The Cozy-Looking Sweaters In ‘Reds,’ Ranked

My Grandma Powell was a knitter. She’s still alive, but she’s too old now to knit. Before there were YouTube tutorials, or YouTube, or the internet, she taught herself how to do it. She spent years knitting sweaters, scarves, mittens, and toques (Canadian for "beanie") for herself, her husband, and her four children. By the time my cousins and I came along starting in the ’70s, she was extremely fast. My younger cousin and I got matching sweaters. We also got sweaters with matching leg warmers when that was in vogue. A little later, we got sweaters with matching miniature duplicates to dress our Cabbage Patch Kids in. No needle held by human hands can produce stitches as fine as you get in a machine-knit sweater, of course. But even when a loose-knit sweater is sold in a store, you can just tell it wasn’t made with love. Those of us who have been the lucky recipients of knitters’ work, or have learned the skill themselves—I personally never progressed far enough even to turn a square Grandma started for me into a scarf—can spot good knitwear at a glance, even on a screen. And while the sweaters in rom-coms like When Harry Met Sally are rightly famous, sweeping epics about love and dialectical materialism can be chock-full of them, too. Reds, Warren Beatty’s 1981 debut as a solo director (he had previously co-directed 1978’s Heaven Can Wait with Buck Henry), stars Beatty as John “Jack” Reed, a journalist, poet, and socialist-turned-Communist activist; Beatty also co-wrote the screenplay with Trevor Griffiths. The film chronicles his life from first meeting his eventual wife Louise Bryant (Diane Keaton) in Portland, Ore.; their romance in Greenwich Village, Provincetown, Croton-on-Hudson, and Petrograd; and his death in Moscow, after which he became one of just three Americans buried in the Kremlin Wall Necropolis. Am I qualified to comment on its historical accuracy, politics, or whether Maureen Stapleton deserved the Best Supporting Actress Oscar she won for playing Emma Goldman? No, on all counts. I’m here to rank its handmade sweaters.

Read it at Defector ↗

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