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Warren Beatty's Reds is a brilliant failure, an epic near-miss. Even if it is too long and too sappy, the film's scandalously sympathetic exploration of Communism earns Reds a valorous place among mainstream Hollywood films. Unfortunately, the Reds soundtrack falters in the same way the film itself does. It takes a radical, potentially explosive premise and not only sentimentalizes, but--ironically enough--Americanizes it. Though the contributions by the Moscow Radio Chorus are deeply affecting and thoroughly transportive to pre-World War I Russia, many of Stephen Sondheim and Dave Grusin's instrumental passages ring false in their menace, and hollow in their emotion. Unlike, say, John Barry's From Russia with Love soundtrack--which brilliantly adapts traditional Russian music for Western ears--Sondheim and Grusin's compositions do little to transcend their deep Broadway/Hollywood roots. --Matt Hanks
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