life idjit).

Mamdani is a match for John Reed and Mamdani’s wife (a real life committed Communist and vicious biotch).

I liked the Long Movie

Warren Beatty was the worst actor. He got over with his pretty boy looks

“Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose”

The more things change the more they stay the same. That’s a quote from 1849.

“There’s nothing new under the sun!” that’s
an even older phrase from Ecclesiastes 1:9.

“History doesn’t repeat itself but it rhymes”

So what are we to learn from this?

“Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose”

The more things change the more they stay the same. That’s a quote from 1849.

I thought it was Neil Peart....

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jx2gTlQ1xXQ

I came here to write that….”But he was Warren Beatty!”

I liked him as Bulworth.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XA62refAB2w

“Family Background: Born to a businessman father and a well-off mother, Reed experienced both privilege and health challenges during his childhood.

Education: He attended private schools in Portland and later graduated from Harvard University, where he developed his writing skills.”

Isnt it interesting how some of the worst leftists come from privileged backgrounds! Mamdani comes from a similar background, as did Marx.

What drives them to go against their own interests and social strata. Is it a sense of guilt? A burning desire for “equality” and equating it to “justice”?

WIKI

John Silas Reed (October 22, 1887 – October 17, 1920) was an American journalist, poet, and communist activist. Reed first gained prominence as a war correspondent during the Mexican Revolution for Metropolitan and World War I for The Masses. He is best known for his coverage of the October Revolution in Petrograd, Russia, which he wrote about in his 1919 book Ten Days That Shook the World.

Reed supported the Soviet takeover of Russia, even briefly taking up arms to join the Red Guards in 1918. He hoped for a similar communist revolution in the United States, and co-founded the short-lived Communist Labor Party of America in 1919. He died in Moscow of spotted typhus in 1920. At the time of his death, he may have soured on the Soviet leadership, but he was given a hero’s burial by the Soviet Union

Reed was born on October 22, 1887, in his maternal grandparents’ mansion in what is now the Goose Hollow neighborhood of Portland, Oregon. His grandmother’s household had Chinese servants. Reed wrote of paying a nickel to a “Goose Hollowite” (young toughs in a gang in the working-class neighborhood below King’s Hill) to keep from being beaten up. In 2001 a memorial bench dedicated to Reed was installed in Washington Park, which overlooks the site of Reed’s birthplace (the mansion no longer exists).

His mother, Margaret Reed (née Green), was the daughter of Portland industrialist Henry Dodge Green, who had made a fortune founding and operating three businesses: the first gas & light company, the first pig iron smelter on the West Coast, and the Portland water works (he was its second owner). SW Green Avenue was named in his honor.

[At Havard] Reed attended meetings of the Socialist Club, over which his friend Walter Lippmann presided, but never joined.

Reed had determined to become a journalist and set out to make his mark in New York. Reed made use of a valuable contact from Harvard, Lincoln Steffens, who was establishing a reputation as a muckraker. Steffens quickly appreciated Reed’s skills and intellect and landed his young admirer an entry-level position on The American Magazine

Reed made his home in Greenwich Village, a burgeoning hub of poets, writers, activists, and artists. He came to love New York, relentlessly exploring it and writing poems about it. His formal jobs on the magazines paid the rent, but it was as a freelance journalist that Reed sought to establish himself. He collected rejection slips, circulating an essay and short stories about his six months in Europe, eventually breaking through in the Saturday Evening Post. Within a year, Reed had other work accepted by Collier’s, The Forum, and The Century Magazine.

Reed’s serious interest in social problems was first aroused about this time by Steffens and Ida Tarbell. He moved beyond them to a more radical political position than theirs. In 1913, he joined the staff of The Masses, edited by Max Eastman. Reed contributed more than 50 articles, reviews, and shorter pieces to this socialist publication.

The first of Reed’s many arrests came in Paterson, New Jersey, in 1913, for attempting to speak on behalf of strikers in the New Jersey silk mills. The harsh treatment meted out by the authorities to the strikers and the short jail term he served further radicalized Reed. He allied with the general socialist union, the Industrial Workers of the World. His account of his experiences was published in June as an article, “War in Paterson”. During the same year, following a suggestion made by IWW leader Bill Haywood, Reed put on “The Pageant of the Paterson Strike” in Madison Square Garden as a benefit for the strikers.

