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The Warren Beatty movie, Reds (1981), is a grabber about the American pro-Communist journalist John Reed (Beatty) and his wife Louise Bryant (Diane Keaton).  Often fascinating, it is also, alas, extremely faulty, and its biggest problem is the use of real-life elderly “witnesses” who yak about the John Reed they saw and knew about.  Rebecca West, George Jessel and Will Durant among them, these people make observations that add nothing to the on-screen story, not least because they utter things the rest of us already know.

Beatty’s acting, though not memorable, is palatable.  Keaton does her best to create a character, but some of what she has to do is plainly beyond her.  Director Beatty—co-scenarist too—mostly wastes Jack Nicholson in the Eugene O’Neill role, and Paul Sorvino is sadly almost laughable.

Reds is sufficiently honest to affirm that the Russian Revolution did not liberate people; it oppressed them.  It says, in addition, that political movements are (constantly) hindered or damaged by natural complexity and human variety, even, in fact, by going against nature (as Alfred Jay Nock knew).  As it happens, Bolshevism, in its cruel determination, went not only against nature but also against people.

Publicity photo of Loretta Young for Argentinean Magazine. (Printed in USA) (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Love is News (1937), directed by Tay Garnett, is another old Hollywood comedy about newspaper reporters, shown here to be a shabby lot.  They lie.  Tyrone Power, as a reporter, intends to lie about a well-known heiress he interviews enacted by Loretta Young; but Young turns the tables on him.  She lies about him to a batch of reporters.

Handsome Power has comic verve but no charisma.  Beautiful Young is not a natural for farce but, happily, is never false.  As a managing editor, Don Ameche is a gratifying exhibitor of range.  The film is lively without being very funny (to me) until it turns slapstick, beginning with Power deliberately dropping Young into a mud puddle.  The ending is romantically jaunty.  Love is News is a more-than-okay lark.     

Publicity photo of Loretta Young for Argentinean Magazine. (Printed in USA) (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Love is News (1937), directed by Tay Garnett, is another old Hollywood comedy about newspaper reporters, shown here to be a shabby lot.  They lie.  Tyrone Power, as a reporter, intends to lie about a well-known heiress he interviews enacted by Loretta Young; but Young turns the tables on him.  She lies about him to a batch of reporters.

Handsome Power has comic verve but no charisma.  Beautiful Young is not a natural for farce but, happily, is never false.  As a managing editor, Don Ameche is a gratifying exhibitor of range.  The film is lively without being very funny (to me) until it turns slapstick, beginning with Power deliberately dropping Young into a mud puddle.  The ending is romantically jaunty.  Love is News is a more-than-okay lark.     

Rick, an adolescent, is determined to see his girlfriend Sheryl, whose mother is vigorously keeping the two apart.  This is because, unbeknown to Rick, Sheryl is pregnant and was sent out of state.  The boyfriend and his unruly buddies drive to the girl’s house and, owing to their aggressiveness, get involved in a physical conflict with the men of the neighborhood.  This early ’60s incident is the axis for everything that takes place in the novel, That Night (1987), by Alice McDermott.

Such a book might seem like a yawner—material so familiar—but it isn’t.  For one thing, it is short; for another, the characterization is engagingly strong; for another, the structure is interesting.  Style?  It’s nothing exceptional but it’s eminently effective.  Closer to Fitzgerald than to Hemingway or Faulkner, thank goodness.

Themes in That Night include the insufficiency of love (for Rick and Sheryl, for Rick’s mother and father) and when there is trauma for the young.  It reveals for us a person’s “blind, insistent longing”—Sheryl, forever apart from Rick, “wants to love someone else”—whether love is insufficient or not.

Rick, an adolescent, is determined to see his girlfriend Sheryl, whose mother is vigorously keeping the two apart.  This is because, unbeknown to Rick, Sheryl is pregnant and was sent out of state.  The boyfriend and his unruly buddies drive to the girl’s house and, owing to their aggressiveness, get involved in a physical conflict with the men of the neighborhood.  This early ’60s incident is the axis for everything that takes place in the novel, That Night (1987), by Alice McDermott.

Such a book might seem like a yawner—material so familiar—but it isn’t.  For one thing, it is short; for another, the characterization is engagingly strong; for another, the structure is interesting.  Style?  It’s nothing exceptional but it’s eminently effective.  Closer to Fitzgerald than to Hemingway or Faulkner, thank goodness.

Themes in That Night include the insufficiency of love (for Rick and Sheryl, for Rick’s mother and father) and when there is trauma for the young.  It reveals for us a person’s “blind, insistent longing”—Sheryl, forever apart from Rick, “wants to love someone else”—whether love is insufficient or not.