Pulling a Pugliese. Yoshie, Doug can't pull a Pugliese, btw, because as Lou Reed says, "nobody does Lou like Lou."
I've wondered about the truthiness of the scene in Reds by Beatty wherein speeches by Zinoviev and John Reed to the Baku Congress of Peoples of the East in 1920 of the Comintern are translated, accurately or not, as calling for Jihad rather than class struggle by the oil workers there.""The scene is a racist slander, trying to build up pro-war hysteria against Arabs and Iranians … The movie … slanders Zinoviev." "REDS is accurate in pointing out the demagogic aspects of the Baku Congress of Peoples of the East in 1920. Zinoviev did indeed call for an Islamic 'jihad' (holy war). This call for religious holy war was an aberration of Communist International (Comintern) policy toward the colonial regions. Surely Beatty was reflecting on Khomeini's Iran as many reformist organizations hailed Khomeini's mullah 'jihad' in part on the authority of the Baku Congress. But Reed was right …" — Kincaid, Worker's Vanguard
An article I found from Jump Cut, a radical left film journal like Cineaste.
Reds on Reds http://www.ejumpcut.org/archive/onlinessays/JC28folder/Reds.html by John Hess and Chuck Kleinhans
from Jump Cut, no. 28, April 1983, pp. 6-10 copyright Jump Cut: A Review of Contemporary Media, 1983.
Cole below, from People's World is a Hollywood 10 figure. Lester Cole, in numerous books on the Hollywood 10 from the sympatico vol. by Larry Ceplair written with the help of Dorothy Healey to the recent volume by Ron and Allis Radosh, called an authoritarian prick. Unity was the newspaper of the League of Revolutionary Struggle(M-L), Maoists for Jesse Jackson. Challenge is the PLP newspaper, still around. Quart is Leonard Quart who does reviews for Cineaste and Logos, http://www.logosjournal.com/issue_5.1/quart.htm . Antonioni's The Passenger: Dead End Journey.
Perhaps the most symptomatic element of the REDS reviews was the critics' repeated return to the question: Who was Zinoviev?
"In Moscow Reed comes into direct conflict with the leader of the Comintern, Zinoviev, a rigid authoritarian, who gives orders, and will not brook interference. (Zinoviev was purged from the Party 15 years later.) — Cole, People's World
"Are the major characters in the movie Bill Haywood, communists and socialists? No. They are: … Grigory Zinoviev, a Bolshevik who opposed the party's decision to begin armed insurrection (Lenin called him a scab for that), who in 1925 organized the Trotskyist "New Opposition" and was expelled from the party in 1934 (Zinoviev is played by the well-known Polish anticommunist writer Jerzy Kozinski, a lover of U.S. imperialism); …" — A Detroit Comrade, Challenge
"It is with the figure of Zinoviev, sharply insisting on the party's monopoly on truth, that Beatty does make some concessions to anticommunist stereotype. Yet as Reed's desire to return home by the holidays is portrayed in the film, in the midst of the Russian Civil War, we do not find Zinoviev's sharp and angry objections to this powerful propagandist's taking off to be out of line." — Kincaid, Worker's Vanguard
"Zinoviev was a leading member of the Bolshevik Party and the Communist International. In the 1930s he and many others were framed up by Stalin and executed as 'Nazi agents.' In one scene, Zinoviev argues with Reed, who wants to return home, assertedly because of a personal commitment he made to Louise Bryant. Zinoviev argues, in a seemingly heartless way, that Reed is urgently needed in Moscow for the important political work he is doing. While the actor who plays Zinoviev delivers the lines in a harsh, alienating way, what Zinoviev is portrayed as telling Reed is not unreasonable. You can always return to your personal responsibilities, Zinoviev says, but never to this moment in history." — Ring, The Militant
"The characterization of Soviet Communist Zinoviev as a Marxist Darth Vader, giving ominous speeches to John Reed about how he must choose between his family and revolution, only serves to frighten the audience. In fact, all successful revolutions have built on people's love of their families and their willingness to make sacrifices precisely to make a better world for their children." — Michaelson and Rosenbaum, Unity
My identification is always with the Reed character, of course, as opposed to Zinoviev. Zinoviev and Radek seem to be relatively accurate portraits. Stalin ultimately killed them in an interesting historical twist; those great bureaucrats were ultimately murdered as Trotskyist and Bukharinite oppositions." — Quart, Socialist Review