In the autumn of 1913, Reed was sent to Mexico by the Metropolitan Magazine to report on the Mexican Revolution. He shared the perils of Pancho Villa’s army for four months and was with Villa’s Constitutional (Constitutionalist) Army (whose “Primer Jefe” political chief was Venustiano Carranza) when it defeated Federal forces at Torreón, opening the way for its advance on Mexico City. Reed adored Villa, but Carranza left him cold.

Reed’s reporting on the Villistas in a series of outstanding magazine articles gained him a national reputation as a war correspondent. Reed deeply sympathized with the peons and vehemently opposed American intervention. Reed’s reports were collected and published as the book Insurgent Mexico (1914).

On April 30, 1914, Reed arrived in Colorado, scene of the recent Ludlow massacre, which was part of the Colorado Coalfield War between the John D. Rockefeller Jr.-owned Colorado Fuel & Iron Company and United Mine Workers union supporters. There he spent a little more than a week, during which he investigated the events, spoke on behalf of the miners, and wrote an impassioned article on the subject (”The Colorado War”, published in July). He came to believe much more deeply in class conflict.

On August 14, 1914, shortly after Germany declared war on France, Reed set sail for neutral Italy, on assignment for the Metropolitan. He met his lover Mabel Dodge in Naples, and the pair made their way to Paris. Reed believed the war was the result of imperialist commercial rivalries and felt little sympathy for any of the parties.

In an unsigned piece titled “The Traders’ War”, published in the September 1914 issue of The Masses, Reed wrote:

we must not be duped by this editorial buncombe about Liberalism going forth to Holy War against Tyranny.

Reed and Dodge went to London, and Dodge soon left for New York, to Reed’s relief. The rest of 1914 he spent drinking with French prostitutes and pursuing an affair with a German woman. The pair went to Berlin in early December. While there, Reed interviewed Karl Liebknecht, one of the few socialists in Germany to vote against war credits. Reed was deeply disappointed by the general collapse in working-class solidarity promised by the Second International, and by its replacement with militarism and nationalism.

He returned to New York in December and wrote more about the war. In 1915, he traveled to Central Europe, accompanied by Boardman Robinson, a Canadian artist and frequent Masses contributor. Traveling from Thessaloniki, they saw scenes of profound devastation in Serbia (including a bombed-out Belgrade), also going through Bulgaria and Romania. They passed through the Jewish Pale of Settlement in Bessarabia. In Chełm, they were arrested and incarcerated for several weeks. At risk of being shot for espionage, they were saved by the American ambassador.

Traveling to Russia, Reed was outraged to learn that the American ambassador in Petrograd was inclined to believe they were spies. Reed and Robinson were rearrested when they tried to slip into Romania. This time the British ambassador (Robinson being a British subject) finally secured permission for them to leave, but not until after all their papers were seized in Kiev. In Bucharest, the duo spent time piecing together more of their journey. At one point Reed traveled to Constantinople in hopes of seeing action at Gallipoli.

After returning to New York, Reed visited his mother in Portland. There he met and fell in love with Louise Bryant, who joined him on the East Coast in January 1916. Though happily involved, both also had affairs with others in accordance with their bohemian circle and ideas about sexual liberation. Early in 1916, Reed met the young playwright Eugene O’Neill. Beginning that May, the three rented a cottage in Provincetown, Massachusetts, a summer destination on Cape Cod for many artists and writers from Greenwich Village. Not long after, Bryant and O’Neill began a romance.

He endorsed Woodrow Wilson, believing that he would make good on his promise to keep America out of the war. In November 1916 he married Bryant in Peekskill, New York. The same year, he underwent an operation at Johns Hopkins Hospital to remove a kidney. He was hospitalized until mid-December. The operation rendered him ineligible for conscription and saved him from registering as a conscientious objector, as had been his intention.

As the country raced towards war, Reed was marginalized... He pawned his late father’s watch and sold his Cape Cod cottage to the birth control activist and sex educator Margaret Sanger.

When Wilson asked for a declaration of war on April 2, 1917, Reed shouted at a hastily convened meeting of the People’s Council in Washington: “This is not my war, and I will not support it. This is not my war, and I will have nothing to do with it.” In July and August, Reed continued to write vehement articles against the war for The Masses, which the United States Post Office Department refused to mail, and for Seven Arts. Due to antiwar articles by Reed and Randolph Bourne, the arts magazine lost its financial backing and ceased publication. Reed was stunned by the nation’s pro-war fervor, and his career lay in ruins.

