Review: Jock Mulligan
Ten Days that Shook the World, by John Reed. Reds, Directed by Warren Beatty.
A fine tale, John Reed tells- one we need to watch nowadays- one that shows the spirit and fire of revolution before Stalin murdered its youth. I’d’ve had a pint with Reed, no doubt, even with him being a bigshot Journo American. You want hope in these times of Trump spaffing all over the world? Reed’s book, Ten Days that Shook the World, is a fucking nice piece of action, documenting pushback. The kind of pushback we need now. It’s not some dusty history book from a man who’s never seen a fight. No, this man was right there in the thick of it, dodging bullets and shouting ‘Fuck the King! Fuck the capitalists! Power to the people!‘ with the best of them.
You can smell the smoke and the damp Russian winter air in his words. He’s not just telling you what happened; he’s showing you the people, the ordinary folk, with their hopes and their fears. He’s got a poet’s eye for the drama of it all, but with the grit of a man who knows what war looks like. It’s not about the big men in the big houses, it’s about the ordinary people who decided they’d had enough of being ground into the dirt.
Reed’s work is a testament to the spirit of a revolution, a proper, honest account from the heart of the action. It’s a book that makes you feel alive, even if it’s about a war. I read it every five years- it is inspirational and beautiful and awe inspiring.
Inspiring, yes.
Inspiring in this time of billionaires stealing our money, exploiting and killing us.
Reds
Now, as for the Reds film based on Reed’s work, with Warren Beatty- the film tries to capture the life of Reed and the American journalist, Louise Bryant. It’s got the look of the time, the hats and coats, and all the big talk. It’s a grand spectacle- it doesn’t just show you the man, it shows you the world he moved through, the very pulse of the revolution itself. It doesn’t get lost in the drawing rooms and the politics; it gets on the train with them. You feel the cold of the Russian winter, the rattle of the carriages carrying news and revolutionaries from one place to another… their desperation for a better world. Beatty’s film is gorgeous and gritty and it doesn’t insult us, unlike many movies nowadays that vomit instructions as to how we must feel and think and leave us feeling like we’ve just ate empty calories and washed it down with non- alcoholic Guinness-lite made in a Tokyo lab.
The film does a proper job of showing the sheer physical work of it all. It wasn’t a revolution that just happened; it was carried across the continent by men and women who were driven by their belief in a better world for them, their children and grandchildren. You see them speaking at those huge, freezing mass meetings, the words not just being said, but being brought to life for the people. The film shows you the vast distances they had to cover, the long nights on the railway, the need to get the word out, to get the people to believe in themselves. It captures that sense of urgency, that feeling that the whole world could be changed with a bit of shouting and a lot of heart. It’s a fucking fine film that understands that the revolution wasn’t just an idea; it was a journey, and a dangerous one at that (and one that today, is unfinished business; one interrupted by greed for power as well as money).
The film spends time on the love story, which compliments the wild, untamed energy of the revolution. It’s a love story in the burning forge of a revolution – between two revolutionaries of words of the oldstyle, real media.
For an un-put-downable read, buy the book (fuck Amazon, order it from a decent online bookstore- I recommend Calton Books in Glasgow). But watch the film too- a triple Oscar winner rarely spoken about nowadays, because it teaches what we should have been armed with in these times of fascist boots stomping through our schemes and streets.