"Zinoviev becomes the film's cynical example of a party leader: opportunist, unfeeling, manipulating and dogmatic — the Hollywood-capitalist image of a good communist. The historical fact is that Zinoviev was a renegade: when he translated Reed's speech to the Oriental Congress, he changed the original words 'class war' to 'jihad' — holy war. That was the traitor's political idea, not the idea of the Third International. Reed attacked Zinoviev for his treachery, though the film portrayal of this is primarily individualistic — don't change anything that I write — not political." — A Detroit Comrade, Challenge
"The whole Baku Conference is falsified. The racist portrayal of the Babel of voices is taken from The Lost Revolutionary by Richard O'Connor and Dale Walker (O'Connor wrote the 'Bat Masterson' TV series of 20 years ago, which made a hero of a homicidal pimp), who got it in turn from Robert Dunn, a U.S. government spy who never got nearer the conference than Constantinople and didn't write until 1959. Zinoviev's speech (which called for, among other things, a 'holy war against robbers and oppressors') is cynically portrayed as a translation of Reed's; in fact, Reed's own speech was about American workers' exploitation. Reed never told Zinoviev, 'Don't rewrite what I write!" This is put in to balance the similar scene at the beginning of the film with Grant Hovey, editor of the bourgeois Metropolitan magazine." — A New Jersey Comrade, Challenge
"The scene is a racist slander, trying to build up pro-war hysteria against Arabs and Iranians … The movie … slanders Zinoviev. Zinoviev and Reed actually put forward the same line at the Congress: workers and peasants in Asia, Africa, and the Middle East should reject alliances with the local bosses and should fight for socialist soviets on the Russian model. This was a very advanced line, which the Communist International later retreated from (at Lenin's insistence). I think that in this case they were to the left of Lenin and they had a better line … We shouldn't be so quick to assume that the communist movement in the past was infected by bad ideas like nationalism. The problem was Beatty's lies, not Zinoviev's." — A Reader, Challenge
"REDS is accurate in pointing out the demagogic aspects of the Baku Congress of Peoples of the East in 1920. Zinoviev did indeed call for an Islamic 'jihad' (holy war). This call for religious holy war was an aberration of Communist International (Comintern) policy toward the colonial regions. Surely Beatty was reflecting on Khomeini's Iran as many reformist organizations hailed Khomeini's mullah 'jihad' in part on the authority of the Baku Congress. But Reed was right …" — Kincaid, Worker's Vanguard
"There is even less basis in fact for the scene in which Reed angrily assails Zinoviev for making a change in translation of Reed's speech at the Baku conference … Actually Reed, along with numerous others of the invited speakers, never got to make his speech at Baku. He did give a very brief greeting, but his speech was simply included in the official proceedings of the conference. Neither his greetings nor his speech … include the phrase 'class war' or 'holy war.'" — Ring, The Militant
"When Reed discovers what has occurred, he engages Zinoviev in a shouting match — a replay actually of an earlier scene in which a bourgeois editor has altered Reed's copy without permission. While Zinoviev ridicules Reed's 'individualism' and justifies the change on the grounds of political expediency, Reed argues that dissent is the essence of revolution. Taken as a unity — as indeed they must be — the two scenes register REDS' essential message: revolution is the struggle against authority in general and there is little distinction between the tyranny of capitalist wealth and the autocracy of communist power. In fact, if anything, the latter is more absolute and, therefore, more oppressive. The communists are such cynical manipulators, in fact, that they will readily abandon their own well-known atheism and play into religious sentiments in seeking immediate advantages."
"It protects itself from going overboard politically; it finally ends with a level of disenchantment with the revolution. It does ask questions about political commitment yet it does not put down political commitment, because Reed is an extremely attractive figure. It asks a number of questions about the nature of political commitment — the self-destructive quality, the level of betrayal which Goldman brings out, that is the betrayal of one's ideals when revolution takes form — questions to me that are real." — Quart, Socialist Review