On August 17, 1917, Reed and Bryant set sail from New York to Europe, having first provided the State Department with legally sworn assurances that neither would represent the Socialist Party at a forthcoming conference in Stockholm. The pair were going as working journalists to report on the sensational developments taking place in the fledgling republic of Russia. Traveling by way of Finland, the pair arrived in the capital city of Petrograd immediately after the failed military coup of monarchist General Lavr Kornilov. This was an attempt to topple the Provisional Government of Alexander Kerensky by force of arms. Reed and Bryant found the Russian economy in shambles. Several of the subject nations of the old empire, such as Finland and Ukraine, had gained autonomy and were seeking separate military accommodations with Germany.

Reed and Bryant were in Petrograd for the October Revolution, in which the Bolsheviks, headed by Vladimir Lenin, toppled the Kerensky government; the Bolsheviks believed this was the first blow of a worldwide socialist revolution.

Food shortages made the situation dire in the capital, and social disorder reigned. Reed later recalled:

The last month of the Kerensky regime was marked first by the falling off of the bread supply from 2 pounds a day to 1 pound, to half a pound, to a quarter of a pound, and, the final week, no bread at all. Holdups and crime increased to such an extent that you could hardly walk down the streets.

A mood for radical change was in the air. The Bolsheviks, seeking an all-socialist government and immediate end to Russian participation in the war, sought the transfer of power from Kerensky to a Congress of Soviets, a gathering of elected workers’ and soldiers’ deputies to be convened in October. The Kerensky government considered this a kind of coup, and moved to shut down the Bolshevik press. It issued warrants of arrest for the Soviet leaders and prepared to transfer the troops of the Petrograd garrison, believed to be unreliable, back to the front. A Military Revolutionary Committee of the Soviets, dominated by the Bolshevik Party, determined to seize power on behalf of the future Congress of Soviets. At 11 pm on the evening of November 7, 1917, it captured the Winter Palace, the seat of Kerensky’s government. Reed and Bryant were present during the fall of the Winter Palace, the symbolic event that started the Bolshevik Revolution.

The cover of this 1919 British pamphlet emphasizes Reed’s short-lived status as Soviet consul.
Reed was an enthusiastic supporter of the new revolutionary socialist government. He went to work for the new People’s Commissariat for Foreign Affairs, translating decrees and news of the new government into English. “I also collaborated in the gathering of material and data and distributing of papers to go into the German trenches,”

Reed attended the opening of the Third Congress of Soviets, where he gave a short speech promising to bring the news of the revolution to America, saying he hoped it would “call forth an answer from America’s oppressed and exploited masses.”

Back in America, Reed and Bryant defended the Bolsheviks and opposed the American intervention. Incensed at Russia’s departure from the war against Germany, the public gave Reed a generally cold reception. While he was in Russia, his articles in The Masses, particularly one headlined “Knit a straight-jacket for your soldier boy”, had been instrumental in the government gaining an indictment for sedition against the magazine (antiwar agitation was considered sedition and treason).

The first Masses trial ended in a hung jury the day before Reed reached New York. The defendants, including him, were to be retried. He immediately posted $2,000 bail on April 29. The second Masses trial also ended in a hung jury.

In Philadelphia, Reed stood outside a closed hall on May 31, and harangued a crowd of 1,000 about the case and the war until police dragged him away. He was arrested for inciting a riot, and posted $5,000 bail. Reed became more aggressively political, intolerant, and self-destructive. On September 14, he was arrested for the third time since returning from Russia, charged with violating the Sedition Act and freed on $5,000 bail. This was a day after possibly the largest demonstration for Bolshevik Russia was held in the United States (in the Bronx). Reed had passionately defended the revolution, which he seemed to think was coming to America as well. He tried to prevent Allied intervention in Russia

On February 21–22, 1919, Bryant was fiercely grilled before a Senate committee exploring Bolshevik propaganda activities in the US, but emerged resilient. Reed followed her. According to Homberger, his testimony was “savagely distorted” by the press. Later that day Reed went to Philadelphia to stand trial for his May speech; despite a hostile judge, press, and patriotic speech by the prosecutor, Reed’s lawyer, David Wallerstein, convinced the jury the case was about free speech, and he was acquitted. Returning to New York, Reed continued speaking widely and participating in the various twists of socialist politics that year. He served as editor of The New York Communist, the weekly newspaper issued by the Left Wing Section of Greater New York.

