On March 29, 1982, Jack Lemmon and Walter Matthau presented Warren Beatty with an Oscar for Best Director for his epic film Reds, about the life of the journalist John Reed. It was Beatty’s first Academy Award, after 11 nominations that included recognition for him as an actor, director, screenwriter and producer.
He might have been forgiven some triumphalism. After all, he had beaten industry veterans Louis Malle and Mark Rydell and the boy wonder Steven Spielberg, as well as the hotly tipped debutante Hugh Hudson, riding high with Chariots of Fire. But during his speech, Beatty frowned professorially, nervously thanked then-girlfriend Diane Keaton and co-star Jack Nicholson – “I know that you’re enjoying my being up here almost as much as I’m being here” – and modestly acknowledged that “I get good people”.
It was a political and measured speech, but one tinged with understandable irritation. His film had lost most of the 12 awards that it was nominated for, most notably Best Original Screenplay, to Chariots of Fire, whose screenwriter Colin Welland – himself a card-carrying socialist – had triumphantly whooped “The British are coming!” Reds had only won two others: Best Supporting Actress for Maureen Stapleton, for her performance as the anarchist Emma Goldman, and Best Cinematography for Vittorio Storaro.
Beatty alluded to behind-the-scenes difficulty when thanking his producers, but managed to make a joke out of it. “No matter how much we would have liked to strangle each other from time to time, I think that your decision, taken in the great capitalistic tower of Gulf & Western, to finance a three-and-a-half-hour romance [that] attempts to reveal… something of the beginnings of American socialism and American communism… reflects not only credit upon you, but credit upon Hollywood, and the movie business.”
At the mention of “socialism”, a single handclap can be heard. Beatty soon went on to acknowledge “the freedom of expression that we have in our American society”, and “the lack of censorship that we have from the government, or the people who put up the money”.
Forty years after its initial release, Reds remains its director’s magnum opus. A film of astonishing ambition and scope, as well as length – three-and-a-quarter hours – it is virtually unique in Hollywood history as a serious attempt to analyse Left-wing politics from a sympathetic perspective. A decade before, Beatty had established himself as a serious player in the arena of Democratic political activism, having supported the presidential campaign of the anti-war candidate George McGovern in 1972. (That McGovern was soundly defeated by the incumbent Richard Nixon was of little consequence, although Nixon’s original 1968 election offered a mordant backdrop to Beatty’s 1975 sex comedy Shampoo.)
