Word: bryants
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...Ford is a young head coach, who checked in for the job by winning the 1978 Gator Bowl, the same game in which Ohio State's Woody Hayes punched out. Ford played for Bear Bryant at Alabama and later coached under him. His explanation for the improvement of his team is entirely Bearlike: "I didn't make as many mistakes this year as I did last year...
Cool and detached on the surface, framed by imperfect reminiscences by the gloriously withered contemporaries of John Reed '10 and Louise Bryant, Reds is a soft sell. It gets by with the hoariest cliches of Hollywood romances by understating them, and by distracting the audience with small matters like a revolutionary war. This is an epic without scope: intelligent, ironic, and ultimately unambitious, despite the $30-million price tag and a nation of Finnish extras. And it perfectly reflects the interests and temperament of its director, co-scenarist and star, Warren Beatty...
...Diane Keaton) lures Beatty to her apartment for an interview, and he proceeds to lecture her on his causes till dawn, we hear nothing but a few liberal buzzwords and phrases; what's supposed to register is Reed's passion--that he could talk all night about politics!--and Bryant's dazed awe. And later, in Russia, when Reed finds himself on a platform exhorting the Communists to strike and promising the support of the American workers, the climax of the scene is not the workers' cheering, but the proud, loving gaze of the hitherto frigid Louise. "She'll sleep...
Some people respond to the romance; I find it thin. Bryant snappily seduces Reed by telling him she'd like to see him with his pants off, and soon enough she's arguing with him about being treated like a wife. They're a couple before we know it, and they're dissolving before we see what kept them together. This is no doubt deliberate--a modern, detached paradigm of "bohemian" relationships, all that petty squabbling and navel-gazing. Only in the second half of the movie, when they have no scenes together, do we become emotionally involved in their...
...hand in the dialogue, since much of it is in their Front Page-filtered notion of how Americans, particularly journalists, talk--the hardboiled, crackerjack repartee. Neither nor Beatty nor Griffiths has the emotional equipment as writers to give Eugene O'Neill (Jack Nicholson)--who has an affair with Bryant when Reed is at a convention--the raging, messy confessional speech he so obviously needs; and so O'Neill puts it in a letter which we never see. They keep Nicholson brooding in the shadows like a character in film noir, relying on our memories of his explosions in other films...