Chez Classics at GV: Reds with John Anzalone

Let's join the lovely Chez folks and Film Professor John Anzalone for a tribute to Diane Keaton, John will do brief intro and follow up info session/Q&A after for certified cinephiles!

The original John Reed was a dashing young man from Portland who knew a good story when he found one, and, when he found himself in the midst of the Bolshevik revolution, wrote a book called “Ten Days That Shook the World” and made himself a famous journalist. He never quite got it right again after that. He became embroiled in the American left-wing politics of the 1920s, participated in fights between factions of the Socialist Party and the new American Communist Party, and finally returned to Moscow on a series of noble fool’s errands that led up, one way or another, to his death from tuberculosis and kidney failure in a Russian hospital. He is the only American buried within the Kremlin walls.
What audiences can, and possibly will, care about, however, is a traditional Hollywood romantic epic, a love story written on the canvas of history, as they used to say in the ads. And “Reds” provides that with glorious romanticism, surprising intelligence, and a consistent wit. It is the thinking man’s “Doctor Zhivago,” told from the other side, of course. The love story stars Warren Beatty and Diane Keaton, who might seem just a tad unlikely as casting choices, but who are immediately engaging and then grow into solid, plausible people on the screen. Keaton is a particular surprise. I had somehow gotten into the habit of expecting her to be a touchy New Yorker, sweet, scared, and intellectual. Here, as a Portland dentist’s wife who runs away with John Reed and eventually follows him halfway around the world, through blizzards and prisons and across icy steppes, she is just what she needs to be: plucky, healthy, exasperated, loyal, and funny.
(Roger Ebert)

Free on-site parking
Tickets available at the box office and online

DUE TO THE LENGTH OF THE PRESENTATION NO AFTER EVENT IS PLANNED