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was a mistake for Beatty to have taken on such an ambitious project—the story of the American journalist John Reed and his eventual undoing as a pawn in the Bolshevik Revolution—but she admitted that it was a film made with “an enormous amount of dedication and intelligence. It’s absorbing, and you feel good will toward it.” Nevertheless, she felt that Reds didn’t work, largely because Beatty hadn’t decided which aspects of his sprawling story interested him most. She loved the interviews with survivors from John Reed’s era—including Henry Miller, Hamilton Fish, Rebecca West, Dora Russell, and Adela Rogers St. John—but felt the problem was that they were “all much peppier and more vital than the actors.”

One of the biggest difficulties Pauline had with Reds was the casting of Diane Keaton, Beatty’s girlfriend at the time, as Reed’s fellow journalist and revolutionary, and his wife, Louise Bryant. She felt the movie did Bryant a disservice by presenting her as “a tiresome, pettishly hostile woman,” and that it never really grappled with the question of how talented or how opportunistic Bryant was. “It takes Keaton a long time to get any kind of bearings; at the start her nervous speech patterns are anachronistic—she seems to be playing a premature post-hippie neurotic,” Pauline wrote.

She admired much about Beatty’s performance in the film, finding him “remarkably subtle in the way he tunes in to whoever is in a scene with him,” though she felt that he was still trying to sell his nice-boy image to the audience; he was too “bewildered, shaggy, eager” and didn’t tap enough into the darker side of John Reed. In the end, Reds was “extremely traditional, and in movies traditional means derivative . . . [it is] the least radical, the least innovative epic you can imagine.”

Her review of Reds led to yet another showdown with Shawn. In order to describe the relationship between John Reed and Louise Bryant as Beatty had conceived it, Pauline had written that the movie showed Reed to be “pussywhipped.” Shawn tried to get her to change it to “henpecked,” which she laughed at and rejected. The argument went back and forth between them, until Shawn finally told her in no uncertain terms that “pussywhipped” would not be printed in The New Yorker. (It’s a shame, in a way, since many who saw Reds must agree that it’s the only word to describe the onscreen relationship.)

There is no surviving correspondence from The New Yorker that addresses the question of whether Pauline should have been allowed to review Reds, given her history with Beatty and Paramount. Certainly Shawn must have considered the potential conflict carefully before allowing her to go ahead. “There was no way that she was going to be able to see Reds with an open mind,” said James Toback. “And she actually hit Warren, in a semiconscious or unconscious desire to stick to him, by attacking Diane Keaton’s performance. It was her way of saying, ‘You, who of all men should know how to bring out the best in a woman, have taken your girlfriend, the female star, and come up with a performance that’s not good.’ If she was going to say something to nail him, that was it.” Roy Blount, Jr., remembered going with Pauline to the screening of Reds and seeing the Paramount publicists hovering fearfully around her. “Oh, God, they were so damned nervous. It was in this little bitty screening room in New York, and they were just sort of hanging on her for a reaction.” Reds had substantial earnings as one of the Christmas season’s big prestige pictures, but its eventual take of around $32 million was not quite enough to earn back its staggering production cost—the result that Pauline had predicted when Beatty was developing the project at Paramount.

At the voting for the 1981 New York Film Critics Circle, Pauline did her usual campaigning for her favorites. For the Best Picture prize, she favored Blow Out, Pennies from Heaven, and Atlantic City; for Best Director, Brian De Palma for Blow Out, Walter Hill for Southern Comfort, and Louis Malle for Atlantic City. Her picks for Best Actor