Affiliated with the Left Wing of the Socialist Party, Reed with the other radicals was expelled from the National Socialist Convention in Chicago on August 30, 1919. The radicals split into two bitterly hostile groups, forming the Communist Labor Party of America (Reed’s group, which he helped create) and, the next day, the Communist Party of America. Reed was the international delegate of the former, wrote its manifesto and platform, edited its paper, The Voice of Labor, and was denounced as “Jack the Liar” in the Communist Party organ, The Communist. Reed’s writings of 1919 displayed doubts about Western-style democracy and defended the dictatorship of the proletariat.

Indicted for sedition and hoping to secure Communist International (Comintern) backing for the CLP, Reed fled the US with a forged passport in early October 1919 on a Scandinavian frigate; he worked his way to Bergen, Norway as a stoker. Given shore leave, he disappeared to Kristiania, crossed into Sweden on October 22, passed through Finland with Ivar Lassy’s help, and made his way to Moscow by train. In the cold winter of 1919–1920, he traveled in the region around Moscow, observing factories, communes, and villages. He filled notebooks with his writing and had an affair with a Russian woman.

Reed’s feelings about the revolution became ambivalent. Activist Emma Goldman had recently arrived aboard the Buford, among hundreds of aliens deported by the United States under the Sedition Act. She was especially concerned about the Cheka. Reed told her that the enemies of the revolution deserved their fate

Though facing the threat of arrest in Illinois, Reed tried to return to the United States in February 1920

On 13 March, Finnish Customs officials found Reed in a coal bunker on the ship. He was taken to the police station, where he maintained that he was seaman “Jim Gormley”. Eventually, the jewels, photographs, letters, and fake documents he had in his possession forced him to reveal his true identity. Although beaten several times and threatened with torture, he refused to surrender the names of his local contacts.

The US Secretary of State was satisfied with Reed’s arrest and pressured the Finnish authorities for his papers. American authorities, however, remained indifferent to Reed’s fate. Although Reed paid the fine for smuggling, he was still detained. His physical condition and state of mind deteriorated rapidly. He suffered from depression and insomnia, wrote alarming letters to Bryant, and on May 18 threatened a hunger strike. He was finally released in early June, and sailed for Tallinn, Estonia, on the 5th. Two days later, he traveled to Petrograd, recuperating from malnutrition and scurvy caused by having been fed dried fish almost exclusively

Reed received a telegram announcing Bryant’s arrival in Moscow. He followed her there, arriving on September 15, and was able to tell her of the events of the preceding eight months. He appeared older and his clothes were in tatters. While in Moscow, he took Bryant to meet Lenin, Trotsky, Lev Kamenev, and other leading Bolsheviks, and also to visit Moscow’s ballet and art galleries.

Reed was determined to return to the United States but fell ill on September 25. At first thought to have influenza, he was hospitalized five days later and diagnosed with spotted typhus. Bryant spent all her time with him, but there were no medicines to be obtained because of the Allied blockade. Reed’s mind started to wander; eventually he lost the use of the right side of his body and could no longer speak. His wife was holding his hand when he died in Moscow on October 17, 1920. After a hero’s funeral, Reed’s body was buried in Mass Grave No. 5 at the Kremlin Wall Necropolis next to Inessa Armand. Only three Americans have received this honor; the others are C. E. Ruthenberg, the founder of the Communist Party USA; and Bill Haywood, a founding member and leader of the Industrial Workers of the World.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Reed_(journalist)

“A burning desire for “equality” and equating it to “justice”?”

They want to be “good”—no matter how many peons they have to stomp on to do it...

Bio:

“He endorsed Woodrow Wilson, believing that he would make good on his promise to keep America out of the war.”

We never learn.

Lol.

Stop posting a whole book

.

Reed sounds more like Bill Ayers than Mamdani.

Mamdani didn’t venture far from his mom’s apron strings.

I dig Reds for two reasons — how badly the Bolsheviks end up treating Ryan, and then Ryan dies. Schadenfreude.

I’m old enough to remember John Lindsay.

Intetesting case of amnesia the author has.

Interesting...