Reds (1981)

Jack Nicholson: Eugene O'Neill

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Quotes 

• Eugene O'Neill : If you were mine, I wouldn't share you with anybody or anything. It'd be just you and me. We'd be the center of it all. I know it would feel a lot more like love than being left alone with your work.

• Eugene O'Neill : You and Jack have a lot of middle-class dreams for two radicals. Jack dreams that he can hustle the American working man, whose one dream is to be rich enough not to have to work, into a revolution led by his party. And you dream that if you discuss the revolution with a man before you go to bed with him, it'll be missionary work rather than sex. I'm sorry to see you and Jack so serious about your sports. It's particularly disappointing in you, Louise. You had a lighter touch when you were touting free love.

• Eugene O'Neill : Jack dreams that he can hustle the American working man, whose one dream is that he could be rich enough not to work, into a revolution led by *his* party.

• Louise Bryant : Would you rather I not smoke during rehearsal?

  Eugene O'Neill : I'd rather you went up in flames than crush out your cigarette during a monologue about birth.

• [repeated line] 

  Eugene O'Neill : Where's the whiskey?

• Eugene O'Neill : I'd like to kill you, but I can't. So you can do whatever you want to. Except not see me.

• Louise Bryant : Gene, if you'd been to Russia, you'd never be cynical about anything again. You would have seen people transformed. Ordinary people.

  Eugene O'Neill : Louise, something in me tightens when an American intellectual's eyes shine and they start to talk to me about the Russian people.

  Louise Bryant : Wait.

  Eugene O'Neill : Something in me says, "Watch it. A new version of Irish Catholicism is being offered for your faith."

  Louise Bryant : It's not like that.

  Eugene O'Neill : And I wonder why a lovely wife like Louise Reed who's just seen the brave new world is sitting around with a cynical bastard like me instead of trotting all over Russia with her idealistic husband. It's almost worth being converted.

• Louise Bryant : He has the freedom to do the things that he wants to and so do I. And I think anyone who's afraid of that kind of freedom is really only afraid of his own emptiness.

  Eugene O'Neill : Are you making this up as you go along?

• Louise Bryant : I don't want to be patronized. I'm sorry if you don't believe in mutual independence and free love and respect.

  Eugene O'Neill : Don't give me a lot of parlor socialism that you learned in the Village.

• Eugene O'Neill : You left without saying goodbye. That's not like you, not that I have the slightest idea what you're like.

• Eugene O'Neill : You're a lying Irish whore from Portland and you used me to get Jack Reed to marry you.

• Louise Bryant : Gene, Jack and I, we haven't told anyone yet because we were too embarrassed. But we're married. Jack and I got married.

  Eugene O'Neill : That is embarrassing.

• Louise Bryant : Boy, you've become quite the critic, haven't you, Gene? Just leaned back and analyzed us all. Duplicitous women who tout free love and then get married, power-mad journalists who join the revolution instead of observing it, middle-class radicals who come looking for sex and then talk about Russia. It must seem so contemptible to a man like you who has the courage to sit on his ass and observe human inadequacy from the inside of a bottle. Well, I've never seen you do anything for anyone. I've never seen you give anything to anyone, so I can understand why you might suspect the motives of those who have. But whatever Jack's motives are, how...

  Eugene O'Neill : I seem to have touched a wound.

• Louise Bryant : What are you working on, Gene?

  Eugene O'Neill : At the moment, Scotch.